AFTER the invasion of Luxembourg by the fascist German Wehrmacht on May 10 1940, the military administration ordered a ban of all political parties. Contrary to the bourgeois parties, including the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Communist Party of Luxembourg (KPL) took the decision to continue the fight illegally.

After Hitler had been brought into power by parts of German big business and financial capital, the KPL had started to push its anti-fascist propaganda with its weekly journal Volksstimme (People’s Voice). The party supported its German comrades the KPD to transport illegal materials into Germany and helped with the reorganisation of the KPD group in Trier.

Luxembourg communists used football matches or religious events, where many Germans took part, to distribute leaflets against Hitler. The party was also active in recruiting volunteers in 1936 to go to Spain and to fight in the International Brigades against the fascist troops.

Before the installation of the nazi civil administration, the KPL had produced two illegal brochures: The Defeat of France, which analysed the reasons for the military defeat of France that had demoralised many Luxembourgers, and On Union Work, unmasking the social demagogy of the nazi trade union.

The secret police of the nazis, the Gestapo, which had come to Luxembourg together with the civil administration, tried hard to destroy the resistance against German occupation from the very beginning.

On September 13 1940, KPL president Zenon Bernard and the editor of Volksstimme were arrested and sentenced to long periods of imprisonment by the Volksgerichtshof, the German fascist court.

Bernard was murdered by the nazis in 1942 in the city of Kassel. KPL general secretary Dominique Urbany fled to Brussels and joined the resistance.

On December 24 1940 an illegal KPL conference in Differdingen mandated Arthur Useldinger, who organised the reconstruction of the illegal party organisation, and Jean Kill to produce the illegal newspaper Die Wahrheit (The Truth).

Several copy machines were constructed for the printing of leaflets, which called for the resistance against the nazi regime and to boycott industrial production.

With the help of a traitor who had attended a June 1 1941 meeting of more than 100 communists in the Steinsel forest near Bereldingen, the nazis arrested numerous comrades. Among them was miners’ leader Nik Bausch, who had been mandated to lead the party. He was murdered in 1943 in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

On August 5 1942, the nazi occupiers dealt the heaviest blow against the communist resistance movement. Following a special order by Hitler, Gestapo, SS and Wehrmacht soldiers raided the KPL. This was done to prepare for the conscription of Luxembourg youth into the German Wehrmacht.

Of the 74 men and women who had been registered on specially prepared lists of the Gestapo, 63 were arrested. They were imprisoned, tortured or sent to concentration camps, many of them with the remark “Ruckkehr unerwunscht” (return unwanted) on their files. A copy machine on which Die Wahrheit had been produced was also confiscated.

But the nazis had to refrain from staging a planned show trial against the KPL, since they were not able to arrest the resistance ringleaders Nik Moes, Jean Kill, Dominique Urbany and Arthur Useldinger.

And they could not impede a general strike on August 31 1942, organised by communist and other resistance organisations against conscription.

The KPL was seriously weakened by the raid and it took a long time until the beginning of 1943 when a new resistance group was formed by communist militants, the Active Luxembourg Unity Front Against Fascism (Alef).

Under the leadership of Francois Frisch the group produced and distributed leaflets against the nazis and collected money and food for the families of political prisoners as well as those young men who refused to join the Wehrmacht and hid in disused mines and underground bunkers.

Unfortunately Alef could not grow as strong as the communist resistance was before August 1942.

During the last 70 years the KPL resistance against the nazis was in many cases concealed or even denied.

There is still no school history book which mentions the heroic communist resistance