Neuville-St.-Vaast

Neuville-St.-Vaast is a municipality in the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France. The military cemetery is located one and a half kilometers south of the town center. The entrance area features a hall that opens onto the cemetery. A relief carved into a stone block depicts the course of the front lines from 1914 to 1918. The relief also lists 17 cemeteries of other nations in the immediate vicinity, where more than 200,000 soldiers are buried, including British, French, Canadian, Czech, and Polish soldiers.

A wooden cross donated by the municipality bears the inscription “Paix aux Hommes de Bonne Volonté” (Peace to Men of Good Will). Metal crosses at the graves bear the names and dates of those laid to rest here. Of the 36,848 fallen soldiers in individual graves, 588 are unknown. 8,040 fallen soldiers rest in the mass grave. Thirty-two slate crosses mark this 140-meter-long burial mound. The 842 names of the identified fallen soldiers buried here are inscribed on metal plaques. The 131 graves of Jewish soldiers feature a gravestone made of natural stone instead of a cross.

44,888 German war dead from World War I are buried in Neuville-St.-Vaast. The cemetery is the largest German military cemetery from World War I in France. The remains of German soldiers, who had previously been provisionally interred in field graves or small war cemeteries, were reinterred here from more than 110 municipalities in the Pas-de-Calais department. They died during the fierce battles for Artois and Loretto Hill from August 1914 to the end of 1915, for Vimy Ridge at Easter 1917 and in the fall of 1918, as well as during the trench warfare that persisted between major offensives.

The French military authorities established the cemetery between 1919 and 1923 as a collective burial ground for German war dead from the area north and east of the city of Arras. In 1928, the Volksbund began work to improve the condition of the cemetery. In 1935, the Wehrmacht assumed sponsorship of the cemetery; soldiers donated several million Reichsmarks at that time. Following the conclusion of the Franco-German War Graves Agreement on July 19, 1966, the Volksbund was able to complete the final landscaping of the German military cemeteries from World War I in France. On November 13, 1983, the Neuville-St.-Vaast Cemetery was dedicated.

Even today, remains are still being recovered in this region, for example during construction work. In September 2023, UNESCO designated 139 World War I cemeteries as World Heritage Sites. Twenty-three German cemeteries are under the care of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V.—Neuville-St.-Vaast is one of them.