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The Romanian military cemetery in Soultzmatt

Le cimetière militaire roumain de Soultzmatt. © ECPAD

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Situated in the Val du Pâtre, Soultzmatt military cemetery is the largest Romanian necropolis in France. This emblematic Romanian heritage site contains the remains of 678 soldiers who died in captivity between 1914 and 1918, most of them due to ill-treatment, malnutrition and exhaustion. In 1916-17, these prisoners of the German army were used to build roads and shelters in various locations. In 1920, the village of Soultzmatt, spared by the war, donated the land needed to bring together these soldiers, dispersed around more than thirty-five Alsatian towns and villages, to Romania. In 1927, King Ferdinand and Queen Mary of Romania attended the inauguration of the cemetery, marking the traditional friendship between France and Romania.

Three marble plaques bear inscriptions dedicated to the sacrifice of the Romanian prisoners: the first one referring to the agony suffered by all the prisoners, who died of “hunger, destitution and torture”, the second one to the tremendous work done by the Romanian monuments committee in Alsace, tasked in 1919 with bringing together the graves dispersed throughout the towns and villages of Alsace, and the third one bearing Queen Mary’s inscription honouring the memory of those who “far from your country for which you sacrificed yourselves, rest in glory”.

Today, the bodies of three thousand Romanians still rest in several national necropolises such as Strasbourg-Cronenbourg (Bas-Rhin), Effry (Aisne), Hirson (Aisne) and Dieuze (Moselle).