Germany occupies Luxembourg

At 4.35 a.m. on 10 May 1940 German armoured columns crossed the border of Luxembourg on the rivers Our and Sûre. The Grand Duchy, a country without an army and with fewer than 300,000 inhabitants, could not defend itself. By evening the Wehrmacht had occupied almost all its territory, and the following day the south of the country as well. The Grand Duchess and the government managed to escape to France. The occupation of Luxembourg is sometimes dated to 11 May: by that day the whole country was in German hands, the government had reached Paris, and a German military administration had begun to operate in Luxembourg. The invasion itself, however, took place a day earlier, in the first hours of the German offensive in the West.

A perpetually neutral country

Luxembourg’s neutrality had been guaranteed by the great powers in the Treaty of London of 1867, which also forbade the Grand Duchy to maintain an army. In 1914 Germany broke this guarantee and occupied the country for the whole of the First World War. Grand Duchess Marie-Adélaïde stayed in the country at the time, and her attitude towards the occupier was judged so compliant that in 1919 she had to abdicate. Her successor, Charlotte, decided together with the government in January 1940 that in the event of an invasion she would leave the country in order to defend its sovereignty from abroad.

In September 1939 Luxembourg declared strict neutrality, and the powerful Radio Luxembourg transmitter fell silent. The country’s armed forces consisted of a company of volunteers and the gendarmerie, a few hundred men in all, under Major Émile Speller. In the spring of 1940 the so-called Schuster Line, named after the engineer who directed its construction, was erected on the borders with Germany and France: 41 barriers made of concrete blocks and steel gates on bridges and roads. It was meant only to slow down an invader and give the guarantors of neutrality time to react. In the event of a German attack the French 3rd Army was to enter Luxembourg.

For Germany the Grand Duchy was a country of transit. The Case Yellow directive of October 1939 already envisaged a march through Luxembourg, and when, after Manstein’s plan was presented to Hitler, the main thrust was shifted to the Ardennes, the Wehrmacht’s best panzer divisions were to pass through the narrow strip of Luxembourg territory.

The night of 9–10 May

On 9 May the Luxembourg authorities received a growing number of warnings. A French intelligence officer in Clervaux saw the Germans preparing pontoon bridges on the Sûre, and a German divisional order from April, setting out objectives to be seized in the Grand Duchy, reached the government. The gendarmerie arrested several members of a German “fifth column”. During the night German saboteurs in civilian clothes went into action, supported by Reich citizens living in Luxembourg. Their task was to prevent the bridges from being blown, cut communications and seize radio posts. The first exchanges of fire with gendarmes took place at around two in the morning. At 3.15 a.m. the government ordered the steel gates of the Schuster Line to be closed. The Grand Duchess moved from Berg Castle to the palace in the capital.

At 4.35 a.m. the three panzer divisions of General Heinz Guderian’s XIX Army Corps, the spearhead of Ewald von Kleist’s panzer group, moved off: the 1st at Wallendorf, the 2nd at Vianden and the 10th Panzer Division at Echternach. The barriers were crossed on wooden ramps. Shots were fired at the border, but most of the volunteers remained in their barracks, and the crossings were guarded only by gendarmes and the odd soldier. Sappers of the Großdeutschland Regiment quickly repaired the partly demolished bridge at Echternach. At the same time Fieseler Storch aircraft landed a detachment of about 125 men near Esch-sur-Alzette in the south of the country, to hold the roads until the main forces arrived. Behind the panzer corps, on the southern flank, marched the infantry divisions of the 16th Army.

