Luxembourgish Patriot League

The Luxembourgian Patriot League (LPL, Luxembourgish: Lëtzebuerger Patriote Liga), was a Luxembourgian Resistance movement during World War II. When Luxembourg was invaded and annexed by Nazi Germany in 1940, a national consciousness started to come about. The LPL (Lëtzebuerger Patriote Liga) was founded in 4. September 1940 at the Lycée of Echternach in Echternach by Raymond Petit (born in 16. January 1920, killed himself on 21. April 1942 while he tried to escape from the Gestapo; he had no other choice except to use his last bullet to kill himself in order not to get captured by the Gestapo and getting tortured to get the names of members of other LPL-Members).

The first rumors and flyers about the foundation of the LPL appeared in October 1940. Those flyers already appealed the inhabitants of Luxembourg to opposite against the German occupation. The LPL had one headquarter (“Quartier Général”), however not many people knew the names of those people – to avoid to get captured. Therefore, the country was divided in regional groups in different districts. The regional groups searched for members, the head of the regional group knew the head of the district, and finally the heads of the different districts knew the headquarter. Therefore, the members of the regional groups did not know the names of all the members, in order to avoid any leak of this highly critical information. There were no member lists. Gestapo tried over years to get names from members of the LPL however they therefore did never succeed.

Actually the regional groups were at the beginning formed by students (school and high school(“Lycée”)), but those students grew the network by trying to find people with similar ideas, and they actually found many people, for example their parents, neighbors, members of different local associations and other people. In 1942, when the Gestapo did a raid through Luxembourg, there was no township left without at least 2 to 3 members of the LPL.

At the beginning, the LPL secretly spread flyers and pictures, not only about resistance, but also news about the allied troops. In addition they tried to figure out how to support allied troops and to smuggle out people from Luxembourg so they could rejoin allied forces or resistance in France and Belgium too. They began to grow a network, not only in Luxembourg, but also with allied resistance movements in other countries. While their network grew, their activity grew too. They reproduced food ration cards and made/falsified ID-cards of any kind in order to help people in Luxembourg to survive. In October 1941 they even succeeded in getting weapons out of the police-department of Diekirch (occupied by the Germans).

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