Around 2,000 victims of the First World War are buried at this German war cemetery in the Département Oise. More than half of them died in 1918.
Burial
The Moulin-sous-Touvent cemetery was established in July 1920 by the French military authorities as a collective cemetery for German war dead. Until 1927, they were reburied from scattered field graves and temporary burial sites in 34 communal areas within a radius of around 25 kilometers.
Moulin and the surrounding villages were among the areas that were particularly hard-fought in the first and last years of the war. The infantry regiment "Bremen" (1st Hanseatic Regiment) No. 75 suffered many casualties. They died in the fighting on September 20/21, 1914, when they fought off an initial French attempt to surround them after the Battle of the Marne and the retreat to the Oise and Aisne.
Apart from battles in June 1915, this section of the front remained relatively quiet until March 1917. In mid-March, the German troops withdrew to the "Siegfried position" - Moulin and the surrounding area became a French staging post.
However, the majority of those buried here died during the major battles and numerous engagements from spring to fall 1918 - above all during the major German attack on March 21 towards Amiens, the German attack between Reims and Soissons at the end of May and the attack between Noyon and Soissons on May 30, 1918. The Allied counterattack - for the first time with strong American support - which began on July 18 and ended in this area with a costly retreat of the German troops at the end of September 1918, also claimed many victims.
The troops resting in Moulin belonged to units whose home garrisons were in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Brandenburg, Saxony, Thuringia, Hesse, Westphalia, Württemberg, Bavaria, Alsace-Lorraine, the Rhineland and the other Hanseatic cities.
The forest of Compiègne, where the armistice agreement was signed in a wagon on November 11, 1918, is only around 20 kilometers away.
History
Following an agreement with the French military authorities in 1926, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. (German War Graves Commission) began initial restoration work in 1929. The area was planted with bushes and trees, the paths were landscaped and the cemetery was enclosed by a fence with a hedge. The entrance building was built and two high crosses were erected. The problem of permanently marking the graves remained unresolved due to a lack of foreign currency and the Second World War from 1939 onwards.
After the conclusion of the Franco-German War Graves Agreement of July 19, 1966, the Volksbund - financially supported by the German government - began the final design of the German military cemeteries in France.
The cemetery was thoroughly renovated, in which young people from Bremen played a major role as volunteers. in 1971, the wooden grave markers were replaced with metal crosses bearing the names and dates of those buried here. The 35-kilogram foundations, which had been supplied by the Bundeswehr, were also laid by young helpers. All the fallen rest in individual graves. Six of them remain unnamed.
The cemetery is constantly looked after by the maintenance service of the Volksbund in France.
Special feature:
The graves of ten fallen of the Jewish faith were given natural stone steles instead of crosses for religious reasons. The Hebrew characters read: "Here rests buried ... ." and "May his soul be interwoven into the circle of the living."
The steles were destroyed by vandalism in 2023. The German War Graves Commission replaced or restored them - with financial support from the municipality of Moulin-sous-Touvent, the French partner organization "Souvenir Français" and the German Embassy in Paris. Five nations were represented at a commemorative event to mark the completion of the restoration on October 10, 2024.
