by Richard Moody
Memorial Day Commemoration in the Netherlands
In the small town of Margraten in the Netherlands lies an American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) cemetery, the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial. It is the only U.S. military cemetery in the Netherlands, but that is not what makes it unique.
Located just east of Maastricht, near the Dutch-German border, the sixty-five-acre cemetery holds the remains of 8,301 American service men and women. Since the first American soldier was laid to rest there on 10 November 1944, the local Dutch citizens have taken special care of the graves, and have taken a special interest in the soldiers and airmen buried there.
After five long years of Nazi occupation during WWII, the Dutch welcomed Allied liberators with open arms. The last few months of the war were especially brutal in terms of casualties, as Germany tried desperately to stave off defeat. Between late 1944 and the end of the war, up to 500 bodies a day arrived in Margraten for burial. The town’s mayor went door to door asking for Dutch volunteers to help the U.S. Army’s 611th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company dig graves for the fallen Americans.
Shortly after the war’s end, the Margraten town clerk and a local pastor came up with the idea of an adoption program: local Dutch individuals and families could volunteer to help care for the graves. The ABMC oversees and maintains the graves and the cemetery, cutting the grass, weeding, and cleaning the white marble crosses and Stars of David. The Dutch ‘adopters’ stop by several times a year and place flowers on a particular serviceman’s graves – usually on the soldier or airman’s birthday, on the date they died, at Christmas, and on Memorial Day.
There are two ABMC cemeteries in Belgium that have a similar adoption program, but Margraten’s is different: there is the only one where every grave has a volunteer caretaker, and there is a waiting list of more than one hundred people who wish to be caretakers. Over the years, Belgian and German volunteers have joined the Dutch caretakers at Margraten.
A large number of the Dutch caretakers pass on what they consider to be an honor and a sacred duty to their children, and to their children’s children. Some of the Dutch families are on their fourth generation of caretakers, each generation instilling the tradition in the one that follows.
In 1998, my wife, Claudia Risner, and I were working at the American Embassy in The Hague. We had the honor of accompanying the U.S. Ambassador to the cemetery in Margraten for Memorial Day. As we stood with the other U.S. military and family members, I was struck by the solemness of the occasion and the reverence shown by the Dutch participants.
Talking with several of the Dutch after the official ceremony, I met two who were caretakers, third-generation caretakers. They told Claudia and me of their families’ tradition of caring for graves of American servicemen of the Greatest Generation, who gave their lives on foreign soil to secure the freedom of people they never met and never knew.
As I have every Memorial Day since 1998, I reflect back on the day Claudia and I spent in the company of Dutch men and women who honor Americans that, in the immortal words of President Abraham Lincoln, gave “the last full measure of devotion” to the country they served and loved. God bless them and their families, and God bless America – the Land of the Free because of the Brave.
* From the NM Veterans Caucus newsletter-used with permission
From the Frontlines to the Homefront 