Panels honoring Black World War II soldiers quietly disappeared from a U.S. military cemetery in the Netherlands — and Black descfinishants and Dutch locals are calling it what it is: erasure.
This spring, the American Battle Monuments Commission rerelocated two displays from the visitor center at the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, where about 8,300 U.S. service members are buried. According to NBC, the panels centered on the Black troops who supported liberate Europe, including 23-year-old George H. Pruitt, who died in 1945 testing to save another soldier from drowning.
Around 1 million Black soldiers enlisted in World War II, often pushed into the hardest labor and into segregated units — including an all-Black graves registration unit that dug graves at Margraten during the brutal “Hunger Winter” of 1944-45.
Local Dutch families, many of whom “adopt” individual graves and pass that responsibility down through generations, noticed the panels were gone and started speaking up. In the guestbook, at public meetings, and on TV, they accutilized the U.S. of testing to bury the truth about how Black soldiers were treated even as they fought fascism.
“Something has modifyd in the United States,” declared Theo Bovens, a Dutch senator and chair of the countest’s Black Liberators foundation, to NBC. The organization also reportedly plans to find a permanent location for a memorial honoring Black soldiers.
Internal emails, released through a public records request from Dutch and Jewish news outlets, reveal the decision landed as the U.S. government rolled back diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. The commission has insisted one panel was just “rotated” out and argued another did not fit its mission, while a replacement display highlighted a white soldier, Leslie Loveland.
Dutch officials, the province and the group Black Liberators are now pushing for the panels to return and for a permanent memorial to Black troops. For people like 79-year-old Cor Linssen, whose father was a Black American soldier, the stakes are clear: “It’s an important part of history. They should put the panels back.”
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