Neuville-St Vaast German war cemetery
The Neuville-St Vaast German War Cemetery (also called Maison Blanche) is a Great War cemetery located near Neuville-Saint.Vaast, a small village, near Arras, Pas-de-Calais, in Northern France. It is the largest German cemetery in France, containing 44,833 burials, of which 8,040 were never identified.
The cemetery was established by the French Government in 1919 as a collective facility for German Empire war dead whose battlefield graves and graveyards lay scattered directly to the north, east and south of the Arras region.[3] It is now administered by the German War Graves Commission - Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (VDK).
Between 1975 and 1983 the VDK completely reorganized the cemetery, replacing deteriorating wooden crosses that previously marked the graves with new ones made of metal with engraved specifics: Name, Rank and Date of Death. Each cross lists four individual names, since it is the location marker for four graves in the plot it stands over.
Within the cemetery there are 129 stone grave markers, of a different design from the uniform metal grey cross, displaying the Star of David for the graves of Jewish-German soldiers who fell in action fighting for Imperial Germany.
A World War I battlefield stone war memorial, fashioned originally by the men of Hanoverian Infantry Regiment Nr.164, was relocated into the cemetery's grounds post-war.
Several small dug-out fortifications still exist within the cemetery's perimeter, relics from the fighting that raged across the area in World War I.
The pictures shown here were taken on 18 July 2024 using a Sony A7R IV camera body and Sony FE16-35mm GM lens.
The music is Selig sind die Toten by Heinrich Schütz recorded by Lumen Valo.
The trench map is courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
#Neuville-StVaast #GreatWar