Bouligny

This war cemetery is home to 1,439 German war dead from the First World War. Département Meuse The German military cemetery in Bouligny was established by their own troops at the beginning of the German offensive against Verdun at the end of February 1916, when numerous seriously wounded soldiers were admitted to the military hospitals and some of them succumbed to their injuries here. This was later followed by victims of the war of position, the French offensive in August 1917 and the major Franco-American attack in September/October 1918. The last burials by German troops took place in October 1918. Prior to this, sculptors serving in the troops had erected a memorial flanked by two communal graves. Memorial plaques indicate that the dead who once belonged to the 24th Inf. Div. and the Res. Inf. Div. rest here. After the end of the war, the French military authorities reburied bodies from Longuy and Haucourt. After the Second World War, a prisoner of war cemetery from the 1914-18 war in Tours on the Loire was closed and the dead were reburied here. Those buried in the cemetery belonged to units whose home garrisons were in East and West Prussia, Poznan, Silesia, Brandenburg, Westphalia, Saxony, Bavaria, Württemberg, Alsace and the Rhineland. Repair work between the wars The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge carried out the first work to improve the condition of the cemetery on the basis of an agreement reached with the French military authorities in 1926. This was initially limited to adding trees and other planting work. The problem of permanently marking the graves also remained unresolved due to a lack of foreign currency and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Final design Following the conclusion of the Franco-German War Graves Agreement of July 19, 1966, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. - financially supported by the Federal Government - was able to undertake the final design of the German military cemeteries of the First World War in France. In the years 1964-1966, young volunteers from the Volksbund had carried out extensive clearing work, planted the graves and renewed the fencing. in 1970, the previous temporary wooden grave markers were replaced with natural stone crosses engraved with the names and dates of those buried here. Of the 1,439 fallen, 1,244 rest in individual graves. Of these, 2 remain unknown. Of the 195 dead in two common graves, only 18 are known by name. For religious reasons, the grave of a fallen of the Jewish faith was marked with a natural stone grave stele instead of a cross, the Hebrew characters of which read: 1. (above): "Here rests buried ... ." 2. (below): " May his soul be bound into the circle of the living." Finally, the entrance was redesigned and the memorial restored. A hedge now surrounds the entire area.