Military History | Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof Neuville-Saint-Vaast — Where France Gathered the German Dead

Between 1919 and 1923 French military authorities worked across the Pas-de-Calais, lifting German dead out of field graves and scattered plots in more than a hundred communes and bringing them to one field beside the road at La Maison Blanche, in Neuville-Saint-Vaast. The Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof Neuville-St. Vaast, the cimetière militaire allemand de la Maison Blanche, is the largest German war cemetery in France. Its totals do not settle. The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, which has worked here since 1928, records 44,888 dead; the German and English Wikipedia articles and the Twentieth Century Society give 44,833. On the mass grave the accounts agree: 8,040 men lie in one Gemeinschaftsgrab, of whom the Volksbund names 842 on metal plaques set under thirty-two slate crosses along a 140-metre mound. It counts 36,848 individual graves with 588 unidentified; the German article gives 36,793 and 615. Two autochrome plates made at the cemetery by Frédéric Gadmer for the Albert-Kahn archive record how fast the ground filled. The plate of 23 June 1924 is captioned a German cemetery of 30,000 graves; the plate of 26 August 1925, one of 50,000. The crosses in both are wooden. The Volksbund's own account records that the Wehrmacht took over patronage of the site in 1935, that the final design became possible only after the Franco-German war graves agreement of 1966, and that the cemetery was dedicated on 13 November 1983; the Twentieth Century Society records permanent construction begun in 1936 and halted by the Second World War. The crosses are metal now, and the English account gives four names to each. Where a Jewish soldier is buried the cross gives way to an upright natural stone: 131 by the Volksbund's count, 129 by Wikipedia's. Two Commonwealth cemeteries of the Canadian Corps lie in the same commune, and the Canadian memorial on Hill 145 stands about four kilometres north-north-east. The lantern tower over the French necropolis at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette is about seven kilometres north-north-west. The cemetery was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023, with 138 other First World War funerary and memorial sites. 📸 Cover: "Neuville Saint Vaast-Maison Blanche-20151231.jpg" by Daniel Villafruela, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Also shown: "France, La Targette, Cimetière Allemand de 30.000 Tombes - A42544.jpg" (23 June 1924) and "France, La Targette, Gd Cimetière Allemand de 50.000 Tombes - A46502.jpg" (26 August 1925), both by Frédéric Gadmer for the Albert-Kahn archive, CC BY-SA 4.0, and captioned by that archive as the German cemetery at La Targette; and "Neuville-St Vaast cimetière militaire allemand.JPG" by Pierre André, CC BY-SA 4.0.