Occupation and Annexation during the Second World War. The Case of Luxembourg
Joé Voncken, University of Luxembourg
Luxembourg’s history during the Second World War is marked by the dual experience of occupation and annexation in a territory swiftly conquered by the German army in May 1940. Unlike Belgium and the Netherlands, Luxembourg was, like the French regions of Alsace and Moselle, swiftly placed under direct civilian administration, aimed at the state’s full integration into the Greater German Reich. This process entailed forced conscription, cultural Germanization, and extensive administrative restructuring. Consequently, Luxembourg’s case of occupation and de facto annexation is best understood as one of intended integration, shaped by a variety of underlying political, social, and institutional dynamics. By 1941, Luxembourg’s native institutions had been virtually replaced by the administrative-political framework of Nazi Germany, while its population was subjected to increasingly repressive measures, notably policies of forced conscription and resettlement.
In spite of the considerable attention devoted to the Second World War by local historians and a myriad of publications over the past decades, Luxembourg’s research landscape has been marked by long-standing limitations. The absence of a university in the country until the early 2000s contributed to a certain degree of isolation, leading to a historiographical tradition that, while varied and prolific, has not always engaged with international scholarship or employed up-to-date methodological approaches. On top of this, there has been a tendency to focus on German sources primarily as evidence of repression and suffering, often extracting them from their broader administrative and sociopolitical contexts. As a result, discussions surrounding everyday life, collaboration, resistance, and the grey areas in between have remained underdeveloped, even as such debates gained traction in neighboring countries in previous decades.
Several recent initiatives are seeking to address these historiographical gaps. State-funded projects, drawing on earlier work on collaboration, purges, cultural policies, and on the political implications of the period, have reinvigorated research on the Second World War in Luxembourg. A forthcoming digital exhibition on the Second World War for instance, aims to rectify public misconceptions and promote a more nuanced understanding of the occupation period, while the WARLUX project provides a significant database of letters of forced recruits and their biographies. Additionally, research publications, including the De Gruyter series “Studien zur transnationalen Zeitgeschichte Luxemburgs”, have sought to integrate Luxembourg into broader European discussions on postwar purges, legal governance, and the societal experience and impact of war. The most recent publication within the series, entitled ‘The Impact of War Experiences in Europe’, by Nina Janz and Denis Scuto, seeks to broaden the outlook on forced recruitment of non-Germans by applying a comparative perspective and going beyond the traditional national level; a trend to be further pursued by this panel. With numerous ongoing and recently completed research projects at both the Institute of History at the University of Luxembourg and the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, the Occupation Studies Network members’ conference presents an opportunity for scholars from the areas of cultural history, military history, administrative history, and digital humanities, to showcase their findings and methodologies, and make scholars aware of this small but fascinating and revealing case of occupation.
This panel aims to situate Luxembourg’s occupation experience within a broader comparative framework and understanding of occupation experiences during the Second World War. Specifically, it explores the institutional and societal impact of occupation and integration policies in a small, de facto annexed state. While there are similarities with other regions and states especially in Western Europe, there are also key differences. For one, unlike the annexed parts of Belgium and France, Eupen-Malmedy and Alsace-Lorraine, Luxembourg had not been part of a previous German polity. Attempts by remnants of the Luxembourgish government, (led by Secretary General of the government Albert Wehrer and known as the Verwaltungskommission or Commission Administrative), at accommodation with the occupier in a Vichy-like fashion were frustrated early on by German policy-makers. As a result, the room for independent action by local Luxembourgish officials tightened significantly over the course of 1940-41. Luxembourg’s linguistically diverse population was presumed by the occupation authorities to be ethnically German and the state territory to be integrated in full. Aside from propagandistic visions and a cultural policy aimed (and nominally succeeding) at complete political and social integration, Luxembourgish institutions and structures were replaced by a German-model administration down to the village level. With the introduction of conscription and forced labor, repressive measures such as resettlement, internment, and collective punishment increased over the course of the period of annexation. This led to the unusual combination of near-complete administrative and political integration with the distinctive characteristics of an occupied society. Chaired by Professor Christoph Brüll, the panel’s contributions cover a variety of topics and approaches, delving further into this dualism of repressive measures combined with policies intended to promote integration and annexation and the limited scope for independent action by different social groups.
Joé Voncken’s research on Luxembourg’s mayors examines local governance structures under German rule in the key transitional period of 1940-41, shedding light on implementation of and reactions to German administrative policies. In a similar vein, albeit with a stronger focus on a military history perspective, Noëlle Manoni’s work on the Allied occupation’s impact on society against the backdrop of the military events of winter 1944, when the northern half of Luxembourg was subject to one of the largest military operations in Western Europe, contributes to a view of the conflict on a local level. Nicholas Attfield’s research explores the transformation of Luxembourg’s musical landscape under occupation, shedding light on cultural policy, while also analyzing how female musicians navigated the constraints and opportunities of the Nazi cultural agenda. The panel also builds on recent findings from the WARLUX project, in particular research conducted by Nina Janz and Sarah Maya Vercruysse, which employed a relational database to map conscripted individuals’ experiences based on a collection of crowdsourced war letters. Their comparative case study of families from one locality allows for a detailed analysis of the impact of forced conscription and resettlement on family and community networks.
The overarching theme is one of impact on a civilian society and individual experiences and practices, with particular attention paid to the actions of and interactions between individuals – both occupiers and occupied – within their respective networks, as documented in sources ranging from war letters, war testimonies, as well as municipal and bureaucratic records.
Panel speakers and presentations
Chair/discussant: Christoph Brüll (University of Luxembourg)
Nicholas Attfield (University of Birmingham): ‘Germanisation’ and women musicians in occupied Luxembourg, 1940-44
Noëlle Manoni (Institute of History, University of Luxembourg): The Battle of the Bulge analysed through the prism of a final civilian hecatomb
Joé Voncken (University of Luxembourg): Luxembourg’s Mayors and the German ‘New Order’, 1940-1941
Photo credits:
Cover picture: The inhabitants of Luxembourg hold their weekly market on Place Guillaume II in Luxembourg City, in the presence of German soldiers
Source: Photothèque de la ville de Luxembourg, 1940-45-9-4969, unknown photographer
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