German Military Cemetery

 

After leaving Essex Farm, the next stop on the Flanders Fields' tour was the German cemetery outside the village of Langemark (originally spelled Langemarck). Very gloomy compared to the others we were to visit this day, we entered through a black structure the size and look of a car wash. Inside, monitors displayed scenes of WWI and German gas attacks, all while playing solemn sounds. 



The stones--lying flat on the ground--were gray and gloomy because the Treaty of Versailles (which ended WWI) forbade the Germans from using white stones. Instead, they are made of basalt and even oak.



A relatively rare site dedicated to the invaders of this region, this is one of only four WWI German cemeteries in the Flanders region. As we learned from Filip, it is expensive to maintain so many Flanders Field cemeteries; and it was the same for the Germans. The origins of this one began with a small group of German graves in 1915. But between 1916 and 1918, the burials at Langemark were increased by order of the German military directorate in Ghent.



In the 1950s, over 9,000 soldiers' remains exhumed from 18 German burial sites around the area were brought here. Eight soldiers, identified and unidentified, were generally buried in each grave plot and their identities marked with a grave number. In 1971 all grave markers which had previously displayed only the number were changed to include personal details for each soldier where possible: a forename, family name, rank, and the date of death.
 

This now is the final resting place of 44,324 (total) Central Power soldiers (along with two Brits who were originally misidentified). In the center is a mass grave--called the Comrades Grave (Kameraden Grabe)--holding the remains of 25,000 soldiers who are unidentified. The names of hundreds of those known to be buried in the mass grave were at that time carved on oak panels in a room on one side of the entrance building. In recent years, research has identified 16,940 of the 25,000 previously "unknown" soldiers. And since 1984, their names have been inscribed on bronze tablets surrounding the common grave.



Filip showed us a photo of Adolf Hitler standing on one of the old bunkers in this cemetery at the beginning of WWII. In the first World War, Hitler had served with the Bavarian Reserve-Infantry and had seen action south of Ypres. He spent two days in 1940 visiting the Ypres Salient battlefields, the town of Ypres, and this cemetery.

This bronze statue of four figures, a particular feature of this cemetery, was created by the Munich sculptor Professor Emil Krieger. Slightly larger than life, they immediately capture the eye, standing solemnly watching over so many thousands of German casualties of war. Krieger's inspiration was a 1918 photograph of soldiers from the Reserve-Infantry-Regiment 238 as they mourned at the grave of a comrade. It became a well-known photograph in the German press that year, made more solemn because one of the soldiers in the photo was killed two days after it was taken.
 
During renovation in the late 1950s, several groups of three basalt-lava crosses were placed in the grounds as an architectural feature only. One was also erected on one of the three original battlefield bunkers left on the site.

Oak trees, the national tree of Germany, were planted during renovation in the mid-1920s and have grown very tall over the past 90+ years. The ground, in fact, was covered in acorns this day. Although this cemetery is the same land size as Essex Farm, there are so many more buried here (44,000) compared to those at Essex (1,200). Officially inaugurated on July 10, 1932, the German War Commission maintains the cemetery by hiring local gardeners. Filip shared, when asked, that he gets very few German citizens on his tours of Flanders Fields.