Qualla: Lommel German war cemetery

Lommel German war cemetery: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kernec at German Wikipedia (Original text: Kernec), CC BY-SA 3.0. Sixteen hectares. Thirty-nine thousand, one hundred and eight names - though only about thirty-three thousand of those names are actually known. The rest are box numbers and dates. The Lommel German war cemetery, on the northern edge of Belgian Limburg near the Dutch border, holds more German soldiers than any other military cemetery in Western Europe outside Germany itself. They came here because the soil at the place where they fell, or where the Americans first buried them, was Belgian, and Belgium - twice invaded by German armies within a generation - had to decide what to do with the bodies. In 1946, the Belgian government decided to gather them all in one place, in the pines of Lommel, and let the German War Graves Commission tend the rows in perpetuity.

Image: Kernec at German Wikipedia (Original text: Kernec) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lommel German war cemetery: Who Is Buried Here

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Twan van Gastel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most of the dead at Lommel were Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS soldiers killed during the campaigns that ran through Belgium and along its borders during the Second World War. The Eighteen Day Campaign in May 1940, when German forces overran the Low Countries. The three battles of Aache...

Image: Twan van Gastel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lommel German war cemetery: The Year the Sand Blew

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Imagerypoet, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the burials were finished in the late 1940s, the cemetery was raw earth - so churned that the topsoil had been destroyed and in windy weather the sand would lift in clouds and drift across the graves. In 1953, the German War Graves Commission began restoring the soil with pe...

Image: Imagerypoet | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lommel German war cemetery: The Crypt and the Gingko

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Twan van Gastel, CC BY-SA 3.0. The visitor enters the cemetery through a low crypt designed by the architect Robert Tischler. Above it stands a crucifixion group six meters high, cut from basalt quarried in the Eifel mountains across the German border - John and Mary flanking the cross, the whole sculpture wei...

Image: Twan van Gastel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lommel German war cemetery: The People Beyond the Borders

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kernec at German Wikipedia (Original text: Kernec), CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1993 a building called Huis Over Grenzen opened next to the cemetery. Its name means House Across Borders. It is a youth-meeting house and education center, and what it does there is the harder, longer work that the rows of crosses can only suggest. Young people from across Eu...

Image: Kernec at German Wikipedia (Original text: Kernec) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lommel German war cemetery: What the Cemetery Refuses to Be

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wasily, CC0. Not everyone has been content to let Lommel be a place of reconciliation. Over the decades the cemetery has occasionally been used as a backdrop for neo-Nazi rallies - members of the Blood and Honour movement, mostly, treating the dead as symbols for an ideology those dead themse...

Image: Wasily | CC0