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History
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May 5, 2025
Meet the Dedicated Volunteers Who Honor World War II’s meet sugar babies Philippines Fallen American Service Members by Adopting Their Graves
Europe will commemorate the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender sugar babies near me Philippines on May 8. But thousands of locals remain committed to preserving year-round the memories of those killed while fighting to liberate the continent
Grave adoption programs—some part of structured, longstanding projects, others more individually driven—offer a touching layer of history that takes many visitors and even seasoned war experts by surprise.
Courtesy of Faces of Margraten
History of Now
Meet the Dedicated Volunteers Who Honor sugar baby dating Philippines World War II’s Fallen American Service Members by Adopting Their Graves
Europe will commemorate the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender on May 8. But thousands of locals remain committed to preserving year-round the memories of those killed while fighting to liberate the continent
Blane Bachelor
May 5, 2025
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Grave adoption programs—some part of structured, longstanding projects, others more individually driven—offer a touching layer of history that takes many visitors and even seasoned war experts by surprise.
Courtesy of Faces of Margraten
November marks a busy month for Mathilde Schmetz.
In addition to her volunteer job running a
World War II museum
in Thimister-Clermont, Belgium, the 75-year-old makes frequent visits to the nearby
Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial
for what she considers her “duty”: honoring 14 wartime graves that she and her husband have adopted.
Most of the soldiers interred in these graves died in November 1944. Every November, Schmetz and the volunteers she recruits to help her—sometimes students or members of the American military stationed just over the border in Germany—follow the same steps to commemorate these men: Place a bouquet of red, white and blue flowers in front of the gravestone. Rub
sand from Normandy
, France, into the inscribed names and dates to make them stand hide sugar dating profile out against the white marble. Say a few words of gratitude. And, finally, take a photograph of each decorated grave, which Schmetz then mails to the soldier’s family or loved ones back in the United States.
Retired Colonel Tom Stein and Mathilde Schmetz at the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial
Courtesy of Mathilde Schmetz
“Every family gets a picture with their Christmas letter—not by email, a regular letter,” Schmetz says. “The soldiers did their duty, and our duty is, at least, to remember what they did for us.”
Schmetz is one of thousands of Europeans who have adopted the graves of U.S. military service members buried or honored in cemeteries in
Belgium
,
France
,
Luxembourg
, the
Netherlands
and other countries. Amid
various commemorative events
held across Europe to mark the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end there on May 8, 1945, such efforts—some part of structured, longstanding programs, others more individually driven—offer a touching layer of history that takes many visitors and even seasoned war experts by surprise.
Dallas-based historian
Robert M. Edsel
was one of the scholars astonished upon learning about the grave adoption programs—specifically, the one at the
Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial
, located in the country’s southernmost tip, a few GCash processing fee scam miles from the German border, where approximately 10,000 U.S. troops are memorialized. Edsel is the author, with
Bret Witter
, of the best-selling 2009 book
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
, which tells the story of the art sugar daddy verification Philippines historians and museum personnel who
rescued art
stolen by the Nazis during the war; the book was adapted into a
2014 movie
starring George Clooney and Matt Damon.
Rows of graves at the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial
Courtesy of Faces of Margraten
One of the Monuments Men from Edsel’s book, Captain
Walter Huchthausen
, was killed on April 2, 1945, in Aachen, Germany, and buried at the Netherlands Cemetery. Edsel had visited Huchthausen’s grave several times and became pen pals with the Dutch woman looking after it, but he only learned from her later that a much bigger phenomenon was in place. He was so moved by the longstanding display of commemoration—“a high-water mark of civilization,” as he describes it to
Smithsonian
magazine—and so astounded by its lack of wider recognition that he decided to spotlight it in his new book,
Remember Us: American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom and a Forever Promise Forged in World War II
, which is available in both English and Dutch.
“The Dutch did something nobody else has done, and from an organic effort, have honored and taken care of these soldiers now for 80 years,” Edsel says. “The fact that they’re honored and remembered, and that [adopters] drill into their kids what freedom is and where it came from, that it’s not free, and these are the people who pay for it—that’s a story. And if ever the world needed that story, now is the moment.”
