Europeana/1914-18/Wikimedia España

Although Spain did not participate directly in the WWI, it is possible to find facts, places or situations that lead to it. Wikimedia Spain contributes to the Europeana 1914-18 2017 online campaign with the following activity.

Photo hunting

On June 18 we organized a photo hunting in order to document the German Cemetery in Cuacos de Yuste, province of Cáceres. In this cemetery are buried many of the German soldiers, pilots and mariners of the WWI and WWII that arrived at the Spanish coasts and lands due to shipwrecks or the shooting down of their airplanes. All the pictures are in this Commons category: Cementerio Militar Alemán de Cuacos de Yuste.

The German government, through the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (institution in charge of guarding the German war cemeteries), decided to gather in a single place the bodies of German soldiers scattered throughout Spain. The works began in 1980 and the same year began the transfer of bodies, ending the work in 1983, when it was officially inaugurated on June 1, with the assistance of representatives of the German Embassy, Spanish authorities and relatives arrived from Germany.

All the graves are equal and only have a cross in dark granite. The inscription includes the soldier's name, his military rank, as well as his date of birth and death. In the cemetery there is a plaque that says, translated from Spanish and German:

In this cemetery of soldiers rests 26 soldiers of the First World War and 154 of the Second World War. They belonged to crews of planes that fell on Spain, submarines and other ships of the navy sunk. Some of them died in Spanish hospitals because of their wounds. Their tombs were scattered all over Spain, where the sea threw them to land, where their planes fell or where they died. The Volksbund in the years 1980-1983 reunited them in this last address inaugurated in the presence of the ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in a commemorative act Hispanic-German 1 of June of 1983. Remember to the dead with deep respect and humility.

Gallery

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  Entrance to the cemetery
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  Plaque at the entrance
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  General view
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  One of eight tombs of unknown soldiers