The Sandweiler war cemetery was the first cemetery to be established abroad by the German War Graves Commission after the Second World War. It was opened to the public on June 5, 1955.
Cemetery description
The municipality of Sandweiler is located eight kilometers east of the capital city of Luxembourg. The war cemetery for those who died in the Second World War was the first to be established by the Volksbund abroad after the Second World War in the 1950s. The cemetery was sponsored by the Schleswig-Holstein regional association. The grass-covered cemetery is divided into 18 blocks. Natural stone crosses mark the graves. They were erected in 1979 and have since replaced the horizontal name stones used in the past. At the end of the cemetery, a five-metre-high stone cross stands on a two-metre-high circular pedestal. The comrades' grave is also located there. Of the 4,829 dead buried there, 4,014 are known by name. Their names are inscribed on bronze plaques on the surrounding walls of the comrades' grave.
Burial
10.913 war dead of the Second World War have found their final resting place in Sandweiler.
History
During the heavy fighting in the winter of 1944 and spring of 1945 in the Luxembourg-Belgium and Luxembourg-German border region, the American burial service recovered its own and German casualties from the combat zone and buried them in two provisional cemeteries in Luxembourg: the Germans in the municipality of Sandweiler, the Americans near Hamm. Both sites are around 1.5 kilometers apart. After completion of the work by the US Army burial service, the German cemetery counted 5,599 graves. At the beginning of the 1950s, there were still German soldiers' graves in 150 places in Luxembourg with 5,286 dead. Most of these were mass graves for which only imperfect records were available. The Volksbund also reburied these dead in Sandweiler. Sufficient land was available there to expand the site and establish a permanent war cemetery. The reburials made it possible to identify the still unknown dead, and the Sandweiler war cemetery was opened to the public on June 5, 1955.
Special feature
The war cemetery agreement concluded in 1952 between the Luxembourg government and the government of the Federal Republic of Germany was the first that Germany had concluded with a neighboring country. The construction of the site was financed by donations from German schoolchildren. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the site, Jean-Claude Juncker, then Prime Minister of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, made the memorable statement during the commemoration ceremony at the war cemetery: "Anyone who doubts Europe, who even despairs of Europe, should visit military cemeteries."
