Deutsche Kriegsgräberstätte Sandweiler
Is the original name of this German war cemetery in German. The Sandweiler war cemetery was the first cemetery that the German War Graves Commission (Deutsche Kriegsgräberstätten) established abroad after the Second World War.
Cemetery layout
The grass-covered burial ground is divided into 18 blocks. Natural stone crosses mark the graves. They were set in 1979 and have since replaced the horizontal name stones used previously. At the end of the burial ground there is a five meter high stone cross on a two meter high circular base. The comrade’s grave is also located there. Of the 4,829 dead who were buried there, 4,014 are known by name. Their names are recorded on bronze plaques on the surrounding walls of the comrades’ grave. In total 10,913 German war dead from the Second World War have found their final resting place in Sandweiler.
History
During the heavy fighting in the winter of 1944 and spring of 1945 in the Luxembourg-Belgian and Luxembourg-German border areas, “The Battle of the Bulge”, the American War Grave Service (American Battle Monuments Commission) recovered its own fallen soldier and German dead from the combat zone and buried them in two makeshift grave fields in Luxembourg. The Germans soldiers in the area of the municipality of Sandweiler, the Americans soldiers at Hamm. Both systems are around 1.5 kilometers apart. After the work was completed by the US Army Graves Service, the German cemetery had 5,599 graves.
At the beginning of the 1950s, there were still German soldier graves with 5,286 dead at 150 locations in Luxembourg. Most of them were mass graves, about which only imperfect records were available. The German War Grave Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge) also reburied these dead German soldiers in Sandweiler. There was enough land available there to expand the facility and set up a final war cemetery. The reburials made it possible to identify still unknown dead. The Sandweiler War Cemetery was opened to the public on June 5, 1955.
The war graves agreement was concluded in 1952. It was between the Luxembourg government and the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and was the first agreement on fallen soldiers that Germany concluded with a neighboring country. The construction of the facility was financed with donations from German school youth. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the site, Jean-Claude Juncker, the then Prime Minister of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, made the memorable statement during the memorial event at the war cemetery: “Anyone who doubts Europe, anyone who even despairs of Europe, should visit military cemeteries.”
The last remains interred were those of an unknown German soldier discovered in the Schumann’s Eck forests in the vicinity of Wiltz in late 2007.
Visit
The municipality of Sandweiler is located eight kilometers east of the capital Luxembourg and is open all year during daylight hours.