How many US soldiers from World War 2 are buried in Germany?

Answer 1

I would say not many. There may be a few individuals here and there, and there may be some WWII vets who survived the war and who were buried in Germany later when they died.

The American Battle Monuments Commission is the US Government agency in charge of cemeteries for American war casualties overseas. They have about two dozen cemeteries, in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Algeria, Italy, England, the Philippines and other places. None are in Germany. See Related Link below for the ABMC website which has information on their cemeteries.

Many of the men buried in those ABMC Cemeteries are on their third burial though. Every US division had a Graves Registration detachment. When action was imminent, they took good large scale maps of the area, and located level, well-drained plots of ground and estimated how many bodies each might hold. They marked each potential grave with a rock, and carefully marked all the plots on their map. Many soldiers went right by their future gravesite and never noticed as they worked unobtrusively. When you were killed you got a somewhat hasty burial, in a shelter half (half a canvas pup tent), with one of your dog tags enclosed with a form in a glass bottle with you. When the action settled down in that area, all these plots were emptied and the bodies reburied in a divisional cemetery. This time you got a wooden box. The dog tag buried with you was nailed to the outside, with one nail through the hole where the chain went, and the other nail in the notch at the other end. GI lore had it that this notch was so the dog tag could be wedged between your teeth when you were killed, but it was actually a nail guide for when the dog tag was nailed to your wooden coffin. Just as grisly. Besides, there was no guarantee you'd still have a head after you were killed. So, some GIs may have been buried under these conditions for the first and second time in Germany.

After the war, all these divisional cemeteries were emptied and the bodies reburied in the lovely, permanent ABMC cemeteries in the mid to late 1940s. As soon as possible, the next of kin of the deceased soldier would be notified that it was now possible, if that's what the family wanted, to bring the remains of their loved one back to the states. It was entirely up to the family. The ones whose families opted to leave their loved one among his comrades are those who are still buried in the ABMC cemeteries today. If the family had the remains returned to the states, the soldier could be reburied in any of the National Cemeteries, such as Arlington, or somewhere closer to home, if that's what the family preferred. Full military honors were provided. WWII soldiers were still being given their last burial well into the late 1940s. Any WWII US infantryman in a cemetery in the US who was killed in the war is likely working on his fourth burial, but with any luck he can at last rest in peace.

The US was determined in WWII that the graves of its dead would not disappear, like those of the men of so many earlier armies had. But few US WWII soldiers would have relished the thought of being permanently laid to rest in German soil.