The war of the pins in Luxembourg

In August 1940 a strange, silent war was being fought in the streets of occupied Luxembourg. Some inhabitants wore the shiny badges of the pro-German movement in their jacket lapels; others pointedly pinned in the same place the red lion of the Luxembourg coat of arms or the image of Grand Duchess Charlotte cut from a coin. Luxembourgers called this contest the Spéngelskrich, the “war of the pins” or “war of the badges”. It was one of the first mass forms of passive resistance to the occupier in a country that had no army and whose government and sovereign were in exile.

The war of the pins is usually placed across the whole of August 1940. That is a simplification, though a justified one. Members of collaborationist organisations were already wearing their badges in July. Patriotic badges appeared en masse in mid-August: according to Luxembourg accounts from 14 August, while the historian Paul Dostert writes that people pinned them on in large numbers on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The badges went on being worn for many months, even though wearing them risked a beating and arrest.

A Gauleiter instead of a colonel

For the first weeks after the German invasion of 10 May 1940 the country was run by a military administration. Its representative in the capital, Colonel Schumacher, was fairly accommodating towards the local authorities and worked with the administrative commission headed by the government’s secretary-general, Albert Wehrer (PL). Many deputies and officials hoped that, as in the First World War, the Grand Duchy would keep at least some of its institutions under occupation.

It soon became clear that Berlin had other plans. According to Nazi doctrine, Luxembourgers were one of the German tribes and their state a historical accident, kept alive by the dynasty and French influence. On 21 July the Army High Command appointed as head of civil administration the Gauleiter of the neighbouring Koblenz–Trier district, Gustav Simon. At the end of July the military administration was withdrawn, and on 2 August Simon was confirmed in his post by a decree of Hitler, to whom alone he was henceforth answerable. Luxembourg became a “territory of the head of civil administration” (CdZ-Gebiet Luxemburg) – formally still not part of the Reich, in practice governed like one of its provinces. Simon is credited with the words: “I am the constitution; I make the laws.”

On 6 August the Gauleiter made his first public appearance on the Place d’Armes in the capital, surrounded by some 800 officers of the German Order Police. The same day he issued a language ordinance: German became the sole official language, and French was removed from offices, schools, shop signs and street names. The ban extended to everyday life, including the French courtesies that had been part of Luxembourg speech for generations: bonjour, merci, monsieur, madame. Posters proclaimed: “Let your language be German and German only.” Soon the Avenue de la Liberté in the capital was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Straße, in August the Gestapo installed itself in the Villa Pauly, and on 15 August the Reich’s customs and currency border was moved to Luxembourg’s borders with Belgium and France, severing the Grand Duchy’s economic union with Belgium.

The lion against the swastika

The pro-German side was represented by the Volksdeutsche Bewegung (VdB, the Ethnic German Movement). It was founded by Damian Kratzenberg, a German teacher at the Athénée in the capital, who since the mid-1930s had led a society promoting German literature and culture. Sources give different dates for the movement’s foundation (17 May or 13 July 1940), but agree on its aim: union with the Reich under the slogan Heim ins Reich (“Home to the Reich”). In the summer of 1940 the VdB was small and drew mainly committed Nazis. Its members, like those of the NSDAP, conspicuously wore the organisation’s badges in their lapels.

The answer came in the same form. Luxembourgers took out of their drawers the red-lion badges struck the year before for the centenary of the country’s independence (counted from the Treaty of London of 1839). Others wore pins in the national colours or made their own by adapting coins bearing the Grand Duchess’s profile. Charlotte, who in May had left with the government for France and then, via Portugal, for London, was becoming a symbol of the country’s independence; during the occupation she spoke to her compatriots fourteen times over the BBC. A badge in the lapel cost nothing and broke no ban yet issued, but it said clearly which side its wearer was on.

VdB activists tried to tear the pins off people’s clothes, which often ended in brawls in the street. The Gestapo regarded those wearing them as provocateurs; some were detained, and in the following months more than one was brought before a special court on charges of anti-German agitation. Luxembourg historians and collectors recall that people were beaten, imprisoned and in some cases deported to Germany for wearing the badges. Even so, the custom did not die out. The war of the pins marked the beginning of what some accounts of the Luxembourg resistance call spontaneous social resistance: dozens of small gestures that the occupier could not turn into a political case, but which showed that its propaganda was falling on stony ground. A paradoxical consequence of the ban on French was a revival of the Luxembourgish language, which the Germans, regarding it as a German dialect, did not prohibit. Speaking Luxembourgish became a demonstration in itself.

Germanisation intensifies

In the autumn of 1940 Simon dissolved the political parties, the Chamber of Deputies and the Council of State, and placed the press under complete control. From 5 September the Nuremberg Laws applied in Luxembourg, and by the end of the year German law and special courts had been introduced. In October the administration decided to demolish the Gëlle Fra (“Golden Lady”) monument, which commemorated Luxembourg volunteers who had fallen in the ranks of the Allied armies in the First World War. For three days passers-by, above all pupils of the nearby Athénée, protested at the monument. The Security Police and the SD broke up the gatherings, and on 21 October 1940 the figure was pulled down with a steamroller and steel cables. Resistance in schools was punished collectively: 60 pupils were expelled from the secondary school in Diekirch, and a group of boys and girls from Esch-sur-Alzette was sent to training camps in Germany.

The occupier also resorted to economic pressure. On 24 October 1940 it was announced that the VdB would no longer accept new members except in special cases, and that anyone who did not belong to the movement “placed himself outside the community” and could lose his job. Membership leapt from about 5,000 at the beginning of October to 40,000 at the end of the month and some 84,000 at its peak. According to reports by the SS security service itself, the great majority joined out of fear or to keep their jobs. On 31 January 1941 French first names, surnames and company names were ordered to be Germanised (Henri became Heinrich), and in February even the wearing of berets was banned.

Place in the war

The war of the pins did not threaten German rule, but it was the first public test of the German assumption that Luxembourgers were “dormant Germans” who needed only to be freed of a French veneer. The test went disastrously for the occupier, and later ones showed it even more clearly. On 10 October 1941 the administration held a census in which three questions – on citizenship, mother tongue and nationality – were meant to induce the inhabitants to declare themselves German. The underground spread the slogan Dräimol Lëtzebuergesch (“Three times Luxembourgish”). When preliminary returns showed that the overwhelming majority were answering “Luxembourgish” (the underground spoke of 93–98 per cent; more recent research on the surviving forms points to markedly lower proportions in some districts), the results were not published and the census was abandoned. From then on Simon’s policy grew ever more brutal.

On 30 August 1942 the Gauleiter announced that Luxembourgers were to be given German citizenship and that young age groups would be conscripted into the Wehrmacht. The next day a strike began in Wiltz and spread across the whole country. A summary court handed down 21 death sentences, and 20 of those condemned were shot at Hinzert camp. More than 10,000 young Luxembourgers were forcibly enlisted in the German armed forces, and some 4,000 people from families deemed hostile were resettled deep inside the Reich. According to Luxembourg figures, some 5,700 of the country’s inhabitants died in the course of the war. Damian Kratzenberg was sentenced to death after the war and shot in October 1946; Simon committed suicide in British custody in December 1945.

The pins with the red lion and Charlotte’s portrait survived in many families as keepsakes. In Luxembourg’s memory the war of the pins opens the story of an occupation in which a small country without an army answered an attempt to erase it from the map with obstinacy: a badge in the lapel, a word in Luxembourgish, an answer on a census form. From that experience grew the post-war attachment to the monarchy, the Luxembourgish language and independence as the foundations of national identity.