Homecoming
Event ID: 500
Categories:
14 November 1925
Source ID: 22
“In the middle of 1925, our family decided to transfer the mortal remains of Manfred v. Richthofen to Germany and bury them in his native soil. The initial intention was to lay Manfred’s coffin next to the grave of his father and his brother Lothar in the Schweidnitz cemetery. However, the relevant authorities of the German Reich, above all the Reichswehr Ministry and the aviation organisations, expressed the urgent wish that Manfred’s body should be laid to rest in the Invalidenfriedhof cemetery in Berlin, where so many German heroes and generals had already found their eternal resting place, to which the family agreed in the knowledge that the memory of Manfred did not belong to them alone, but to the entire German nation. The necessary and rather time-consuming negotiations with the French authorities were initiated, and in mid-November I travelled to France to the place where Manfred’s grave was located. It was not the original one, as his body had only been moved after the war to Fricourt, a small village eight kilometres from the once hotly contested Albert, where there is a German cemetery for the fallen.
I had been assigned a gentleman named Lienhard by the responsible authorities, who was primarily responsible for dealing with the necessary formalities with the French authorities and managing the exhumation. It was 14 November 1925 when, coming from Amiens, I met Monsieur Lienhard in Albert. I found this very prudent and eager gentleman in quite a state of agitation, as the French authorities, although they had been informed of the exhumation in good time, had unfortunately not bothered with anything at first. After some searching, we managed to find an old gentleman who had been a non-commissioned officer during the war and now held the position of cemetery administrator. We took him with us in our car and the three of us soon reached Fricourt. The German cemetery there presented a truly shocking picture, and the impression I gained from seeing it is difficult to express in words. According to the cemetery manager who accompanied us, there are about six thousand German soldiers in individual graves and about twelve thousand in one huge mass grave. No green leaf, let alone any wreath, gives this sad and poignant site a more friendly character. Only a simple tin wreath lay on the mass grave, which perhaps an old mother had dedicated to the memory of her son who had fallen for the fatherland and was resting there with thousands of comrades. The bodies of German heroes were brought here from thirty different cemeteries in the first years after the war. However, the layout of the cemetery may not have been finalised at that time. In the meantime, the Volksbund für deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission) has probably also taken care of this resting place of dead warriors, and it hopefully offers a friendlier and more beautiful sight today.
At the Fricourt cemetery itself, nothing had yet been prepared for the exhumation. We had to call in the various labourers and it took almost three hours before the excavation itself could be carried out. We found a zinc plate with Manfred’s name and date of death written on it in English and German. This plate had been attached to the coffin by the Englishmen who had laid him to rest. It is now in my mother’s possession in Schweidnitz. After everything that was mortal about Manfred had been reburied in the zinc coffin we had brought with us, we took it to Albert, where it was loaded onto the railway to Kehl on the Franco-German border under the direction of the responsible French authorities.”
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