Remembrance in Groesbeek

Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery lies one and a half kilometres from De Wolfsberg. With 2,619 graves it is the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the Netherlands. If you are travelling here to visit a grave, we are the nearest hotel.

The cemetery was created in 1945 and holds 2,610 Commonwealth burials together with nine graves of other nationalities. Among them lie 2,338 Canadians. Most died during the Battle of the Rhineland in February and March 1945, when Canadian divisions advanced south from Nijmegen to clear the land between the Maas and the Rhine. Others fell in earlier or later operations in the southern Netherlands and the Rhineland.

Adjoining the cemetery stands the Groesbeek Memorial, which commemorates by name more than a thousand servicemen who died in north-west Europe between late August 1944 and the end of the war and who have no known grave. Both cemetery and memorial were designed by the British architect P.D. Hepworth.

The cemetery is freely accessible. On the third day of the Nijmegen Four Days Marches the route passes the cemetery, where the fallen are remembered along the way.