Seclin

Département Nord 1187 German war dead 4 Russian war dead First World War The German military cemetery at Seclin was established by the German troops in January 1915. Those buried here until it was cleared in October 1918 were almost exclusively soldiers who succumbed to their wounds in military hospitals or who were on stage duty. Around 20 percent of those buried here died in 1915 as a result of the extremely costly battles between Neuve-Chapelle and La Bassée. A further 60 percent suffered fatal injuries in the spring of 1918 at the start of the major German attack towards Amiens and on the Kemmelberg near Ypres and the Allied counter-attack in August 1918. The soldiers resting here belonged to units whose home garrisons were in West Prussia, Brunswick, Saxony, Thuringia, Westphalia, Württemberg, Bavaria and the Rhineland. Repair work between the wars The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. (German War Graves Commission) carried out the first work to improve the condition of the cemetery after 1930 on the basis of an agreement reached with the responsible French military authorities in 1926. The memorial was created during the war by sculptors serving in the troops. 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. - financially supported by the German government - was able to undertake the final design of the German military cemeteries of the First World War in France. In addition to a fundamental landscape gardening overhaul, the previous temporary wooden grave markers were replaced in 1979 with metal crosses bearing the names and dates of those buried here. The German Armed Forces supported the Volksbund by, among other things, transporting the 35 kilogram concrete foundations required to erect the metal crosses, which were then placed at the graves by participants from the Volksbund's youth camps. All 1,187 fallen soldiers rest in individual graves. 29 of them remain unnamed. For religious reasons, the two graves of the fallen of Jewish faith were given a gravestone made of natural stone 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." Maintenance: The cemetery is constantly maintained by the Volksbund's maintenance service.