Bisping

This war cemetery is home to 1,216 war dead from the First World War. 598 Germans 618 French Département Moselle The Franco-German military cemetery at Bisping was established by the German troops in April 1915 for the German dead and those of the enemy from the battles in Bisping and the surrounding area during the so-called "Battle of Lorraine", which lasted from August 20-23, 1914. Later, the dead from the defensive battles against the French forces attacking in 1915 and victims of the war of position in the years 1915 - 1918 were added. Those resting here belonged to units whose home bases were mainly in Bavaria, but also in Alsace, Lorraine, Württemberg and Mecklenburg. After the end of the war, the French military authorities transferred further dead from the communal areas, where they had often initially found a temporary grave at the place of their death during the fighting. Repair work between the wars The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. (German War Graves Commission) carried out the first work to improve the condition of the cemetery in 1930 on the basis of an agreement reached with the responsible French military authorities in 1928 on the treatment of joint cemeteries. The entrance was created by the French side. For its part, the Volksbund had the high cross erected and the common graves on the German cemetery enclosed with natural stone walls. Trees and bushes were also planted and the graves were landscaped. However, due to a lack of foreign currency and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the problem of permanently marking the graves initially remained unresolved. Final landscaping After the conclusion of the Franco-German War Graves Agreement of July 19, 1966, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. - with financial support from the German government - was able to begin the final landscaping of the German military cemeteries in France from the First World War. In addition to a fundamental landscaping overhaul of the German cemetery, in which volunteers from the Volksbund's youth camps were actively involved, the previous temporary wooden grave markers were replaced in 1973 with natural stone crosses engraved with the names and dates of those buried here. 70 of the 598 German fallen are buried in individual graves. Of the 528 fallen in the two communal graves, 135 remain unknown.