The Luxembourg census

On 10 October 1941 a census was being taken in occupied Luxembourg. The German civil administration of Gauleiter Gustav Simon officially called it the Personenstandsaufnahme, a survey of civil status. Alongside the usual entries the form contained three questions that mattered most to the occupier: on citizenship, on mother tongue and on ethnic nationality (Volkszugehörigkeit). The underground called on the inhabitants to give the same answer to all three: Dräimol Lëtzebuergesch, “three times Luxembourgish”. When the first results showed that many had done so, Simon called off the census, and its results were never published.

It is often said that a “referendum” on Luxembourg’s incorporation into the Reich was planned and in the end never held. That is not quite accurate. The Germans were not planning a vote on annexation, only a census with questions on nationality. The underground and the government-in-exile, however, presented it as a disguised plebiscite, and that is how Luxembourgers remember it. In the Grand Duchy, 10 October is today a day of national remembrance. A second event belongs to the same month, one that chronologies usually place under 19 October: the first deportation of Luxembourg’s Jews.

A country that was to be German

Ever since the occupation of the Grand Duchy in May 1940 and Simon’s assumption of power in August that year, Luxembourg had been a “Chief of Civil Administration area”: formally it was not part of the Reich, but in practice it was governed like a German province. The Gauleiter, who also ran the neighbouring party district of Koblenz–Trier (from January 1941 Moselland), acted on a simple premise of Nazi doctrine: the Luxembourgers were a German tribe, and their statehood, their dynasty and their French accretions were a historical accident. He banished French from offices and schools, dissolved parliament and the political parties, introduced German law, including the Nuremberg Laws, and ordered first names and surnames to be Germanised. Luxembourgers responded with small gestures of defiance, such as the war of the stamps in August 1940, and from the autumn of 1940 and through 1941 the first organised underground groups were formed.

The first census under the occupation, held on 15 December 1940, had asked only about citizenship and about Jewish descent as defined by the Nuremberg Laws. The new one was meant to go further. According to historians who have studied Simon’s correspondence, its main purpose was to record the “ethnically alien” inhabitants. Luxembourg was a country of immigrants: Italians, French, Belgians, Poles, Russians and others lived there, and in Nazi nationality policy they counted as a “foreign body” in the German area of settlement. The census was also to collect data on parents and grandparents, needed to establish Jewish descent. On this basis the intention was to “cleanse” the country of foreigners after the war while denying them German citizenship, which would have brought with it liability for military service. Simon coordinated these plans with the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, a post held by Heinrich Himmler, and with the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle under his authority.

For native Luxembourgers the answer was decided in advance. The published guidance for the form advised entering “Luxembourgish” under citizenship, but explained that Luxembourgish was not a language but a Moselle Franconian dialect of German, and that anyone who was a Luxembourger “by stock” could only be German by nationality. For Luxembourgers, answering “German” in the last two entries would therefore have amounted to admitting that their nation did not exist.

“Three times Luxembourgish”

The underground saw the census above all as a political and military threat: it was feared that an ostensibly statistical survey would serve to annex the country formally to the Reich and to turn its inhabitants into Reich citizens liable to conscription. Resistance groups, among them the Lëtzebuerger Patriote-Liga (LPL) and the Lëtzebuerger Volleks-Legioun (LVL), spread leaflets with the slogan Dräimol Lëtzebuergesch. Not all of them said the same thing: some urged people to write “Luxembourgish” in all three entries, others to leave the last two blank. The slogan passed by word of mouth, and the Luxembourgish language – banned as an official language but not in everyday speech – became a badge of belonging.

Accounts differ on exactly what happened on 10 October. Some of them, including an account of the Luxembourg resistance, say that preliminary soundings showed that the population would follow the call, and that the census was cancelled. Others speak of a census broken off midway. Some 15,000 completed census cards have survived, however, which suggests that in many communes the forms were collected. What is certain is that Simon abandoned the undertaking. On 13 October he announced that a nationality card index would be set up instead of the census, and declared that Luxembourg citizenship had ceased to exist on 10 May 1940 and that Luxembourgers, as Germans, were merely awaiting the grant of Reich citizenship.

