The liberation of Luxembourg

On 10 September 1944 tanks of Major General Lunsford E. Oliver’s US 5th Armored Division drove into the capital of the Grand Duchy. The Germans had left the city without a fight. The inhabitants, who for four years had not been allowed to say “merci” or “bonjour” in public, or even to wear berets, poured into the streets. On the Place d’Armes – the same square on which the German head of the civil administration had made his first public appearance in August 1940 – the Americans were greeted with flowers. Returning to the country with the American soldiers was Prince Felix of Bourbon-Parma, husband of Grand Duchess Charlotte. He was soon joined by her eldest son and heir to the throne, Prince Jean, who since 1942 had served as a volunteer in the British Irish Guards and with them had gone through Normandy and the liberation of Brussels.

It is often said that Luxembourg was liberated on this day by the US First Army. The date is right, but the wording needs two refinements. The capital was entered by a single division – the 5th Armored, of V Corps, part of General Courtney Hodges’s First Army. Nor was the country liberated in a single day: the first American units crossed the border near Pétange on 9 September, the capital was taken the next day, and according to Luxembourg accounts by 12 September the Germans had left about 90 per cent of the Grand Duchy’s territory. The north of the country, recovered in September, became a battlefield again in December and was finally cleared of Germans only at the beginning of 1945.

Four years of occupation

German troops occupied Luxembourg on 10 May 1940, the first day of the offensive in the west. Grand Duchess Charlotte and Pierre Dupong’s government went abroad; the government operated in exile in London, while the Grand Duchess, who spent most of the war in Canada, addressed her compatriots over the BBC. After a few weeks of military administration, in August 1940 power in the country was assumed by Gustav Simon, Gauleiter of the neighbouring Gau of Koblenz–Trier (from 1941 Moselland), as head of the civil administration. Formally Luxembourg was never incorporated into the Reich, but in practice Simon ruled it as part of his Gau and made it his aim to “restore” the country to Germandom.

Germanisation touched everything: the names of towns, streets and firms were Germanised, even first names and surnames; the use of French in public life was banned; and young people were enrolled in the Hitler Youth and the Reich Labour Service. Luxembourgers responded in ways that required no weapons: as early as the summer of 1940 they wore lapel badges bearing the red lion and the Grand Duchess’s portrait, and in the autumn of 1941, in the census, they declared their nationality, mother tongue and everyday language as Luxembourgish in such numbers that the Germans called the census off. The heaviest blow was the conscription of the 1920–1927 age groups into the Wehrmacht, announced by Simon on 30 August 1942. The response was a general strike, which the occupier crushed with a summary court and the shooting of 21 people.

According to Luxembourg research centres, more than 10,000 young Luxembourgers in all were drafted into the German armed forces and auxiliary services. Many of them evaded service, hid in the country or fled abroad – some of those who reached Britain later fought in Jean-Baptiste Piron’s Belgian brigade. From September 1942 the Germans deported “unreliable” families and relatives of deserters to the east, including to the Sudetenland and Upper Silesia; this affected more than 1,400 families, some 4,200 people. Members of the Luxembourg resistance were sent to the Hinzert special camp and to concentration camps. Of the roughly 3,700 Jews living in the country in May 1940, more than half fled or were forced to leave. The Germans concentrated the rest in a former monastery at Cinqfontaines and, between October 1941 and June 1943, deported them in seven transports to the Łódź Ghetto, Theresienstadt and camps in the Lublin region, and later to Auschwitz. According to Luxembourg findings, 43 of the 683 deportees survived; in all, more than a third of the Jews living in the country in 1940 perished.

The pursuit to the border

After the liberation of Paris on 25 August the Allies set off in pursuit of the shattered German armies. The British and Canadians advanced along the Channel coast into Belgium, while Hodges’s First Army, initially driving north-east, turned east towards the border of the Reich from 3 September. Its northern corps took Liège, and V Corps on the right wing passed through the Belgian and Luxembourg Ardennes. Its 5th Armored Division, known as “Victory”, took Sedan on the way – the town near which German tanks had broken through the French front in May 1940 – and on 9 September crossed the Luxembourg border from France.

