In the summer of 1956, young people from six nations took part in the design of the German military cemetery Recogne-Bastogne. The site is located in the Ardennes.
Cemetery description
The town of Bastogne is located in the Ardennes on the border with Luxembourg. The German military cemetery is located in the Recogne district, six kilometers north of the town. The site is surrounded by fields and meadows and borders the village cemetery on the east side. A low enclosure wall made of red Eifel sandstone runs along the road that leads into the village on the north side. It ends in a staircase and protrudes like a bastion. A small chapel rises from the masonry of this bastion. The interior of the chapel forms a vaulted sanctuary, the walls of which are decorated with two reliefs: St. Michael with the scales and the archangel Gabriel with the light. In a small side niche are the registers of the dead with details of the grave locations.
Burial
The German military cemetery Recogne-Bastogne contains 6,807 German war dead from the Second World War who died in the battles around Bastogne, in the Belgian province of Luxembourg, the southern part of the province of Liège and the areas around Eupen-Maldemy and St. Vith as well as in the German border region. These are not only those who died in 1944, but also those who died in 1940 or during the occupation.
History
On February 4, 1945, during the fighting near Bastogne, the US Army began to create a large collective cemetery. American and German casualties were buried in two separate cemeteries west of the road between Bastogne and Noville. Together, the US Army buried 2,700 US soldiers and more than 3,000 members of the Wehrmacht there. In the summer of 1948, the American dead were disinterred and transferred to Henri-Chapelle. The official Belgian burial service began to dismantle German field graves, individual graves in municipal cemeteries and smaller burial grounds and transferred the dead to two collective cemeteries, which were designated as the final German military cemeteries of the Second World War on Belgian soil: the German cemetery near Bastogne and another in Lommel. In the course of these reburials, 3,300 dead were laid to rest in Recogne-Bastogne. in 1954, the government of the Kingdom of Belgium and the Federal Republic of Germany concluded a war graves agreement, which placed the future care of the graves on Belgian soil in German hands. After redesigning the cemetery area, the war cemetery was ceremoniously opened to the public on September 25, 1960.
Special feature
In the summer of 1956, young people from six nations took part in an international youth camp organized by the Volksbund. The Kolping Society and the YMCA were in charge. Not only the German government and the Volksbund contributed to the costs of the decoration, but also the employees of the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, who donated annually to the Volksbund for the Recogne-Bastogne military cemetery.
