Luxembourg / Luxembourg (City) (Luxemburg (Stadt))

Memorial to the victims of the Shoah

Monument en mémoire de la Shoah

Since the summer of 2018, a monument in the centre of the city of Luxembourg commemorates the Jews deported from Luxembourg.

History

On May 10, 1940, the German Wehrmacht attacked neutral Luxembourg and occupied the country. Adolf Hitler appointed the Gauleiter of Koblenz-Trier, Gustav Simon, as head of administration in Luxembourg. The occupying forces soon began to persecute Jews. Many Jews had fled the German Reich only a few years earlier. Hundreds of Jews tried to flee to France, many later fell into German hands again. The Jews in Luxembourg were disenfranchised, expropriated and forced to conduct slave labour, and the synagogues were taken away from their congregations.
The first deportation train with Jews left Luxembourg in October 1941 for the Łódź ghetto. This was the first deportation of Jews from an occupied country in Western Europe. Up to June 17, 1943 another six transports followed. They were attached to larger transports in the German Reich. The destinations of the transports were the Izbica transit ghetto, the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and the Theresienstadt ghetto.

Luxembourg (City), about 1942, Nazi march in front of the Old Synagogue during the time of the German occupation, public domain

Luxembourg (City), undated, The Old Synagogue destroyed in 1943, public domain

Victims

The National Socialists deported 658 (676 according to other information) Jews from Luxembourg to ghettos and camps in the occupied East. Only 36 of them survived. Before the war, 3,600 Jews lived in Luxembourg, of whom about 1,500 survived on the run, in hiding or in camps.

Before the Second World War the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg had around 300,000 inhabitants. 3,500 to 3,700 of these were Jews, including many refugees from Nazi Germany and the Saar region, which had been reincorporated into the Third Reich on March 1, 1935. The German Wehrmacht invaded neutral Luxembourg on May 10, 1940. The newly appointed Gauleiter (district leader) Gustav Simon (1900–1945) began to strip Jews of their rights with the aim of annexing a Jew-free Luxembourg to the Reich. In October 1941, the approximately 700 Jews remaining in the country were incarcerated in the former monastery in Fünfbrunnen. Many of them died as a result of the conditions there. In the period up to June 1943, the SS deported the survivors in several transports to occupied Poland, where they were taken either to Auschwitz-Birkenau or to ghettos, from which they were also later transported to the extermination camps. Many Luxembourg Jews who had fled to countries such as France and Belgium were captured by the German SS or police. The total number of Jewish victims is estimated at around 1,200. In August 1942, Luxembourg ceased to exist as a country and became part of the German »Moselland« Gau (administrative district). The introduction of compulsory Reich labour service and universal military conscription for those born between 1920 and 1927 led to strikes in 1943. The authorities retaliated by carrying out shootings and deportations to the concentration camps. The Luxembourg resistance did not become a single coordinated movement until March 1944. Many young Luxembourgers, including those who had gone underground to escape military service, joined the French and Belgian resistance. American troops liberated Luxembourg in September 1944. During the Ardennes offensive the following winter the north of Luxembourg was reoccupied by Germany. The country was liberated by the Americans for a second time in January 1945. The country suffered an immense amount of war damage. Over 5,700 Luxembourgers died as a result of World War Two, including almost 2,900 forced recruits who died in combat and around 800 who died in the concentration camps. There are monuments and museums in Luxembourg remembering the war, resistance and deportations but also the Allied liberators, the hundreds who died in the Ardennes offensive and the deported Jews.

Remembrance

On June 17, 2018, exactly 75 years to the day after the last deportation train from Luxembourg left for Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, a Holocaust memorial was inaugurated in the centre of Luxembourg. Nearby was the Old Synagogue, destroyed during the German occupation in 1943. Henri, Grand Duke of Luxembourg and Prime Minister Xavier Bettel took part in the unveiling. The cost of the monument was shared by the City and the State of Luxembourg. The sculpture was designed by the French-Israeli sculptor Shlomo Selinger (*1928), who had also designed the memorial of the Shoah memorial complex Drancy near Paris in 1976. On the pedestal of the monument it reads in French and Luxembourgish: »Kaddish for the Jews of Luxembourg murdered by the Nazis in 1940-1945«. On the same day, a commemorative plaque was unveiled at the Luxembourg station in memory of the 658 Jewish children, women and men who had been deported from that station between 1941 and 1943.

Luxembourg, 2018, Memorial plaque at the station, Fédération des Enrôlés de force

Luxembourg, 2018, Memorial to the victims of the Shoah, Fédération des Enrôlés de force

Open

The memorial is accessible at all times.

Contact

http://www.ons-jongen-a-meedercher.lu

Luxembourg, 2018, Detailed view of the memorial, Fédération des Enrôlés de force

Luxembourg, 2018, Luxembourgish inscription on the pedestal of the memorial, Fédération des Enrôlés de force

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