Gauleiter Gustav Simon at a Luxembourg rally
August 1942
Gauleiter Gustav Simon at a Luxembourg rally. Simon joined the Nazi Party in its early days and quickly rose through the ranks. He was appointed regional leader ('Gauleiter') of Luxembourg after the German invasion of 1940.
Centre de Documentation et de Recherche sur la Res
Gustav Simon was born in the city of Saarbrücken in 1900 to a railway bureaucrat father and a homemaker mother. He trained as a teacher, and joined the Nazi Party in 1925, rising rapidly through the ranks. He was appointed regional leader, or ‘Gauleiter’, of Koblenz by Hitler in 1931, and, following Germany’s invasion, regional leader of Luxembourg in 1940. Simon’s instructions were to dismantle the principality’s state apparatus, to ban the use of the French language, and to Germanise its people. Sometime in late 1940, Gustav Simon initiated a new programme: the deportation of the entire Jewish population of Luxembourg. Simon transported all Jews out of the country and declared Luxembourg to be Judenfrei. He was one of the only Nazi Gauleiters to claim his region had been 'cleansed'. Following the war’s end, Hanns successfully tracked down and arrested Simon.
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