Burying the
hundreds of thousands
of U.S. service members who died during World War II was a monumental task. On June 8, 1944, the U.S. First Army established the first American military cemetery on European soil as a resting place for the U.S. soldiers who lost their lives during the D-Day invasion, including on
Omaha Beach
, the
deadliest
of the five Allied landing spots. On a bluff high above the bloodstained shores, service units—often made up of
African American soldiers
—began the
arduous process
of digging graves.
The grave of an unknown soldier at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Today, the
Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial
serves as the final resting place for 9,389 service members killed while fighting to liberate Europe from the Nazis. Another 1,557 names are listed wealthy men Makati on the Walls of the Missing. With more than 2.2 million annual visitors, the site is the most visited one run by the
American Battle Monuments Commission
, the federal agency established in 1923 that operates and maintains 26 cemeteries and 31 monuments and memorials in 17 countries, including the U.S.
More than half of those cemeteries are located in Europe, with most memorializing those who served in World War II. However, not all have grave adoption programs, and there’s no overarching U.S. agency or organization that coordinates the process. Instead, various volunteer and nonprofit groups in Europe have taken up the task.
At Normandy, the nonprofit
Les Fleurs de la Mémoire
, founded in 2001, handles grave adoption. The
American Overseas Memorial Day Association
, a public-private organization, encourages people with a special connection to a particular service member at any of several cemeteries in Belgium to become his or her “
Sentinel of Memory
.” At the
Epinal American Cemetery and Memorial
in France, local “godmothers” and “godfathers” who adopt a grave (or a name on the Court of Honor) through the volunteer-run
U.S. Memory Grand Est France
receive a printed certificate. The nonprofit’s website also provides step-by-step instructions on how to order flowers to be delivered to a specific grave.
Story of Margraten Grave Adoptions
Watch on
But the
adoption program
at the Netherlands Cemetery is by far the most robust and longstanding of them all. It traces its roots to 1944, when the bodies of thousands of U.S. troops began piling up for burial in temporary graves in a fruit orchard near the small village of Margraten, just a few miles from the German border.
In early 1945, even as the war raged on, the mayor of Margraten formed a committee of concerned townspeople hoping to find a way to honor their fallen liberators, giving birth to the
grave adoption program
. Soon, locals began stepping forward and volunteered to become adopters. By the second Memorial Day ceremony in 1946, all of the approximately 18,000 graves had been adopted. “No fallen American has been left without a mourner,” Edsel writes in the prologue of
Remember Us
.
The remains of about 10,000 service members buried at the cemetery during the war were
eventually repatriated
to the U.S. Today, 8,291 Americans are still buried in graves arranged in gently curved rows of Italian marble crosses and Stars of David, with another 1,722 names inscribed on the Walls of the Missing, exactly how the dead are memorialized in other American Battle Monuments Commission cemeteries. All of these graves (and those of two civilians, both Red Cross workers, also buried at Margraten), along with every name on the Walls of the Missing, have each been adopted by a local Dutch family, individual or school.
A 1947 photo of Margraten residents honoring the fallen Americans buried near their town
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
According to Edsel and
other historians
, the events of the war during the fall and winter of 1944 played an important role in establishing the longevity and success of Margraten’s adoption program. American troops
first liberated
the southern part of the Netherlands in mid-September, after four and a half years of occupation by Nazi Germany. As a result, American forces remained closely intertwined with local Dutch communities for months leading up to major Allied operations into neighboring Germany in late 1944 and early 1945, such as
Operation Market Garden
, the
largest airborne drop
in military history. Many Dutch people knew the individuals whose graves they would soon adopt, laying the foundation for deep bonds of both grief and gratitude.
The
Foundation for Adopting Graves at the American Cemetery Margraten
has run the Dutch town’s program since 2002. Adopters pay a one-time fee of €10 (around $11) and commit to at least two visits per year, though many come more often. The foundation closed the waiting list in 2021, when it grew to 1,000 names. According to foundation secretary Frans Roebroeks, more than 700 hopeful adopters remain on the list, with between 30 and 60 graves becoming available each year. Many Dutch families, including his own, have cared for the graves of the same soldiers for several generations. “It’s a bit in our DNA,” Roebroeks says.
