Thiescourt

The Thiescourt Military Cemetery (Oise department) was established in January 1920 by the French military authorities as a German-French war cemetery. 1,095 Germans and 1,739 French soldiers are buried there in two burial fields. The site was chosen after a mass grave containing 50 German and French soldiers—which had been dug by German troops—was discovered there.

The French authorities reinterred additional remains from temporary graves in 16 surrounding municipalities. Few had died during the fighting in mid-September 1914 between Roye and Noyon. Others had perished during the fighting in the spring of 1915 and during the trench warfare from 1915 to early 1918. By far the largest number lost their lives in 1918. The Battle of Noyon in June and the defensive battles along the Matz River in August, in particular, claimed many lives.

Of the 1,095 German soldiers who fell, 707 rest in individual graves—four of them unnamed. Of the 388 buried in the two mass graves, 90 are known by name. For religious reasons, the six graves of Jewish soldiers were marked with a gravestone made of natural stone instead of a cross.

The home garrisons of those who died in 1914–1915 were mostly located in Schleswig-Holstein, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck, as well as in Bavaria, East Prussia, Brandenburg, and Berlin. Those who died in 1918 came from garrisons in Silesia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony, Thuringia, Württemberg, and Bavaria.

The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. undertook the first maintenance work on the cemetery in 1928, based on an agreement with the French military authorities dating from 1926. It planted trees and hedges and landscaped the grave sites. A new entrance with a wrought-iron gate was constructed. The communal grave was given a natural stone border and a memorial stone in the center. However, the problem of permanently marking the graves remained unresolved—first due to a lack of foreign currency, and later because of World War II.

Following the conclusion of the Franco-German War Graves Agreement on July 19, 1966, the Volksbund—with financial support from the federal government—began the final landscaping of the German military cemeteries in France. The grounds were completely landscaped from scratch. Beginning in 1976, the Volksbund replaced the temporary wooden grave markers with natural-stone crosses bearing names and dates. As a symbol of reconciliation, the hedge between the German and French burial grounds was removed.

The cemetery is continuously maintained by the Volksbund’s maintenance service in France.

In September 2016, the Regional Directorate for Cultural Affairs in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie —Office of Cultural Heritage and Architecture, Regional Office for the Protection of Nature and Historic Monuments—added the French necropolis and the German war cemetery in Thiescourt to the list of Historic Monuments.

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.—Thiescourt is one of them.