M. FAURE: Gentlemen, I shall ask the Tribunal to be kind enough now to take the file which is entitled “Luxembourg.”
The Tribunal has already been informed of the essential elements of the situation concerning Luxembourg by the testimony of President Reuter, who was heard during yesterday’s session. I shall, therefore, be able to shorten my explanations about this file; but it is nevertheless indispensable that I submit some documents to the Tribunal.
The annexation of Luxembourg has quite a special character, in that it carried with it the total abolition of the sovereignty of this occupied country. It therefore concerns a case which corresponds to the hypothesis which we call “debellatio” in classic law, that is to say, the cessation of hostilities by the disappearance of the body of public law of one of the belligerents.
This total annexation of Luxembourg completes the proof that there was criminal premeditation on the part of the Reich against this State to which it was bound by diplomatic treaties, notably the Treaty of London of 11 May 1867, and the Treaty of Arbitration and Conciliation of 2 September 1929. And the Tribunal knows by the testimony of Mr. Reuter that these pledges were confirmed, first by a spontaneous diplomatic step taken on 26 August 1939 by M. Von Radowitz, the Minister Plenipotentiary for Germany, and afterwards by a re-assuring declaration a few days before the invasion, in circumstances which have already been explained to the Tribunal.
In view of the fact that Luxembourg—unlike Alsace and Lorraine, which were French departments—I say, in view of the fact that Luxembourg was a state, the Germans, in order to carry out this de facto annexation, had to issue special regulations concerning the suppression of public institutions; and this they did. Two ordinances of 23 August and 22 October 1940 announced, on the one hand, the ban on Luxembourg’s political parties; and, on the other, the dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies and the State Council. These two decrees are submitted as Documents RF-801 and RF-802. I request the Tribunal only to take judicial notice of these documents which are public texts.
Moreover, from 26 August 1940 on, a German decree had abolished the constitutional executive formula, according to which justice is rendered in the name of the sovereign. A formula, according to which justice is rendered in the name of the people, was substituted at that time for this executive formula. On 15 October 1941, the formula was again modified in a more obvious way and became “In the name of the German people.”
I shall now follow in my supplementary explanation the order of ideas which I adopted for Alsace and Lorraine; and naturally I shall dwell only on those circumstances peculiar to Luxembourg.
As in the case of Alsace and Lorraine, the Germans attempted to extirpate the national sentiment of Luxembourg and to render impossible all manifestations of the traditional culture of this country. Thus, the ordinances of 28 August 1940 and 23 October 1940 banned all associations of a cultural or educational nature.
As in Alsace and Lorraine, the Germans imposed Germanization of family and Christian names. This was the object of a decree of 31 January 1941, Document Number RF-803. I point out, in passing, that the wearing of a beret was also forbidden in Luxembourg, by a decree of 14 February 1941. At the same time they did away with national institutions, the Germans set up, according to their custom, their own administration and appointed a Gauleiter in the person of Gustav Simon, the former Gauleiter of Koblenz-Trier.
From the administrative point of view, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was administered as a Bezirk (district) of the Chief of the Civilian Administrative Service but by the German administrative services. As far as the Party was concerned—the National Socialist Party—it was officially joined to the Reich, as a dependency of the Mosel Gau.