The Dagneux military cemetery is the resting place for almost 20,000 German soldiers, most of whom died in the south of France during the Second World War.
Cemetery description
The German war cemetery is located in Dagneux, a commune in the Département of Ain, about 16 kilometers east of Lyon. You enter the 4.5-hectare cemetery grounds through a narrow entrance gate. The entrance building houses the visitors' room, where the lists of names of the buried fallen are displayed. 42 blocks of different sizes make up the cemetery. The grave locations are marked by steles. They bear the names, ranks and dates of birth and death of two fallen soldiers on the front and back. Individual groups of crosses interrupt the uniform rows of grave steles and the central path leads diagonally through the cemetery to the memorial, a pentagonal, eight-metre-high, windowless building with an open interior. The large bronze figure of a mourner stands there. An eleven-meter-high cross stands to the side. Below the memorial is the comrades' grave with more than 800 dead, of whom more than 350 are unknown. The names of the known soldiers were carved into nine square limestone slabs, which are embedded in the floor of the memorial.
Burial
The Dagneux military cemetery is home to almost 20,000 German soldiers who died mainly in battles in the south of France and in captivity.
History
After the Allies landed on the French Riviera on 15 August 1944, they captured the cities of Grenoble, Toulon, Marseille and finally Lyon on 3 September within a few weeks. In 1952, French authorities established the military cemetery around two kilometers south of the two small towns of Dagneux and Montluel and initially buried 1,486 German casualties and prisoners of war there. They had originally been buried in civilian cemeteries in the south of France, mainly in Lyon, Aix-les-Bains, Thonon-les-Bains, Bourg-en-Bresse and Bélignieux.
Following the conclusion of the war graves agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and France in 1954, the reburial of the dead also began four years later in the south of France. The French government made the previous provisional site available for expansion into a permanent German military cemetery, taking into account the additional space required. The reburial work was completed in the summer of 1961. The dead were from the following départements: Ain, Allier, Alpes-Maritimes, Ardèche, Ariège, Aude, Aveyron, Basses-Alpes, Bouches-du-Rhône, Cher, Drôme, Gard, Hautes-Alpes, Haute-Garonne, Haute-Loire, Haute-Savoi, Hérault, Isère, Loire, Lozère, Puy-de-Dôme, Pyrénées-Orientales, Rhône, Savoie, Tarn, Var and Vaucluse.
