Sapignies

This war cemetery is home to 1,550 German war dead from the First World War. Département Pas-de-Calais The German military cemetery at Sapignies was established by the German troops in 1916. Until March 1917 - but especially during the summer battle from July to November 1916 - and then again from the end of March 1918 to August 1918, after German troops had retaken the site, fallen soldiers were buried in the cemetery. Two casualties from the battles around Arras at the beginning of October 1914 were moved here from the municipal cemetery. In 1924, the French military authorities transferred more than 400 German casualties from the neighboring municipality of Favreuil to Sapignies. Those buried here belonged to units that had their home garrisons in Pomerania, Poznan, Silesia, Saxony, Thuringia, Hesse, Lower Saxony, Oldenburg, Westphalia, Baden, Bavaria, Württemberg, Lorraine and the three Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck. Repair work between the wars The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge carried out the first work to improve the condition of the cemetery from the winter of 1927/28 on the basis of an agreement with the responsible French military authorities. Trees and shrubs were planted, the graves were landscaped and a new entrance was created with a wrought iron gate between stone pillars and adjoining walls. However, the problem of permanently marking the graves 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. was able to begin the final design of the German military cemeteries in France from the First World War. From 1977, the previous temporary wooden grave markers were replaced by metal crosses with the names and dates of the dead cast in relief. The 1,550 fallen lie in individual graves. For religious reasons, the nine graves of fallen Jews were given a natural stone stele instead of a cross. The Hebrew characters read: 1 (above) "Here rests buried .... ." 2. (below) "May his soul be interwoven into the circle of the living." The German Armed Forces were responsible for transporting the concrete foundations required to erect the metal crosses, most of which were laid by participants in Volksbund youth camps. This was followed by a thorough landscape gardening overhaul, with the greening of the graves, the planting of new trees and bushes and the maintenance of the existing planting. Maintenance: The cemetery is constantly maintained by the Volksbund's maintenance service.