For decades it was repeated, following the underground and the government-in-exile, that more than 90 per cent of the inhabitants – 95–98 per cent in some versions – had answered “three times Luxembourgish”. Nobody ever counted these figures: the results were not published. The Luxembourg historians Philippe Blasen and Denis Scuto, who analysed a sample of the surviving cards in 2024, found such answers from about 62 per cent of those enumerated in the canton of Esch and from about half in Dudelange. In their view the campaign’s success was smaller than the legend claimed, but still clear, and the cards reveal a diverse society shaped by migration rather than the uniform community that both the Nazis and the post-war national narrative wanted to see. As early as 1972 the historians Henri Koch-Kent and André Hohengarten pointed out that the occupier was not concerned with the citizenship of the Luxembourgers, whom it regarded as Germans anyway, but with registering the “foreigners”.

For the occupier it was a propaganda defeat in any case. The Gestapo went looking for culprits: in November 1941, 134 men suspected of links with the underground or of an “anti-German attitude” were sent to the SS special camp of Hinzert in the Hunsrück. From November a wave of arrests thinned the ranks of several resistance groups.

The first transport of Jews

In the same week the occupier began deporting Jews from the Grand Duchy. Before the war some 3,500–3,900 Jews had lived in Luxembourg, many of them refugees from Germany and Austria. About 1,600 fled in May 1940. From the autumn of 1940 the Gestapo pushed the rest across the border, usually to France or Portugal; by 15 October 1941, according to Luxembourg studies, some 1,500 people had left in this way, often into endless wandering. Jewish property was confiscated, the synagogues in Esch-sur-Alzette and in the capital were closed and demolished, and elderly people were concentrated in the former monastery of Fünfbrunnen (Cinqfontaines) near Troisvierges, disguised as a “Jewish old people’s home”. In the autumn of 1941, as in the Reich, Jews in Luxembourg had to wear the yellow star, and in October Berlin banned any further emigration. Some 700–800 Jews remained in the country.

On 16 October 1941, 323 people from Luxembourg were assembled at the railway station in the capital. About 190 Jews from the area of Trier, Bernkastel and Wittlich were added to them. After a wait of many hours the train left at around one o’clock in the morning of 17 October, and on 18 October it brought more than 510 people to the Łódź Ghetto, which the Germans called the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. It was one of the first transports in which Jews from the Reich were deported to Łódź from mid-October 1941; the first had left from Vienna, from where Jews had already been deported at the beginning of the year to the General Government. According to Luxembourg data, of the 323 people deported from the Grand Duchy that day 11 survived the war – 13 according to other tallies.

Under 19 October 1941 one also finds the claim that Luxembourg was declared “free of Jews” (judenrein). That was not so. October 1941 saw the departure of the first of seven transports, and the others – to the ghetto in Izbica, to Theresienstadt and to Auschwitz – went on leaving until 1943. The last one left Luxembourg on 17 June 1943, and only then did Simon declare the country judenfrei. In all, according to various tallies, between some 660 and 690 people were deported from Luxembourg in this way, of whom a few dozen survived. More than 500 Luxembourg Jews who had earlier taken refuge in France and Belgium were caught and deported from there. According to government and historical studies, the Holocaust claimed in total between some 1,200 and 1,900 Luxembourg Jews, depending on who is counted among them.

Place in the war

The census of 10 October 1941 did not change Luxembourg’s situation, but it dashed Simon’s hope that the Luxembourgers would recognise themselves as Germans of their own accord. The Gauleiter therefore turned to compulsion. On 30 August 1942 he announced that the inhabitants were being granted German citizenship and that the age groups born in 1920–1927 were being conscripted into the Wehrmacht. The answer was a general strike, which began the next day in Wiltz and spread across the whole country; a summary court passed 21 death sentences, and 20 of the condemned were shot at Hinzert camp. More than 10,000 young Luxembourgers were forcibly drafted into the Wehrmacht, and from September 1942 to 1944 some 4,000 people from families deemed hostile were deported to the Reich, the Sudetenland and Silesia.

In Luxembourgers’ memory the census and the strike of 1942 form the two pillars of the story of the occupation: the collective refusal of a small nation without an army. Research in recent years has corrected this story, but not overturned it. The first train to Łódź, on 16–17 October 1941, is a reminder that the same administration that lost the dispute over nationality pursued, unhindered, a policy in the Grand Duchy that left no room for Jews. Today there are memorials to the victims at the station in the capital and at Fünfbrunnen, and since 2018 there has also been a Shoah memorial in Luxembourg City, unveiled on the 75th anniversary of the last transport.