Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

Elsewhere, some small countries showed bolder defiance than did the French. The Danes, alone among European societies, refused to participate in the deportation of their Jews, almost all of whom survived. Few of the 293,000 people of the tiny Grand Duchy of Luxembourg welcomed its incorporation into Hitler’s empire. During the 1940 German invasion, seven of Luxembourg’s eighty-seven defenders were wounded; the ruling family and ministers escaped to London to form a government in exile. When a plebiscite on the German occupation was held in October 1941, 97 percent of the population declared their opposition. Berlin shrugged off this vote, declared all Luxemburgers German citizens, and began conscripting them into the Wehrmacht. They responded by calling a general strike, which was broken by the execution of twenty-one trades unionists and the deportation of hundreds more to concentration camps. It would be mistaken to idealise Luxembourg’s resistance to the Nazis: its postwar government convicted 10,000 citizens of collaboration, and 2,848 Luxemburgers died in German uniform. But most of the duchy’s people made plain their rejection of Nazi hegemony.