The Army of Luxembourg
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
December 2021

Standing between France and Germany, with no army to speak of, Luxembourg had no opportunity to remain neutral during the Second World War. The relatively small grand duchy did have an appreciable base of industry and population for its size, but her leaders decided not to use it to build up their armed forces. At most they might have fielded a division or so of troops, not nearly enough to hold back their neighbors’ massive armies. Instead, they decided to quite literally close the duchy’s doors to intruders.

Our 1940: The Fall of Luxembourg is a Panzer Grenadier expansion set, featuring Luxembourg’s defenders and their hopeless task in 1940. It’s downloadable, and available for free exclusively to our Gold Club. You get 24 pieces featuring the entire Army of Luxembourg, plus a couple of scenarios so you can play with them.

In early 1940, the grand duchy hired construction contractor (and former Minister of Roads) Joseph Schuster to shut Luxembourg’s doors to the outside world. At every road crossing leading into Germany, large or small, as well as a few leading to France, Schuster built large steel doors. In time of crisis, Luxembourg’s police would close the doors and tell invaders to go away. Eventually the invaders would work their way through the doors, but by then, unspecified outside intervention forces would have arrived to defend the duchy.

A Schuster Door, seen before the war. This is one of the taller examples.

To support the line of steel doors, Luxembourg’s “army” was composed of two different branches. The Gendarmerie, or militarized police, numbered 13 officers and 255 men, organized into one very large company. The volunteer corps numbered 300 in peacetime, increasing to 425 in September 1939, and drew their officers from the gendarmes. This army had only light weapons, no mortars or machine guns and obviously nothing heavier: no anti-tank guns and no artillery.

When the panzers rolled across the frontier in the pre-dawn hours of 10 May 1940, they simply drove around the Schuster Line roadblocks. At many crossings even that wasn’t necessary – there was no one around to shut the doors. Most of the gendarmes and volunteers remained in their barracks, but in several places brief firefights broke out between the Luxembourgish forces and a handful of Brandenburg commandos supported by armed pro-German civilians at several bridges and at Radio Luxembourg.

The Army of Luxembourg. The entire Army of Luxembourg.

The radio station with its big, powerful antenna was considered a major objective. Radio Luxembourg had ceased broadcasting on 21 September 1939 to “protect the grand duchy’s neutrality,” but between 1933 and 1939 it was a powerful pirate radio station blaring out English-language music, sports and odes to Ovaltine on an unauthorized frequency. At the time, the BBC did not begin its day until 10:15 a.m., and only broadcast religious programs on weekends. Radio Luxembourg cheerfully filled this dead air, raking in advertising revenue from British firms as over half of all people in Britain tuned in.

Radio Luxembourg fell to German troops from the regular army a few hours later, undamaged and ready to begin service as a propaganda transmitter of the first order. English-language presenters bombarded the United Kingdom with their taunts, including William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw. In September 1944 the Germans abandoned the station, failing to blow it up, and after some quick repairs it went into use as an American “black propaganda” station.

German soldiers pose with a Schuster Door, May 1940.

While the Luxembourgers didn’t do much fighting on their own behalf, French cavalrymen crossed the grand duchy’s southern border about three and a half hours after the invasion began, looking for Germans to fight. The 3rd Cavalry Division and 1st Brigade of Spahis found them fairly quickly, and a number of firefights broke out. The French horsemen remained in Luxembourg until the next day, when it became obvious that the German panzer spearheads had moved far past their positions. They returned to the Maginot Line with about 100 prisoners of war trailing behind them.

As for the rest of Luxembourg, the occupation was complete within hours. A half-dozen gendarmes had been wounded along with one volunteer, but none were killed. The Germans kept Luxembourg under military authority for the next several months, and in August 1940 began steady moves toward annexation: transferring the police to German control, dissolving Parliament, introducing German laws, starting forced labor service, and finally in 1942 military conscription.

Luxembourg resisted the occupation, and provided an artillery battery in the Free Belgian Piron Brigade (the 25-pdr units included with this set). Almost six thousand of the duchy’s pre-war population of 309,000 perished during the war, including about 900 of Luxembourg’s 1,200 Jews. When American forces drove the Germans out in September 1944, Luxembourg immediately began to raise its own army and participated in the post-war occupation of Germany. The grand duchy even demanded large-scale annexations of German territory in retribution for the occupation, but was finally persuaded to accept a cash indemnity instead.

At Western Europe’s usual proportions, Luxembourg in 1940 should have been able to provide 15,000 troops in a conscript-based army. Arming them would be only somewhat problematical; Luxembourg had a well-developed base of heavy industry and strong economy, and Belgium next door had a very modern arms industry. In practical terms, the Luxemburg forces would have been the equivalent of a third division of Chasseurs Ardennais, and no matter what their fighting qualities (and judging by their sons and grandsons who served NATO, these would have been of a pretty high standard) would have been forced to retreat alongside the two Belgian Chasseur divisions and forced to surrender with the Belgian Army a few days later. An armed Luxembourg would not have been spared occupation.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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