WWII: Russen im besetzten Luxemburg

The Second World War brought together several groups of emigrants in occupied Luxembourg whose roots lay in Tsarist Russia. At the beginning of the 20th century steel industry workers came from what was then Russian Poland, while Jewish merchants from Ukraine who fled the pogroms also settled there. After the First World War, the group was enlarged by the former prisoners of war and after the October Revolution of 1917 by the political refugees, often members of the so-called White Guard, from the Russian Empire. With the occupation of Luxembourg, the ethnically, politically and religiously colorful Russian diaspora was completed with the forced laborers from the Soviet Union. The Nazi occupiers redefined the positions and some in this group turned into the hunters and the others - the hunted. People with the same birthplaces and dialects of Russian ended up on both sides of the barbed wire of the numerous labor camps in southern Luxembourg.