Military History | Bayeux War Cemetery — Also Buried Here Are Servicemen of Other Nations

The information board inside the gate carries the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's founding principle in one sentence: to honour each person equally, regardless of rank, race or religion, and to do so forever. At the other end of the same board it sets out who is in the ground — more than 4,100 Commonwealth servicemen, and then, in its own words, "Also buried here are more than 500 servicemen of other nations, including Germany."

The two statements share a panel and do not refer to each other. The principle the commission adopted after its 1917 charter was about its own dead: that a general and a private should be marked the same way. It does not mention German dead, and the commission has never claimed that it does.

They are here because of how the burials happened rather than because of a rule. British medical units set up hospital facilities on the outskirts of Bayeux, taken on 7 June 1944 and described on the board as the first city in France to be liberated; the commission's own account says those units treated Allied and Axis wounded alike, and the dead were buried close by. A graves concentration unit based in Bayeux brought in more from across Normandy. The cemetery was completed in 1952 to a design by Philip Hepworth, the commission's principal architect for North West Europe.

The German war graves service, the Volksbund, calls its plot here a German section of honour and gives the number as 464 in its cemetery database and 467 in its printed guide to Normandy. It also records who maintains it: the CWGC. Polish, Soviet, Czechoslovak and Italian graves are here as well.

The cemetery is open to visitors and free to enter. The lawn is mown and roses stand at the head of the rows, in the German plot as in the rest, under no written principle saying that they must. The road outside is Boulevard Fabian Ware.

📸 Cover: Bayeux War Cemetery, looking across the plots, photograph by Iain Cameron, 8 July 2014, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.