The municipality of Maissemy in the Département of Aisne is located just under ten kilometers west-northwest of the city of St. Quentin. The Maissemy war cemetery, located between the villages of Vermand and Bellenglise, can be reached via road D 33. 30,481 German war dead who lost their lives in the First World War are buried in the cemetery.
Description of the cemetery
In 1924, the French military authorities had the German military cemetery Maissemy established. After Neuville-St. Vaast near Arras with 44,833 dead, it is the second largest German war cemetery of the First World War in France. On the basis of the Franco-German War Graves Agreement of 1966, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. (German War Graves Commission) undertook the final design of the German military cemeteries from the First World War in France. From 1964, participants in Volksbund youth camps from North Rhine-Westphalia worked on leveling and planting the graves. in 1972, the existing wooden grave markers were replaced with crosses made of Belgian granite, which immortalize the names and dates of the buried. 15,481 war dead rest in individual graves in the cemetery; 75 of them remain unknown. For religious reasons, the graves of dead soldiers of the Jewish faith were given a gravestone made of natural stone. It reads in Hebrew "Here rests buried ..." and "May his soul be bound into the circle of the living". 15.000 dead are buried in two common graves. Only 967 of them are known by name. Their names are documented on metal plaques attached to the surrounding walls of the two common graves. These walls were completely renewed during the design of the war cemetery. In addition, the landscaping of the site was redesigned. The Volksbund's maintenance service looks after the cemetery on a permanent basis.
History
When the Maissemy war cemetery was established, the French authorities relocated war dead from 124 communal areas as well as from provisional gravesites that had been created during the fighting within a 30-kilometer radius of the current war cemetery. Most of those buried here lost their lives in the three battles of the Somme. Almost half of the soldiers died in the battles from the end of June to November 1916 and in the "Great Battle of France" in the spring and summer of 1918. The latter was an unsuccessful attempt by the German Empire to bring about a favorable outcome to the war for the Central Powers on the Western Front. From 1929, the Volksbund undertook work to improve the cemetery grounds; an agreement with the French military authorities made this possible. Several hundred trees and shrubs were planted as well as more than 70,000 lavender plants to green the bare cemeteries. The communal graves were planted with 8,000 wild roses and given stone borders. A new entrance with surrounding walls on the street front and a central path were created. The latter is flanked on both sides by large stone slabs. Inscribed in the form of lead inlays, these slabs bear the names and coats of arms of the towns in the Ruhr region that sponsored the cemetery at the time. The Ruhr towns again contributed financially to the final expansion of the site. In the interwar period, a permanent marking of the graves could not be achieved due to a lack of foreign currency until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, which prevented further work.
Special feature
Between 1934 and 1935, the Volksbund had a memorial hall built in the middle of the cemetery, between the two large communal graves, made of golden yellow tuff quarried in the foothills of the Alps. Artfully forged heavy bronze grilles close off the passages in the hall, which contains a bronze sarcophagus with a frieze of angels. More than 340,000 tesserae were used for the building's vaulted mosaic ceiling. The inauguration of the memorial hall took place on July 12, 1935.
