Provincial councillors in Limburg have called for a permanent memorial to black American servicemen to be erected next to the US war cemetery in Margraten after it emerged that panels commemorating their part in the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945 have been removed.

NRC reported at the weekend that the two panels were taken away from a permanent exhibition at the cemetery, one of which said that black American soldiers had fought on two fronts: against Nazi occupation and racism.

The panels were removed at an unknown time earlier this year, after The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing US think tank, accused the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) of defying Donald Trump’s crackdown on diversity programmes.

Eleven of the 15 parties in Limburg’s assembly have signed a letter asking the provincial government to look at ways to replace the plaques, either temporarily or through a permanent memorial. The far-right PVV and FVD, farmers’ party BBB and local group Oost Limburg did not back the call.

The parties said they were “shocked” by reports of the removal of the plaques, calling the move “indecent” and “unacceptable”. They have asked the province and the municipal council of Eijsden-Margraten to explore the possibility of putting a memorial on land next to the cemetery.

The cemetery itself is on land that has been granted to the United States on perpetual loan and is managed by the AMBC. The visitor centre containing the exhibition was opened in December 2023.

Segregated army

The plaques commemorating black soldiers were included the following year. One of them honours the one million black servicemen who fought in Europe during the Second World War, many doing menial tasks such as grave digging in the segregated US army.

The other tells the story of George H Pruitt, a 23-year-old soldier who drowned in June 1945 – a month after the war ended – while laying a telephone line across a river near Bremen, Germany, during the reconstruction.

Kees Ribbens, senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (NIOD), told Dutch News that the cemetery itself was the best place to tell the soldiers’ stories rather than a spot chosen by the council.

“I’m sympathetic to the idea, but the question is where the statue or memorial should be located,” he said. “It can’t do any harm to draw more attention to this neglected aspect of history, but most people who want to find out about the cemetery at Margraten go to the visitor centre.”

The ABMC has not responded to requests for comment from Dutch News, but a spokesman for the Paris-based organisation said they had been “rotated” during a change of exhibits.

Trump DEI policy

The panels were added after the Biden-appointed ambassador to the Netherlands, Shefali Razdan Duggal, and a spokesman for the ABMC raised the issue.

Ribbens said the removal of the plaques was consistent with the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) programmes.

“When I first went to the visitor centre in December 2023 I was surprised to see there was no mention of the black soldiers at all, even though there’s been a lot of focus on their role in the last 15 years,” Ribbens told Dutch News.

“It’s theoretically possible that they’re a rotating feature of the exhibition, but I haven’t heard any other examples of elements being replaced in the same way since the visitor centre opened,” Ribbens told Dutch News. “Why have they explicitly chosen these two panels about black soldiers?”

More than 8,000 fallen American soldiers are buried at the cemetery and the names of another 1,700 who went missing in action are inscribed on walls either side of the Court of Honor.

Theo Bovens, Christian Democrat (CDA) senator and the chair of the Black Liberators in the Netherlands foundation, said the exhibition in its current form paid “far too little attention to the black liberators”.

“Around 12.5% of American liberators were of African-American origin,” he told NRC. “They did not just play an important part in creating the cemetery in Margraten: 172 of them have their final resting place there.”