The general strike in Luxembourg

On the morning of 31 August 1942, in the small town of Wiltz in northern Luxembourg, municipal officials and workers at the local tannery refused to start work. Over the following hours and days they were joined by steelworkers and miners from the south of the country, postal workers, railwaymen, teachers and schoolchildren, while farmers stopped their milk deliveries. It was a protest against the conscription of young Luxembourgers into the Wehrmacht, announced the day before by Gauleiter Gustav Simon. The Germans responded with a state of emergency and a summary court, which sentenced 21 strikers to death.

War chronologies link two events with these days. Under 30 August it is stated that the German civil administration that had operated in occupied Luxembourg since 1940 was abolished and the country annexed to the Reich. This needs correcting. Simon’s civil administration was not abolished – it remained in place until the liberation in September 1944. What Simon did announce on 30 August 1942 was conscription and the granting of German citizenship to the age groups it covered. Many studies regard that day as the moment of the Grand Duchy’s de facto annexation, although no Reich law ever formally incorporated it, and neither the Allied powers nor the Luxembourg government-in-exile ever recognised such an act. Under 31 August the start of the strike is recorded – and that date is accurate.

A country that was to be German

From the occupation of the Grand Duchy in May 1940 and Simon’s assumption of power in August of that year, Luxembourg was a “Chief of Civil Administration area” (CdZ-Gebiet Luxemburg). Simon, who was at the same time Gauleiter of the neighbouring Party district of Koblenz–Trier, renamed Moselland in 1941, in practice ruled it as part of his Gau. According to Nazi doctrine, Luxembourgers were a “German tribe” and their statehood a historical accident. The occupiers banned the use of French, Germanised street names and surnames, dissolved the parties and parliament, and forced officials and teachers to join Nazi organisations.

Luxembourgers resisted by means that did not require weapons: by wearing patriotic badges in 1940 and, above all, by answering “Luxembourgish three times” in the census of October 1941, which was meant to prove that they were Germans. Simon called off the census, and losing the contest over nationality led him to resort to coercion. For a long time conscription was not his idea: at first he had counted on volunteers among the “ethnic Germans”, but volunteers were few, and after its defeats and losses on the Eastern Front the Wehrmacht needed men. The heads of the civil administrations in Alsace, Robert Wagner, and in Lorraine, Josef Bürckel, had pressed Adolf Hitler, through Martin Bormann, to introduce compulsory service. In both these regions conscription was announced a few days earlier, in the second half of August 1942; the Alsatians and Lorrainers conscripted against their will are known as the malgré-nous.

30 August: conscription and citizenship

On 30 August 1942 Simon addressed a rally in the exhibition hall in the capital. He announced that men born in 1920–1924 would be called up into the Wehrmacht and that the age groups liable for conscription would receive German citizenship. The legal basis was the ordinance on citizenship in Alsace, Lorraine and Luxembourg of 23 August; according to the studies, full Reich citizenship went above all to those who put on German uniform, and to their families, as “proven Germans”. Luxembourg’s Jews, who had been deported to ghettos and camps since the autumn of 1941, were not covered by conscription. It was later extended to those born in 1925–1927, and young people of both sexes were required to serve in the Reich Labour Service.

Conscripting the citizens of an occupied country into the occupier’s army violated the laws of war, and even German law: the Military Service Act of 1935 required Reich nationality. For Luxembourgers it meant something more. Their sons were to fight in the uniform of the state that had abolished their country, against the Allies – among whom, in London, were Grand Duchess Charlotte and the government of Prime Minister Pierre Dupong. Already on 30 August people in several localities began to discuss how to respond. Groups of the Luxembourg Resistance printed and distributed leaflets calling for a strike.

31 August – 2 September: the strike

The strike broke out in Wiltz on 31 August. The municipal officials, led by Michel Worré, chairman of the local economic council, and the town secretary Nicolas Müller, refused to work. They were joined by the workers of the IDEAL tannery – a plant that, before “Aryanisation”, had belonged to the Jewish firm Adler & Oppenheimer – and then by teachers and other inhabitants. The news quickly reached the industrial south. In Schifflange a worker of German origin, Hans Adam, sounded the works siren, announcing the strike to the whole valley. In Esch-sur-Alzette, the capital of the iron-ore basin, the mines and steelworks came to a standstill. In the capital, the main post office stopped delivering letters in the afternoon. In many schools pupils did not turn up for lessons, and teachers refused to teach.

