Military History | Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof Langemark — The Cemetery the Students Paid For

On 11 November 1914 the German Supreme Army Command issued a communiqué reporting that west of Langemarck — Langemark in the Dutch spelling, in West Flanders — young regiments had gone forward against the enemy's front line singing "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles", and had taken it. The action had been fought near Bikschote, Bixschote in the spelling of the time, and not at Langemarck, by reserve corps made up of reservists, militia and volunteers, some of them pupils and students. Writing for the 1914-1918-Online encyclopedia, Lukas Grawe records that the phrase "young regiments" was read in Germany as meaning the units had been students', and that they had not been. The reading outlived the war, and it built a cemetery. German students kept an annual Langemarck commemoration through the Weimar years and raised money for the ground. The Flemish heritage register records that the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge laid the site out in the 1930s with help from veterans' and student organisations, that it was dedicated on 10 July 1932, that it had begun as a British burial plot of October 1914, and that 859 dead lay in it after the war, 627 of them German. By 1932 the register counts 10,143, of whom 6,313 were identified and cut into oak panels inside the red sandstone gate building. Grawe records that after 1933 the National Socialists took the myth up for its national and heroic dimensions, and that it kept the conservative character it had had before. From the mid-1950s the German dead of Flanders were gathered into four large sites, Langemark among them. Langemark took 9,257 identified dead from seven parishes, and nearly 25,000 unidentified into a Kameradengrab, a comrades' grave near the entrance; blocks around it carry seventy bronze panels naming close to 17,000 of them. Published totals for the whole cemetery differ. The stone over the comrades' grave gives its own, under a bronze wreath of oak leaves: AUF DIESEM FRIEDHOF RUHEN 44061 DEUTSCHE SOLDATEN DES KRIEGES 1914/18. 📸 Cover: the grave field, flat granite plates set among the oaks with groups of three basalt crosses and the low red sandstone wall beyond. LBM1948, 21 June 2014, CC BY-SA 4.0. Also shown: the bronze oak-leaf wreath on the comrades' grave, with the line from Isaiah cut inside it. BigBlobfish, 25 October 2024, CC0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.