Margraten War Cemetery, in the Dutch province of Limburg, is the last resting place of around 8,300 American servicemen. The names of another 1,700 whose remains were never found are commemorated on the Wall of the Missing. Local volunteers tend the graves, and the Arnhem-based Fields of Honor Foundation runs the Faces of Margraten website, which displays the names and faces of fallen servicemen.
Some 172 African Americans are buried at Margraten, but in the words of Theo Bovens, a former governor of Limburg who chairs the Black Liberators Foundation, their role in liberating the country was under-represented for decades.
When the cemetery opened a visitor centre two years ago, Bovens and Dutch war historians quickly noticed that the Black soldiers had again been omitted from the standing exhibition. They raised the issue with the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), the Paris-based US government agency that manages the war cemeteries in Europe. So did Shefali Razdan Duggal, the Joe Biden-appointed ambassador to the Netherlands.
Thanks to their lobbying, two panels were added to the displays, one bearing a quote from a Black American soldier, First Lieutenant Jefferson Wiggins, and another featuring a fallen Black serviceman, George H Pruitt.
It didn’t take long for the commemoration of Black Liberators to raise the hackles of Donald Trump after his return to the White House. In March, a fellow of The Heritage Foundation wrote a blog post complaining that the ABMC still had a chief diversity officer, in defiance of Trump’s orders to terminate DEI appointments at all government agencies.
Within days, the officer, Priscilla Rayson, was placed on administrative leave. In June, Trump was invited to visit the cemetery and commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation while he was in the Netherlands for the Nato summit. He declined, for undisclosed reasons. And at some time in the past six months, the panels commemorating the Black Liberators were quietly removed from the display.
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The ABMC’s capitulation looked like a victory for Trump’s crusade against diversity, but he reckoned without the keen sense of history in this part of the world where the borders have shifted countless times over the centuries, usually with much bloodshed. The local adopt-a-grave scheme has been so popular that it has a waiting list of 700. As soon as the panels’ absence was noticed, the mayor and regional governor wrote to the agency demanding they restore the panels, to give “permanent attention to the Black Liberators in the visitor center [sic]”.
Separately, local politicians started a campaign to erect a permanent memorial outside the cemetery, where the ABMC has no remit. Trump’s desire to erase Black American servicemen from history only strengthened the determination of people in Limburg to honour them, in a magnificent example of the Streisand effect.
You can almost hear the squirming in the ABMC’s statement attempting to defend the decision to remove the panels under “schedule for periodic rotation to include new content for visitors”. Four of its 15 rotating panels feature African American servicemen; it was just an unfortunate coincidence that none were on display.
The fact that the panels were included as a result of strong local lobbying, but removed without a word to anyone – at around the same time as the ABMC crumbled to pressure from an influential right wing US think tank – did not go unnoticed.
A tweet from Trump’s new ambassador to the Netherlands, Joe Popolo, suggests the administration is backtracking. Popolo distanced himself from the removal of the panels, pointing out that it happened “prior to my arrival as ambassador”.
“There is zero inconsistency in honoring the important role African American soldiers played in WWII,” he added, the closest any Trump official will ever come to acknowledging the diversity of the armed forces.
George Orwell wrote that he who controls the past controls the present. But in the battle for the memory of the second world war, this has been a bloody defeat for Trump.
Gordon Darroch is a journalist, writer and copy editor living in The Hague. His memoir, All The Time We Thought We Had, is published by Polygon
