Spiel

If you want to know the difference between winning and losing a war, then look around. This is Langemark German cemetery and it is one of the most affecting places in Flanders. It is sombre, brooding, dark; it feels a degree or two colder in here.

Remember back to the vast expanse of land that was Lijssenthoek [if you have been] – the beautifully kept, light and welcoming Commonwealth cemetery. There were 10,000 burials there. In that small rectangular space near the entrance to this cemetery is a burial pit. It is known as the Kameraden Grab (Comrades Grave). It contains the remains of 24,917 German soldiers.²⁰ The total number of burials here is 44,292. If grief describes anything then it describes the feeling of this place.

The burial of the German dead was, not surprisingly, a much more contentious issue than those of the victorious nations. In the immediate years after the war it was the British who handled this work before the Belgians took over. In 1925, during Germany’s renaissance and acceptance back into the international community (the ‘Golden Years’), a treaty was signed between Belgium and Germany which meant that in 1929 the Germans took over the care of the cemeteries. There were, initially, hundreds of cemeteries, but nearly all of them were eventually concentrated into four cemeteries in Belgium. When the Second World War broke out, work on these sites was, understandably, halted. Work was not actually finished here until the 1980s.

About 3,000 of the burials here are of the Student Volunteers who died in the battle of Langemark in October and November 1914 – a vitally important national story, especially important as a propaganda tool to Hitler and the Nazis; here were half-trained young patriots who died heading courageously into battle, to be slaughtered by machine gun fire, whilst singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles’, or so the myth goes. In 1940, Hitler visited here. He stood by the pillboxes with hundreds of other Nazis, viewing this place and believing that he had overturned the legacy of that war and delivered a German Reich that would last a thousand years. There is a photograph of him leaving here, out of the main entrance, under a corridor of Nazi salutes. This pageantry, fascism and national rebirth would be short lived but, for Hitler, Langemark was a reason for the Second World War; it linked the two in his mind and its importance cannot be underplayed. Under Hitler’s reign as Führer, 11 November in Germany became ‘Langemarck Day’as a counter toArmistice Day. However skewed, or factually incorrect, the “slaughter of the innocents” at Langemark left an imprint on Hitler’s soul.