The Germans did not intend to defend the Grand Duchy. As the US official historian Charles B. MacDonald established from the accounts of German commanders, on 10 September the Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, worried by a gap between the German armies, allowed General Franz Beyer’s LXXX Corps to leave only rearguards in Luxembourg and withdraw the rest of its forces to the fortifications of the Siegfried Line behind the Our, the Sûre and the Moselle. Many German officials and the most committed collaborators, especially from the Volksdeutsche Bewegung founded in 1940, left for the Reich even before the Americans arrived. The Americans therefore advanced quickly, although they were increasingly short of fuel: supplies were still being brought up by lorry all the way from Normandy.

As the Germans withdrew, the resistance organisations went into action. In March 1944 most of them had merged into the Union of Luxembourg Freedom Organisations (Unio’n), which after liberation took charge of public order in many places and detained collaborators. In the capital its members gathered in the town hall – previously the seat of the German-appointed mayor. Prince Felix accompanied the American troops as the Grand Duchess’s representative, and his presence held symbolic meaning for Luxembourgers: the dynasty around which resistance to Germanisation had rallied for four years had returned together with the liberators.

After taking the capital, the 5th Armored Division deployed along a front of several dozen kilometres on the border rivers, south of the US 28th Infantry Division, which had taken up position at the northern tip of the Grand Duchy, as far as the Moselle, and spent several days refuelling. As early as 11 September the first American patrol crossed from its sector into German territory.

The government’s return and the second wave of war

Dupong’s government returned home from London at the end of September 1944. In line with the position it had taken in exile, it declared all the occupier’s ordinances null and void, although some German regulations on labour law, taxation and social insurance were retained. The reckoning with collaboration began: many suspects were detained, and the leader of the Volksdeutsche Bewegung, Damian Kratzenberg, was sentenced to death by a court and executed in 1946. Gustav Simon withdrew to his Gau of Moselland, where he commanded the Volkssturm; after the war he hid under an assumed name as a gardener in Westphalia, was arrested by the British on 10 December 1945 and died eight days later in prison in Paderborn, before he could be handed over to Luxembourg for trial. The official cause of death was given as suicide, but various versions of the circumstances have grown up around it.

The liberation proved incomplete. Along the border rivers the front froze for three months, and the Germans shelled the border villages from fortifications on the far bank. In November resistance fighters repelled an attack by a Waffen-SS unit on Vianden. On 16 December 1944 the Germans launched the Ardennes offensive, whose southern wing struck northern Luxembourg, defended by exhausted American divisions resting there after heavy fighting. The capital remained in Allied hands and became the rear base of George Patton’s Third Army, but from December to February it was shelled by the German long-range V-3 guns. The north of the country, with Clervaux, Wiltz and Vianden, had to be liberated a second time; the last localities were recovered in February 1945. It was this fighting that caused the greatest destruction.

Grand Duchess Charlotte returned to Luxembourg on 14 April 1945 to an enthusiastic welcome. The war’s toll on the small country was heavy: according to figures accepted in Luxembourg, some 5,700 citizens died, about 2 per cent of the 1940 population – the highest proportion in Western Europe – and roughly a third of all buildings were destroyed or seriously damaged. More than 10,000 young men had been forcibly conscripted into the German army; many of them were killed or went missing, mainly on the Eastern Front, and the question of their fate and of compensation weighed on Luxembourg–German relations for decades.

The experience of occupation also ended Luxembourg’s policy of unconditional neutrality, which had protected the country neither in 1914 nor in 1940. The government-in-exile had already signed the customs convention with Belgium and the Netherlands that heralded Benelux; after the war Luxembourg joined the UN, and in 1949 it was among the founding members of NATO. The Luxembourgish language, which the occupier had tried to stamp out, became for the inhabitants of the Grand Duchy one of the chief symbols of national identity.