Luxembourg government in exile
The government left no written declaration explaining the reasons for its departure to a distressed population, nor any instructions for the commission charged with provisionally administering the country.
So as not to compromise the action of his colleagues, he informed the Chamber of Deputies that due to his circumstances, he felt obliged to provisionally renounce the exercise of his functions as minister.
The Luxembourgish authorities remaining in the country had not yet abandoned the hope that in the new European order dominated by Nazi Germany, the Grand Duchy could retain its independence.
The Grand Ducal family, Pierre Dupong and for a time, Victor Bodson, established themselves in Montréal, Canada, a Francophone city close to the United States.
In choosing to go into exile, first in France and later in Britain and Canada, the Luxembourgish government abandoned its traditional policy of neutrality and joined the camp of those fighting the Axis powers.
Despite its small size, Luxembourg was a party to the great agreements which brought together the Allied war effort and laid foundations for the post-war period.
In 1944, the government succeeded in furnishing a modest contribution to the Allied military effort by creating the Luxembourg Battery, composed of Luxembourgish volunteers and integrated in the Belgian Brigade Piron.
The Luxembourg state lacked any funds since its gold reserves, entrusted to the National Bank of Belgium in 1938–1939, had fallen into German hands.
After the war was over, there were numerous critics who accused the government of not having done enough to rescue them or help them reach the British Isles, such as those who remained trapped in the South of France or in camps in Spain.
It was mostly the two socialist ministers, who felt left out from the foreign policy led by Bech and Dupong, who tried to find solutions for the domestic problems of the post-war period.
Even though various tensions in the government-in-exile were reminiscent of the ideological battles of the inter-war period, all its members wanted to avoid another social and political crisis like that which had followed the First World War.
[9] The exile government was heavily criticised by members of the Resistance and others for its lack of help towards Luxembourgers attempting to flee their occupied country during the war.
[12] Its inactivity persuaded two of its critics, the resistance members Henri Koch-Kent and Armand Schleich [lb], the presenter of the Luxembourgish BBC programme, to found the Association des Luxembourgeois en Grande-Bretagne ("Association of Luxembourgers in Great Britain") in London, which counted 300 refugees from Luxembourg and men who had been forcibly conscripted into the German armed forces but had defected to the Allies.
[citation needed] Criticism was also forthcoming from the rest of the community of Luxembourgish refugees in London and in the Allied armed forces.
[6] These included Émile Krieps and Robert Winter, both officers in the Allied armed forces, and Albert Wingert, leader of the Luxembourgish Alweraje resistance group.
