Who Lies Here? A Quiet German Cemetery Near Verdun

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00][music] [singing] [music] [singing] [music] [singing] [music] >> I'm at Liny-devant-Dun German war cemetery where 449 soldiers from the First World War lie at rest. And among those are seven soldiers who are unidentified.

[00:00:34]Let's take a quick look at this cemetery and see what we can learn from it. When you walk into a cemetery like this, it's easy to only see the crosses, but every one of these names was a person, someone who had a home, someone who had a family, someone who may have been carried here wounded thinking that the worst of the battle was already behind him.

[00:00:55]For many of the men buried here, Verdun did not end in the trenches.

[00:01:00]>> [music] >> It ended in a hospital bed behind the front.

[00:01:04]This is the German military cemetery of Liny-devant-Dun in the Meuse area, not far from Verdun.

[00:01:12]According to the Volksbund, the cemetery was established at the end of February 1916, shortly after the Battle of Verdun began.

[00:01:20]German military hospitals had been set up here, and the first soldiers buried in this ground were seriously wounded men who died from their injuries.

[00:01:29]Today, 449 German soldiers from the First World War rest here.

[00:01:35]Most of them belonged to the 16th Rhenish Army Corps, >> [music] >> a German Army Corps connected to the Rhineland.

[00:01:42]Others came from across the former German Empire, from Prussia and Silesia to Westphalia, Hesse, Baden, Alsace, and the Rhineland.

[00:01:52]And we even have a human voice connected to this area.

[00:01:56]>> [music] >> The website Verdun 1914-1918 in the article "Ich liege hier in Rabenwald" publishes letters from the German soldier Hans Sixtus to his wife Margarete. In May 1916, he mentioned Liny as a rest quarter behind the Verdun front.

[00:02:15]In the same letter, after describing mud, shellfire, lice, exhaustion, and fear, he wrote that people at home could not truly imagine the men at the front were going through.

[00:02:27]>> [music] >> That is why small cemeteries like this matter because behind every cross here was not just a soldier.

[00:02:35]It was a human life caught within one of the most brutal wars humankind had ever seen.

[00:02:54]>> [music] >> So, over the past few days, I've been driving through the French [music] countryside where the Battle of Verdun took place or the vicinity of it. And one thing that you'll notice is that there's several different war cemeteries from all the nations involved that did fighting in this area scattered throughout the countryside.

[00:03:14]Um and as you drive along the road, it's you'll just stumble upon these. And I think it's interesting cuz this one has 495 individual lives that were affected by the war who never made it home.

[00:03:30]That's 495 personal human stories. That's one thing that is really important uh when you come to places like this, to war cemeteries, you get to learn a little bit to expand the historical understanding of what happened. It's so easy to get lost in the numbers when you're looking or reading about the battles, but when you come to a place like this, you see the individual human impact that these battles had and the enormous loss of life can be felt by looking on this hill and seeing the crosses with the different names on them.

[00:04:11]So, I'm currently in front of the grave of Oscar Neufeld. He was a reservist and he died on the 2nd of March, 1916.

[00:04:19]He's one of the 100,000 German Jews who fought for Imperial Germany and he lies here at rest at this cemetery with the proper religious indicator of his religion.

[00:04:33]Um we've been looking at several different First World War German cemeteries and we've been seeing several of these kind of um Jewish headstones and I just think that's a very, you know, important aspect [music] that, you know, the religious beliefs are respected and they're buried under the proper religious markers.

[00:04:54]Uh similar to how you have it at French cemeteries, British cemeteries or as well as American cemeteries.

[00:05:00]A quick definition about some of the symbolism in this in particular cemetery and how German war graves were designed in the interwar period. So, there are a lot of details in this building um and the symbols that you can find. And this goes back to um Robert Tischler, who was the head architect of the Volksbund um since 1919 uh until his death in 1957.

[00:05:24]And in the interwar period, um >> [music] >> he did a lot of work to plan German World War I cemeteries. Um there was a lot of emphasis in this planning. Robert Tischler was was an artist nationalist and um >> [snorts] >> he was inspired by nationalist ideologies and you can find many small details in his architecture, in his planning work um that goes back to his way of thinking and, uh, the intention in the interwar period, of the German cemeteries was not so much, um, a reflective way of commemoration and remembrance, but more intended to glorify, um, the achievements of German soldiers during the First World War. Um, and as we can see the backdrop here, as you enter this red building, it [music] does give you that kind of a glorified feeling almost, as Danny mentioned earlier. And then you come into the backdrop of all the crosses looking at you, and you can see the, uh, tragic loss of life which this war caused. But it is important to come to a place like this to remember the individual human tragedies because there is over 400 people buried here. I think it's 495 if I'm not mistaken.

[00:06:37]That's 495 lives that ended abruptly.

[00:06:41]So, I've mentioned in some of my other German war cemetery videos how no German war cemetery is like the other and they're all a little bit different. And this one's kind of unique because normally when you're at a German war cemetery, there aren't single graves.

[00:06:55]It's normally one cross for multiple individuals. And here we have examples of single graves. Um, so one cross per person, but not all of them. For example, here we have Stefan, who was a musketeer. We have Rudolph, who was a artillery cannoneer.

[00:07:13]Um, [snorts] same here with Gustav.

[00:07:16]And then here we have a shared grave.

[00:07:18]So, I was told the top name of these graves normally is laying here on the left, and then the bottom one on the right, and they're identified. So, you can tell, um, what part of the grave that person is laying at.

[00:07:34]And sometimes in German war cemeteries, you'll have the back grave as well. So, we don't here we don't have any buried in the back except for this cross, which we [music] do.

[00:07:46]Which we have a Anton who was an Obergefreiter who died on the 22nd of April 1916. So, as you're walking through the cemetery and looking at the different headstones and reading the names, you know, you can try to imagine what happened to them. Um and even though you don't have any sources, sometimes you can put a picture together.

[00:08:06]For example, you have these four individuals right here who all died on the 7th of August 1916.

[00:08:14]>> [snorts] >> And you can't help but wonder, did they die together? Or was it individual engagements on that day?

[00:08:22]But I would guess that, you know, maybe an artillery shell or something took them out together and that's why they're buried here in a communal grave. Uh what's interesting about these four individuals is they [snorts] have a, you know, plaque on the ground as opposed to a cross.

[00:08:41]Um and maybe that's because they couldn't identify the individuals um to give them their own cross, so they put them all together. And that's part of the experience of coming to a place like this. Sometimes you can't put factual information to the stories to 100% confirm them, [music] but you can, you know, use your imagination a little bit and maybe piece together what could have happened to these people.

[00:09:06]So, walking into the red brick building, there is a small chapel here with a memorial with a eagle in the middle. And on the left, 1914 to 1918 with several different names engraved from left to right.

[00:09:25]I have no idea who these names are. I would assume maybe they're the people buried in the cemetery.

[00:09:32]Um but yeah, this is a very interesting aspect of this particular cemetery here.

[00:09:42]So, that brings us to an end of today's video on this German war cemetery. And although it was a short video, I hope you were able to learn something from this place and that this video adds some educational value.

[00:09:57]If you thought it was interesting, please leave a like and subscribe to the channel so we can continue learning together.

[00:10:04]And I'll see you guys in the next one.