In the 1950s, young people from 16 nations helped to expand the Belgian war cemetery in Lommel. This gave rise to the motto "Reconciliation over the graves", which still stands for the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge's youth work today.
Cemetery description
The German war cemetery in Lommel is located in the Flemish region of Belgium in the province of Limburg. The 16-hectare site, which is a listed monument, is divided into 63 fields with up to 28 rows and 640 graves. There are almost 20,000 crosses in the cemetery, on both sides of which the names, dates of life and grave numbers of two of the fallen are documented.
Occupancy
Of the 39,111 people buried in Lommel, 13,000 were originally unknown. To date, the Volksbund has been able to clarify the fates of almost 7,000 of them. The soldiers buried there had mainly died during the battles in Belgium and western Germany, particularly near Aachen, in the Hürtgen Forest and at the Remagen bridgehead.
Lommel was also the final resting place for 542 German soldiers from the First World War, after a small military cemetery in Leopoldsburg had been closed.
History
Towards the end of the Second World War, the American burial service provisionally buried its own and German casualties in four collective cemeteries: Henri-Chapelle, Fosse, Overrepen and Neuville-en-Condroz. The German dead were reburied in Lommel in 1946 and 1947, while the American dead were brought together in the two cemeteries of Neuville-en-Condrez near Liège and Henri-Chapelle to the west of Aachen.
in 1946, the Belgian burial service began to dissolve all other German burial grounds from the Second World War in the country and transfer the dead to Lommel and - to a lesser extent - to a site near Bastogne.
Immediately after the conclusion of the war graves agreement between the German and Belgian governments in 1952, the Volksbund landscaped the cemetery, which was located in a large heathland area.
On September 6, 1959, the largest German war cemetery of the Second World War in the West to date was opened to the public with a commemorative ceremony. The cemetery is sponsored by the State Association of Lower Saxony.
Special feature
Young people from several countries took part in the expansion of the cemetery in the 1950s. in 1954, almost 400 young people from 16 nations helped. The joint work gave rise to the motto "Reconciliation over the graves", which still applies to the Volksbund's youth work today and was later supplemented by "Working for peace".
The international youth meeting and education center Huis Over Grenzen opened on September 17, 1993 in the entrance building of the war cemetery. Overnight accommodation was discontinued at the end of 2024 and the building is being converted into a place of learning and remembrance with an exhibition. Guided tours can still be requested: Huis Over GrenzenThe Volksbund also offers historical, social and political education programs for stays of several days at the three JBS in Ysselsteyn (Netherlands), Niederbronn-Les-Bains (France) and Golm (Germany).
