Cemeteries and memorials to visit Luxembourg

On January 13, 1945, ten people who had taken refuge in a cellar in Wiltz in the midst of the atrocities of war made a promise to build a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima. The monument was inaugurated on 13 July 1952. The first official pilgrimage of Portuguese families to the monument took place in 1968. Since then, every year, thousands of fellow Portuguese citizens make their way on Ascension Day from the Church of Saints Peter and Paul (or Church of Niederwiltz) to the shrine.

This cemetery contains 5,076 graves of American soldiers who fell during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-1945. General George S. Patton (1885-1945), who died after the war in a car accident, also lies here. The commander of the ^3rd US Division had expressly expressed the wish to be buried next to his men. Next to the chapel, the names, ranks and units of 371 missing American soldiers are inscribed on two rectangular pylons.

On August 31, 1942, in response to the military obligation decreed by the German occupier, the inhabitants of Wiltz decided to start a general strike. 21 patriots (20 Luxembourgers and 1 German) who refused to submit were then shot in Hinzert. To pay tribute to the heroism of the population and its resistance, this monument was erected in 1956 by the Luxembourg architect Roger Wercollier and his brother, the famous sculptor Lucien Wercollier.

On 14 June 1985, the signing of the Schengen Agreement, abolishing border controls on people and goods, took place in the charming village of Schengen. The town commemorates this event with its monument located on the Esplanade de la Moselle and consisting of three steel stelae, each bearing a brass star. They represent the signatories of the 1985 agreement: the Benelux states (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), France and Germany.

In the past, a Roman bridge connected Stadtbredimus to Palzem, the German village on the other side of the Moselle. It no longer exists and some of the columns found in 1962 are in the Landesmuseum in Trier (Germany). It is thought that the Romans took advantage of the remains of a Celtic footbridge to build this bridge of at least 5 columns around 56 AD. The upper wooden construction could have carried a 6 to 6.50 m wide roadway.

The Hochfels rock is outside the village of Boulaide, in the direction of Bigonville. On this rocky promontory, in the middle of the vegetation, you will discover an anti-tank gun and a field howitzer dating from the Second World War. The two guns, one American and one German, had been abandoned near the crossroads of the Poteau de Doncols. The site was laid out in 1970 with wooden panels providing notes explaining their origin. The view on the lake of the Haute-Sûre is quite nice.

The bomb that makes up this very discreet memorial located on the outskirts of the village was found intact in a wood near the commune, after being dropped by an American plane on Christmas Day 1944. It was installed there in September 1980, in memory of the victims of the Battle of the Bulge which took place during the winter of 1944-1945. This bloody episode of the Second World War caused more than 200,000 dead, wounded and missing.

263 bodies lie in this burial place (Deutscher Soldatenfriendhof). From 1815 to 1866, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was part of the Prussian Union and the nearby fortress (today's Dräi Eechelen or Three Acorns Museum) was occupied by a Prussian garrison. The dead of this garrison were buried in this cemetery. French and German soldiers were buried here during the First World War and German soldiers during the Second World War.

In this cemetery (Deutscher Soldatenfriendhof) lie 10,914 German soldiers, 4,829 of whom are buried in a mass grave (Kameradengrab). 810 could not be identified. Most of them died during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-1945. The first German cemetery outside of Germany, this place was set up by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge). A second German cemetery (262 bodies) is located in the district of Clausen.

This memorial was erected on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Luxembourg by the Allied armies. It contains the plaques of the American units that took part in the battle. Nearby, a 3 km-long memorial trail leads through the woods that were the object of intense fighting. The holes of the riflemen correspond to the locations of the bodies of the 160 German and American soldiers who were discovered there after the fighting that followed on December 30, 1944.