Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial

The Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial is a Second World War military cemetery in the village of Margraten, about ten kilometers east of Maastricht in the southern Netherlands, dedicated in 1960 and officially opened by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. It is the only American military cemetery in the Netherlands, administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission, and it holds more than 8,000 American war dead across roughly 26.5 hectares of grounds. Its Court of Honor centers on a reflecting pool leading toward a chapel tower crowned with a grieving-mother sculpture by Joseph Kiselewski, and a set of Tablets of the Missing records 1,722 further names; operations maps within the visitors' building were designed by the Yale-trained artist Lewis York and produced by the Dura Company of Heerlen. The cemetery has maintained an active grave adoption program, in which local Dutch families care for individual graves, continuously since 1945.