In the morning the German minister, Otto von Radowitz, handed the Secretary-General of the government a memorandum in which Berlin gave assurances that it had no intention of infringing the territorial integrity or political independence of the Grand Duchy. Similar assurances were given that day by the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

The flight of the court and the government

At around 6.30 a.m. Prime Minister Pierre Dupong and Foreign Minister Joseph Bech left by motorcade for the south. Near Esch they came upon a German roadblock and had to get round it by side roads. The Grand Duchess, with her husband, Prince Felix, and her mother, crossed the French border at 7.45 a.m. The car carrying the heir to the throne, Jean, was fired on by a German aircraft, and near Esch its driver forced his way through a German roadblock. The Minister of Justice, Victor Bodson, stayed on in the capital for a while and then escaped to France by back roads. Others were less fortunate: the Minister of Education, Nicolas Margue, and the French and Belgian ministers were turned back by German patrols. On 11 May the government reached Paris.

The French reacted belatedly. The reports of their intelligence officer in Luxembourg did not reach the headquarters of the 3rd Army in Metz. At around eight o’clock elements of General Robert Petiet’s 3rd Light Cavalry Division, with Colonel Jouffault’s 1st Spahi Brigade and a tank company, entered the south of the Grand Duchy. After skirmishes with the Germans, in which five spahis were killed, they withdrew behind the Maginot Line. British Fairey Battle bombers of No. 226 Squadron RAF attacked the armoured columns without fighter cover. Most were hit by anti-aircraft fire, and one aircraft crashed near Bettendorf.

The capital was occupied before noon. According to Luxembourg figures, six gendarmes and one soldier were wounded, and 22 soldiers and 54 gendarmes were taken prisoner. More than 90,000 civilians fled the canton of Esch, through which the front passed, some 47,000 of them to France. That same day Guderian’s leading units crossed into Belgium and entered the Ardennes.

From occupation to annexation

The only representative of the authorities left in the country was the Secretary-General of the government, Albert Wehrer (PL). With a few senior officials he set up an administrative commission, which co-operated with the German military administration. Many Luxembourgers hoped that, as in the First World War, the Grand Duchy would keep some measure of autonomy. The government moved from France via Portugal to London, while the Grand Duchess and the Prime Minister spent a longer period in Canada. Charlotte, whose speeches were broadcast by the BBC, became a symbol of independence.

At the end of July 1940 the military administration was replaced by a civil administration headed by the Gauleiter of the neighbouring Koblenz–Trier district, Gustav Simon. According to Nazi doctrine the Luxembourgers were Germans, and their separate identity merely a French veneer. Simon made German the sole official language, banned French names and expressions, dissolved Parliament and the parties, and introduced German law, including the Nuremberg Laws. The census of 10 October 1941, in which the inhabitants were to declare German nationality and German as their language, was called off when preliminary returns showed that the overwhelming majority were answering “Luxembourgish”.

On 30 August 1942 Simon announced that Luxembourgers were to be granted German citizenship and that the age groups born in 1920–1927 were to be conscripted into the Wehrmacht, which amounted to de facto annexation of the country. The next day a strike began in Wiltz and spread to steelworks, mines, offices and schools throughout the country. The occupier responded with a state of emergency and summary courts: 21 death sentences were passed, 20 of the condemned were shot at the Hinzert camp and one was beheaded in Cologne. Hundreds of people were sent to camps, and whole families were deported to the interior of the Reich.

Significance

For the course of the campaign the occupation of Luxembourg was an episode: the Wehrmacht needed its roads to bring Guderian’s columns within a few hours to the Belgian Ardennes, from where, two days later, they reached the Meuse at Sedan. For the Luxembourgers it was the beginning of the darkest period in the country’s history. Of the more than 10,000 men forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht, some 2,800 were killed or went missing, and almost all of the Jews who had not managed to escape in May 1940 were murdered. According to Luxembourg figures, some 5,700 inhabitants, almost 2 per cent of the population, lost their lives during the war.

American troops liberated the capital on 10 September 1944, but in December, during the Ardennes offensive, the Germans returned to the north of the country and were driven out only in January 1945. The Grand Duchess returned home in April 1945. The experience of occupation convinced Luxembourg that neutrality did not protect a small state: in 1948 the Grand Duchy abandoned it in its constitution, and a year later it became a founding member of NATO.