Many adopters go to great lengths to honor their service members.
Sebastiaan Vonk
, a war expert based in the Netherlands and the founder of the
Fields of Honor Foundation
, a nonprofit that has compiled an online database of more than 43,000 U.S. soldiers memorialized in Europe, recalls one couple who named their firstborn child after the soldier they adopted. When he was born, they brought flowers to the soldier’s grave, placed the baby’s birth announcement on it and took photos.
“It’s very telling [about] the sort of relationships between families in the United States and the Netherlands, and also how deeply people feel connected to soldiers,” says Vonk, who has adopted three soldiers in the Netherlands and Belgium.
American soldiers from the "Old Hickory Division" on September 14, 1944, the day of the Allied liberation of Maastricht
RHCL Maastricht via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0
For grave adopters and the loved ones of fallen U.S. troops, connecting with each other can be a deeply moving experience.
Schmetz, who is in regular contact with relatives or loved ones of all but one of her adopted service members, says meeting next of kin is an especially profound reminder of the Americans’ ultimate sacrifices. She often meets them at the cemetery or during their visits to the
Remember Museum 39-45
, which she and her husband, Marcel Schmetz, opened in 1994. (The donation-only museum contains thousands of personal items left by 110 soldiers from the First Infantry Division on Marcel’s
family farm
before departing for the
Battle of the Bulge
, from which many never returned.)
“I’m always touched to see how they still miss their fathers,” Schmetz says. “People don’t realize behind every soldier was a family suffering. When you meet those people, and you talk with them, then you realize we can never do enough.”
Meanwhile, for some Americans, adopters provide a critical link to loved ones they never had the chance to meet.
Debbie Holloman
, a retiree who lives in Virginia, witnessed the power of such relationships firsthand when she was about 12 years old. Her uncle,
Eddie Hart
, a private first class in the Army and a Purple Heart recipient, was killed in action at age 22 in April 1945; a Dutch woman named Betty Vrancken adopted his grave at Margraten. Holloman joined other family members when her grandmother—Hart’s mother—met Vrancken for the first time in 1967.
Eddie Hart and his sister
Courtesy of Debbie Holloman
Betty Vrancken visiting the grave of Eddie Hart
Courtesy of Debbie Holloman
“She just sat there and held Betty’s hand, and it was so touching,” Holloman recalls. “My little old grandmother, it was like the only way she could get close to her son again, to touch this woman who had adopted his grave.”
For the past decade, Holloman has served as a liaison between adopters in Europe and families in the U.S. She estimates she’s helped about 200 families or loved ones connect with their service member’s adopters, mostly those with graves at Margraten and Henri-Chapelle. She’s also a volunteer with the Fields of Honor Foundation and the
Faces of Margraten
, a project by the foundation that Vonk launched to find a photo of every person memorialized at the cemetery (so far, it’s found about 9,000).
As World War II recedes further into the past, the task of tracking down next of kin and other information about U.S. forces is becoming tougher for volunteers like Holloman. Therein lies further incentive for proponents of grave adoption programs dedicated to honoring Americans who died while serving their country: making sure their memories are never forgotten, even during an especially polarizing moment in U.S. history.
“This is a bigger story than one American president, or two American presidents or two cycles of an American president,” says
Rob O’Brien
, an Amsterdam-based writer and filmmaker
whose documentary
about Margraten’s adoption program is slated to be released this fall. “This sugar daddy dating safety Philippines is 80 years of people visiting and paying their respects. It’s as strong as oak. No one can break that.”
A family at the Walls of the Missing at the Netherlands American Cemetery
Courtesy of Faces of Margraten
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Blane Bachelor
is an award-winning journalist sugar daddy bio examples who has written for outlets including CNN,
National Geographic
,
Afar
, the
New York Times
,
Robb Report
and the
Cut
. Her main specialties are travel and aviation, but she especially loves discovering lesser-known stories about people doing good in the world. Blane was born and raised in a proud military family in Florida and has lived in four countries abroad. Her current base is Amsterdam, where she resides with her husband and son. Find more of her work at
blanebachelor.com
.
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