Military History | Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof Vladslo — The Figures Followed the Graves

Two granite figures kneel at the edge of a field of flat stones in the Praatbos, a wood north-east of Vladslo. They were not carved for this cemetery. The Flemish heritage register dates the first German burials in the wood to October 1914, during the fighting on the Yser, when the Praatbos held a German rest camp behind the third line; the German Wikipedia article has the cemetery laid out from 1917. By 1938 the register counts about 3,849 dead here, many of them of the Marinekorps Flandern. Käthe Kollwitz's younger son Peter was killed in Flanders in October 1914 and buried at the Roggeveld cemetery at Esen, Eessen in the older spelling, a few kilometres away. She worked at a memorial for him, on and off, from 1914 to 1932. The two figures carry her face and her husband Karl's, and were cut in Belgian granite by August Rhades and Fritz Diederich. They were set up at Roggeveld in 1932 — on 23 July, and in the presence of the Kollwitzes, by the German account, which also records that the group had first been planned in three parts, with a figure of Peter lying between his parents. Then the graves moved. Belgium and West Germany agreed in the 1950s to close the small scattered German plots of West Flanders and gather the dead into four cemeteries. The register records some 22,000 brought here from more than sixty of them, in 1955 to 1957, to Robert Tischler's design; the German account counts 128 cemeteries emptied into all four, between 1956 and 1958. Roggeveld was one of them. Peter's grave came to Vladslo and the figures came with it, in 1956 by the register, the Volksbund and the Twentieth Century Society, in 1958 by the German account. More than 25,600 lie here now under flat granite stones, up to twenty names to a stone; the register counts 25,645. The parents kneel with their backs to the wood, looking across the stones at the brick entrance lodge. The cemetery was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023. 📸 Cover: the two figures at the edge of the grave field, looking down it to the entrance lodge. Davidh820, 15 September 2013, CC BY-SA 3.0. Also shown: the pair on their granite blocks in winter, Bva, February 2009, GFDL and CC BY-SA 3.0; and an oblique view across the flat stones, Davidh820, 15 September 2013, CC BY-SA 3.0. All via Wikimedia Commons.