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During World War II, around 1944, people from Margraten, a small parish in Limburg, discovered that their fields had been expropriated by the American army. The forces used them to bury their fallen soldiers. Because the flood of corpses soon became unmanageable, young villagers were asked to help inter the war victims. Nobody could envisage that eventually twenty thousand crosses would be planted in the Limburg mud. 'You have no idea what falling in battle means, in those numbers,' someone asserts. More than forty eyewitnesses recall the heavy digging, the sludge and the dreadful stench. Traumatic to both the villagers and the Americans. 'It's horrible to see your own soldiers being brought in like coppice.' The many, sometimes emotional accounts are complemented with unique footage from American army archives, telling the relatively unknown history of this war cemetery, the identification and subsequent, large-scale reshipment of the deceased soldiers.

Credits

Set geluid
Sound editing
Sound Design
Co-producer
SHOM Stichting Akkers van Margraten
Production company
Ruim Kader Films
TV company
IKON TV
Distributor NL
Cinema Lumiere

Title: Akkers van Margraten
Year: 2010
Duration : 1 hour, 10 minutes
Category: Long Documentary
Edition: NFF 2010

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Stills

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