The El Alamein war cemetery was one of the very first German sites. It is also the resting place of 30 dead soldiers whose origin is unknown.
Cemetery description
The German war cemetery El Alamein is located on the coastal road between Alexandria and Marsa Matruh, about 100 kilometers west of Alexandria. It is laid out in the shape of an octagon and resembles a castle (so-called Totenburg). Each corner is formed into a tower. The outer diameter including the towers is 42 meters, the height of the entire structure is twelve meters. The Volksbund has built similar structures in Tobruk (Libya) and on the Pordoi (Italy).
The interior of the structure forms a courtyard of honor, around which - as in Tobruk - an archway leads. Between the archway and the outer wall, the inwardly projecting masonry of the towers creates eight niches, one of which is designed as an entrance room. Beneath the seven other niches are crypt chambers where the fallen lie. At the top of the niches are memorial stones in the shape of sarcophagi. The names of the fallen buried below are inscribed on bronze plaques on the back walls of the niches. A further 31 dead soldiers, whose nationality is unknown, are buried under the entrance room.
Occupancy
A total of 4,313 dead are buried in El Alamein. These include 4,283 German casualties from the Second World War and 30 from the First World War.
History
Between 1943 and 1947, reburial detachments of the British Army brought together the fallen Commonwealth troops from scattered desert graves in a newly created cemetery. Italian and German dead were also transferred there. The result was a provisional cemetery with 3,000 German and 1,800 Italian dead. It was given the name Tell-el-Eyssa and was taken over by the official Italian burial service in 1947.
At the end of 1953, the Egyptian government allowed a working group of the German War Graves Commission, which had previously been active in Libya, to recover a further 1,200 bodies from neglected cemeteries and field graves on its territory. They were reburied in a temporary mausoleum next to the Tell-el-Eyssa cemetery.
The war cemetery was given its final location three kilometers southeast of the temporary cemetery after the Egyptian government made a suitable site available free of charge. It allowed the entire construction equipment to be moved to Tell-el-Eyssa in Egypt immediately after the completion of the Tobruk war cemetery in Libya in November 1955. In addition, the Volksbund was allowed to have the stone material necessary for the construction of the memorial quarried in a quarry near Marsah Matrut.
The memorial was inaugurated on October 28, 1959 and was one of the first German memorials to be opened to the public after the Second World War.
Special feature
Every three years, an international memorial service is held to commemorate the end of the Battle of El Alamein. The event takes place alternately at the German, Italian and British military cemeteries.
The Egyptian government is currently building a new city (New Elamein) around the war site, where around one million people are to find a new home.