In Differdange the protest spread over several days. On the morning of 2 September 156 rolling-mill workers failed to turn up for their shift, and some of those already at work downed tools. The plant’s German managers threatened the death penalty. Some of the workers went back to work, but about fifty continued to refuse. A few hours later six of them, singled out as ringleaders, were arrested.

How many people went on strike is not known. In publications of recent years, Luxembourg historians have pointed out that in many plants – especially the large steelworks – work did not stop completely, and that in post-war memory the strike grew into a general uprising of the whole nation. That does not alter the fact that such events were rare in occupied Europe. Before this, the Dutch had struck en masse against the occupiers in February 1941, and in May of that year so had the miners of northern France and Belgian workers, but in none of these countries did protest break out in response to conscription into the occupier’s army.

State of emergency and summary court

Simon reacted with the utmost severity. In the first days of September he declared a state of emergency throughout Luxembourg and set up a summary court (Standgericht), presided over by the Gestapo official Fritz Hartmann. Within hours the Gestapo had arrested and interrogated those regarded as the leaders of the protest. The court sentenced 21 people to death. Twenty of the condemned were shot in the woods by the SS special camp of Hinzert in the Hunsrück. The first to die, on the evening of 2 September, were Worré and Müller from Wiltz; according to an SS eyewitness, their last words were “Vive Lëtzebuerg” – “Long live Luxembourg”. Others were shot between 3 and 5 September, among them teachers from Wiltz and Echternach, the six men arrested in Differdange, postal workers and railwaymen; the last, Eugène Biren from Schifflange, was killed on 9 September. Hans Adam, regarded as a “traitor” because he was of German origin, was beheaded on 11 September in prison in Cologne.

The Germans announced the names, occupations and places of residence of the executed on red posters put up throughout the country. The repression reached far more people. According to Luxembourg studies, some two thousand people were arrested; more than eighty – more than a hundred, according to some sources – were handed over by the court to the Gestapo, which sent them to concentration camps. 290 secondary-school boys and girls, 40 apprentices of the ARBED steel concern and seven young postal workers were sent to Hitler Youth “re-education” camps in Germany. Teachers were dismissed and arrested.

The harshest collective punishment was resettlement (Umsiedlung). The families of the executed and, in the months that followed, also the families of deserters, draft evaders and people deemed enemies of the Reich were deported to resettlement camps, most of them in Silesia. According to Luxembourg figures, 4,186 people were resettled in this way by 1944, of whom 154 died. Their houses and farms were taken over by German settlers, among them settlers from South Tyrol.

Place in the war

The strike did not stop conscription. In the autumn of 1942 the first conscripts left for barracks in the Reich, and most ended up on the Eastern Front. According to the historian Peter M. Quadflieg, a total of 10,211 Luxembourgers were called up into the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. 1,764 were killed and 1,974 were declared missing. Some 1,200 went into hiding to avoid induction, and some 2,300 deserted or went over to the enemy – altogether, roughly one in three of those called up evaded service. They hid in villages and disused mines, or fled to Belgium and France, where some joined the partisans. Those who went over to the Red Army or were taken prisoner faced Soviet prisoner-of-war camps, including the camp at Tambov, from which many never returned. In Luxembourg the forcibly conscripted are called Zwangsrekrutéierten, and colloquially Ons Jongen – “our boys”.

The government-in-exile regarded the strike as proof that Luxembourgers had not accepted the occupation, and Allied radio and newspapers reported on it widely; Grand Duchess Charlotte, who had been addressing her compatriots on BBC radio since 1940, became for them the symbol of a state the Germans had failed to abolish. The Grand Duchy was liberated in September 1944, and its north, including Wiltz, became a battlefield once more during the Ardennes offensive in the winter of 1944–1945. Simon, captured by the British, committed suicide in custody in Paderborn in December 1945, before he could be brought before a Luxembourg court. 31 August is a day of remembrance in Luxembourg. In 1965 the National Strike Monument, with reliefs by Lucien Wercollier, himself a former prisoner at Hinzert, was unveiled in Wiltz. The strike of 1942 – alongside the census of 1941 – became, in the memory of a small country without an army, the most important symbol of collective refusal to submit to the occupier.