A few kilometers south of Venray, a municipality with 38,000 inhabitants (in the Dutch province of Limburg), lies the German military cemetery of Ysselsteyn.
More than 31,000 German soldiers have found their final resting place here on a gently undulating, 28-hectare site in the heath and moorland of “De Peel”.
The Dutch captain Ludwig Johann Timmermans is inextricably linked with the history of the cemetery in Ysselsteyn. He worked as the cemetery administrator on behalf of his government from 1948 to 1976 and is considered the “father of the Ysselsteyn military cemetery”.
The cemetery was laid out by the Dutch Graves Registration Service. The Dutch Ministry of Defense wanted the German fallen exhumed from the civil cemeteries, since proper maintenance of the war graves could only be ensured by combining all the graves into one large complex.
From Maastricht to the island of Ameland, the German military graves were scattered across the entire country.
On October 15, 1946, the Dutch grave service began the reinterment. Corporal Johann Siegel was the first fallen soldier to be buried here. About 3,000 German soldiers also rest in Ysselsteyn, who were buried by the American grave digging service in the last months of the war (Hürtgenwald, Battle of the Bulge) next to the American military cemetery in Margraten (8,301 American fallen).
In addition, 1,700 fallen soldiers from the Arnhem area were laid to rest here in Ysselsteyn.
In the front part of the complex, 85 fallen soldiers from Maastricht and other communities have been transferred and laid to rest. In Rotterdam, Weert and on Schiermonnikoog, further fallen soldiers of World War I rest. In several years of work, the Dutch grave service has opened the graves of the unknown and, in close cooperation with the Volksbund and the German office in Berlin (formerly the Wehrmacht information office), identified 7,330 dead, so that the name of these dead could be given back to them.