LUXEMBOURG: Bodies for Souls

For the Nazis, it was too easy. They dispensed with the usual excuses, and announced to the occupied Grand Duchy of Luxembourg that it was the first country to be honored with annexation to the Third Reich since the shooting started. Incidentally, they said, Luxembourg men would be drafted into the German Army.

In front of the blast furnaces at Schifflange, men paused to talk. Somebody turned off the blowers that forced the drafts into the fires. The strike was on. The German-controlled newspaper, Nationalblatt, called the strikers “enemy agents.”

The German Gauleiter, Gustav Simon, was quick to discipline the new citizens of the Reich. He declared a state of civil emergency, established military courts with powers to sentence strikers to immediate death. Luxembourgers should remember, he intimated, that workers in the New Order do not strike.

Luxembourgers remembered, instead, the years before the war, when personal savings bulged in the banks and in the farmhouse mattresses; when workers got holidays with pay; when all adults voted; when Luxembourgers could call their souls their own.

While firing squads went to work, the furnace chimneys of southwest Luxembourg grew cold, the smoky “black country” grew bright again. Work stopped in steel mills. The strike spread countrywide.

Through the Nazi’s solid wall of censorship word seeped last week to London that the strike kept on. And there were stories of sabotage. Fine sand, mixed somehow into lubricating oil, was scarring the bearings of Luxembourg’s railroad engines. Railway signals misbehaved; the transport system went awry.

This week Charlotte-Aldegonde-Elise-Marie-Wilhelmine of Walram, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, said: “My heart breaks for them [the strikers] because I know hundreds will allow themselves to be shot rather than go back to work.”

Nobody knew whether or not the Nazis preferred discipline to industrial output, shooting strikers to running rivers of steel. Nobody knew whether the strikes would spread. If the puniest child could be so stubborn, what would the big brothers do?