Dutch honor American war dead by ‘adopting’ their graves

In the fall of 1945, a Dutch teenager named Frieda van Schaik wrote a letter to the US military seeking the address of the mother of an Army officer and Harvard-trained architect who was killed about a month before the German surrender.

“He is buried at the large US military cemetery in Margraten, Holland, a place of six miles from where I live,” she wrote. “I am taking care of his grave.” 

Van Schaik’s letter inquiring about Army Capt. Walter “Hutch” Huchthausen sent US businessman and author Robert Edsel on an eight year odyssey to document the history of the little known Netherlands American Cemetery in the village of Margraten near the city of Maastricht. At the end of the Second World War, the cemetery contained the remains of more than 20,000 war dead, most of them Americans and all of them “adopted” by locals in gratitude for their sacrifice in helping to liberate their country from Nazi tyranny. The Netherlands had been under Nazi occupation since May 10, 1940. It was liberated on May 5, 1945.

Edsel, 68, became obsessed with the adoption program and the story of the soldiers buried over the 65-acre burial ground after meeting van Schaik on Memorial Day in 2016, he said.

The book is a testament to the people of the South Limburg region of the Netherlands who helped set up the cemetery and volunteered to honor the dead for the last 80 years. Each “adopted” soldier’s grave has been cared for by multiple generations of the same Dutch family.

“Families are now in their third generation, or fourth,” writes Edsel. “Eighty years later, they write to the children, grandchildren, and extended family members of the fallen.”

“Since spring 1946, when a committee of caring citizens in the small town of Margraten completed its work matching a local ‘adopter’ with every grave in the cemetery, no fallen American has been left without a mourner,” writes Edsel. “This work is not a duty to these thousands of adopters; it is an honor.”

Texas-based Edsel, a former pro tennis player who began his career in the oil and gas sector, is the author of the “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History,” which chronicles the work of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives  division of the US Army, tasked with recovering cultural treasures stolen by the Nazis during the war. The book became a 2014 film directed by and starring George Clooney.

Among the “Monuments Men” buried in Margraten was Huchthausen, a 40-year-old professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota. In the spring of 1945, he made several trips to the German city of Aachen, on the border with the Netherlands and Belgium, to assess damage to historic monuments, including the Aachen Cathedral, one of Europe’s oldest churches, which dates to 805.

On April 2, a month before the German surrender, Huchthausen and his driver crossed the Rhine River to investigate the looting of an altarpiece. They unwittingly drove into enemy-controlled territory and came under machine-gun fire. Huchthausen was killed instantly, and his body slumped over his driver, likely saving his life.

In addition to soldiers killed in battle, Edsel also chronicles the men who initially dug thousands of graves by hand “in the drenching rains of 1944” so that the US military could honor the dead where they fell. Most of the gravediggers belonged to the all-black 960th Quartermaster Service Company. They were housed in a drafty fruit warehouse and “mud-caked and exhausted,” writes Edsel.

Sgt. Jefferson Wiggins from Alabama was one of the 260 black grave diggers at Margraten. In 2009, Wiggins attended the 65th anniversary of the founding of the cemetery, and in his speech noted the irony of fighting for freedom from Nazi persecution but returning to a segregated America.

“During the war, we didn’t often discuss our civil rights,” Wiggins said. “But we certainly did realize that if we . . . were good enough to be sent to France, Belgium and the Netherlands, to liberate the people living there, we also were able to liberate ourselves at home.”

Although the military offered to repatriate the remains of slain American soldiers back to the US, many of their family members decided to leave them at Margraten where there are currently 8,200 American war dead.

In September 1946, when Helen Moore arrived from Georgia to repatriate her son Bill Moore — who was 23-years-old when he was tortured and killed near the Dutch city of Apeldoorn — she was shocked to find a group of 1,200 Dutch mourners gathered in the rain for his memorial service.

She spread red clay from a jar that she had brought from her home near the grave, and she decided that she would leave her son in Margraten among the Dutch residents who appreciated his sacrifice and “honored him and cared for him as any mother could,” Edsel writes.