This cemetery has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since September 2023.
Description of the cemetery
This cemetery in the Département of Ardennes is the only site for German casualties in the Argonne forest area that has been preserved almost in its original state. It was established by the Reichwehr at the beginning of November 1915.
It was created during the extremely costly battles in 1915 in the dense forests and gorges of the Argonne, where infantry and artillery were pushed to their limits. Both sides then drove tunnels under the enemy lines and blew up entire sections of the positions. Large blasting funnels still bear witness to this today. The positional battles from 1916 to 1918 claimed further victims.
Occupation
The fallen were buried here until the area was cleared in October 1918. After the end of the war, the French military authorities buried around 230 German dead in temporary graves. Those buried here belonged to 13 infantry and Landwehr regiments, whose home bases were in Württemberg, Saxony, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Lorraine and the Rhineland.
All of the fallen rest in individual graves. Eight are still unknown today. Instead of a cross, two graves of Jewish soldiers were given a gravestone made of natural stone with the following Hebrew inscriptions: "Here rests buried ..." and "May his soul be bound into the circle of the living".
History
The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. (German War Graves Commission) undertook the initial work of maintaining the cemetery on the basis of an agreement with the French military authorities in 1926. However, the problem of permanently marking the graves remained unresolved - first due to a lack of foreign currency and later because of the Second World War.
After the conclusion of the Franco-German War Graves Agreement of July 19, 1966, the Volksbund - with financial support from the German government - began to design the German military cemeteries of the First World War in France and give them their present form. However, the site in Apremont remained largely as it was due to the old trees.
Young volunteers from the Volksbund had already begun preparatory gardening work there at work camps before 1966. in 1976, the temporary wooden grave markers were replaced with metal crosses bearing the names and dates of the dead. Young people from work camps were also involved in this work.
Special feature
In September 2023, UNESCO declared 139 First World War cemeteries as World Heritage Sites - Apremont is one of them.
Photo: Fritz Braun
