By T.W. Paterson
As we’ve seen in the story of Lieut. Freidrich Lengeld, the Hurtgen Forest was the scene of five weeks of bloody fighting between the advancing Americans and the defending Germans.
When the battle finally ended and the Americans continued their advance, the ravaged forest was left with the dead of both sides littering the ground. There simply was no time to deal with them: the priority was achieving victory not burying the dead.
So it was in June 1945 when German soldier Julius Erasmus returned home to find that everything was gone: his family killed, his home destroyed. A textile worker from Aachen before the war, he’d served as a captain in an engineering unit in the Wehrmacht and as a prisoner of war. The loss of everything he’d cherished devastated him.
Retreating inward, he became a recluse and set up home in an abandoned cabin in the Hurtgen (Hurtgenwald) Forest, the scene of bloody see-saw fighting in November-December 1944. Everywhere he looked — everywhere he stepped — were the remains of the battle’s casualties, not all of them complete. Cadavers were “lying by the roadsides, on the edge of the woods and under fallen trees.
“I just wasn’t able to ignore these bodies, unburied and forgotten. They preyed on my mind.”
It was gruesome and gut-wrenching. But, instead of moving, Ermasus began what would become a years-long obsession — the recovery, identification and proper burial of the fallen soldiers. Working alone, he gathered up the human remains of both sides as he found them, making every effort to identify them before giving them a proper burial.
The work was emotionally and physically exhausting. Nevertheless, single-handed, he dug and filled 120 graves, even crafting the wooden crosses himself. At that point, his informal cemetery became official when the local community formally designated the plot of land at the edge of the Hurtgenwald Forest.
By this time, too, he was no longer working alone, having been befriended by the local parish priest, Father Eschweiler. Volunteers from surrounding towns and villages then joined him in his work, a few at a time, until he had a small army at his disposal. By 1949, they’d achieved 800 burials. This, despite the fact that unexploded mines and ordnance killed as many as 100 of them, including the mayor of Vossenack!
Finally, the West German government stepped in and, in 1952, formally dedicated Vossenack Military Cemetery. By that time, Erasmus had seen to the burial of 1,569 soldiers. There are now 2,221 graves in the cemetery.
His work done, Julius Erasmus disappeared. He left no word, no one knew where he’d gone or why he chose to do so, unannounced. Not until years after his death in 1971 was it learned that he’d moved to Nideggan-Abenden in the Eifel Mountains. He’d died unnoticed and all but forgotten.
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The Hurtgen(wald) Forest, site of a five-week-long battle between the American and German armies, has become something of a destination for those who enjoy exploring old battlefields. Spanning just over 50 square miles east of the Belgian-German border, it was “the longest battle on German soil during WWII and stands as the U.S. Army’s longest single battle”. It supposedly has some of the least disturbed foxholes and bunkers to be found from the Second World War.
For more information check out www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/julius-erasmus.html and www.europeremembers.com/stories/58/juliuserasmus
T.W. Paterson is an author and historian. For more, check out twpaterson.com
