Memorial to Black US Soldiers Who Died in WW2 Quietly Removed

Plaques commemorating African American soldiers fighting against Nazi Germany in Europe have been removed from a U.S. military cemetery in the Netherlands.

Approximately one million African American soldiers fought in Europe during World War II, the deadliest war in history.

More than 8,200 Americans are buried at the Netherlands American Cemetery in the southern village of Margraten, just east of city of Maastricht. Another 1,700 officially counted as missing have their names displayed at the site, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), the U.S. agency responsible for the Dutch site.

A total of 174 African American soldiers are buried or memorialized at Margraten, according to the Dutch research project, the Black Liberators. It is the only U.S. military cemetery in the country.

Dutch media reported earlier this month two informational panels about African American soldiers in the mid-twentieth century war had been taken down in the cemetery’s visitors’ center. A local official who was granted anonymity to speak freely told Newsweek the ABMC did not inform authorities in the Limburg province, where the cemetery is located, of the removal.

A spokesperson for the Black Liberators project separately confirmed to Newsweek on Monday the panels had been taken down and were not currently on display.

It is not clear exactly when the panels were removed. The panels were added to the visitors’ center in mid-2024, partly because of pushes from then-U. S. ambassador to the Netherlands, Shefali Razdan Duggal, the Black Liberators project said. But they were “removed again earlier this summer,” the initiative said.

The local official said on Monday they had learned of the information being removed from display the previous weekend.

The White House, under President Donald Trump, has cracked down on programs aimed at diversity and inclusion, an attitude echoed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his reshaping of the Pentagon and the U.S. military. Arlington National Cemetery in March removed references to the history of Black and female service members from its website, and the Pentagon in the same month restored a webpage celebrating U.S. Army Major General Charles Calvin Rogers, a recipient of the U.S. highest military honor and a Black Vietnam veteran, after an outcry at its removal.

The ABMC has been approached for comment. Hélène Chaulin, a spokesperson for the ABMC in Paris, said the panels were “designed to be rotated regularly throughout the exhibition” to showcase different soldiers’ life stories, according to Dutch newspaper NRC.

The Black Liberators project said the panels detailed the life of George H. Pruitt, a New Jersey-born telephone engineer who died in 1945 while attempting to rescue a fellow soldier from a river in Bremen, northwestern Germany. He was 23 years old.

The second panel provided information on the “strict policy of segregation” in the U.S. military during World War II and the journey of many soldiers into postwar civil rights movements. The U.S. military officially desegregated in 1948.

The panel featuring Pruitt is “currently not on display, but not out of rotation,” Chaulin told NRC.

The ABMC’s response “might explain the removal of the story of Technician Fourth Class George H. Pruitt, even though it was already the last story to be added, it does not explain why the panel highlighting racial segregation was removed,” said the Black Liberators project.

The cemetery itself is symbolic of U.S. participation along with Dutch fighters toward the end of the war, and where many people travel to pay their respects, said Kees Ribbens, a senior researcher at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam.

African American soldiers typically held labor or supporting jobs in the military during World War II, and helped build the Margraten site from late 1944, Ribbens told Newsweek.

Families could then chose whether to leave the remains of their loved ones in Margraten or have them returned to U.S. soil when the cemetery was remodeled a few years later, said Ribbens. “People attach a lot of meaning to the fact that the graves are still there.”

Local and provincial authorities are discussing plans for a possible alternative memorial, according to Dutch media.