Below you will find the database of all war dead who found their final resting place at the German Military Cemetery in Ysselsteyn. You can easily search by name, dates or the location of the 1st (field) grave*, for example. If you prefer an extended search, all fields can also be combined, optionally with part of a name or a specific date. By clicking the info button you will be automatically redirected to the relevant “Find a Grave” memorial page for this war casualty, where in many cases more information can be found. If you need additional information about a war casualty, please contact us.
*The location of the 1st (field) grave does not necessarily correspond to the place of death.
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History of the Cemetery
The collective cemetery for German war dead was initially made available free of charge at the end of 1946 for a maximum of 3 years, with the intention of transferring the graves to Germany at a later stage under a Peace Treaty to be concluded with Germany. However, such a peace treaty between the Netherlands and Germany was never signed; the state of war was not ended until 26 July 1951.
Although there are various cemeteries in the Netherlands where German war victims found their final resting place, most of them, scattered after the war across cemeteries and field graves throughout the Netherlands, were reinterred at the German military cemetery in Ysselsteyn. As approximately 2,500 missing German soldiers still rest in anonymous graves in the Netherlands and one is occasionally recovered from obscurity, the number of war dead at the cemetery continues to grow.
The German military cemetery in Ysselsteyn, with an area of approximately 28 ha, or 56 football pitches, is the largest German military cemetery in the world; this does not however mean that the most war dead are buried at this cemetery. Exact figures are unfortunately not known, partly due to the sometimes careless administration, the approximately 237 war dead who were reinterred elsewhere in Europe, the 18 empty In Memoriam graves and the prominent collaborators who were possibly buried anonymously.
Ysselsteyn is the resting place primarily of German soldiers, people in German military or administrative service and a small number of civilian victims of various nationalities, including women and children such as evacuees from the internment camp at Vught. Although most graves all take the form of a Latin cross, at Ysselsteyn there are also approximately 73 collective graves for two or more war dead, which were mostly provided with an upright or recumbent gravestone.
Of the approximately 31,714 war dead (as of August 2018) resting at Ysselsteyn, 87 (of whom 8 are unknown) are from the First World War and 31,627 (of whom 4,861 are unknown) are from the Second World War or its consequences. Confusion may arise in our database regarding the above number of unknowns because we have also included in our database the names of the 2,669 war dead who could not be identified beyond doubt and who were buried at the time as unknown soldiers; this database was also compiled in cooperation with Fred van den Munckhof, volunteer at Find A Grave.
Although the majority of the war dead fell or died during the Second World War in the Netherlands, approximately 3,075 German soldiers are also buried at Ysselsteyn who fell during the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest and the Ardennes Offensive and were buried by the American Graves Service at Margraten. At the end of 1946 these Germans were also transferred to Ysselsteyn.
On Friday 27 June 1952 the completed cemetery was officially opened by means of a wreath-laying ceremony by the German consul in the Netherlands and, after years of preparation, finally opened to the public.
Although we have an extensive archive of original documents, we felt it was a better idea to leave it at this brief summary, as the book “Duits beheer over Nederlands erfgoed” is now available, containing the painful history of this largest military cemetery in the Netherlands.