WAR MEMORIAL AT THE CEMETERY IN PINTSCH/LUXEMBURG

20 JUNE 2007

The Town of Hancock and the Hancock Chamber of Commerce received an e-mail from alwin.geimer@education.lu on Friday, 29 June 2007 as follows:

Dear Mr Murphy.

On June 20th we celebrated in the commune of Kiischpelt/Luxemburg the inauguration of a war memorial dedicated to the 317. Infantry Regiment

of the 80. infantry Division, which liberated our region in January 1945 from the German occupation during the "Battle of the Bulge".

"Special guest" was Mr. Dan R. Fleming from Hancock.

I will send you two fotographs of Mr. Fleming at the memorial, the speech of our mayor Armand Mayer and a test with some information concerning our

commune.

The second fotograph shows Mr. Fleming with

1. our mayor Armand Mayer on the right

2. three town council members (Alphonse Wenking right down, Jean Majerus left, Bert Allard left near the stone.

Perhaps you can publish some of these things on an internet-site or a local news paper.

I'm something like a "local historian" and project-manager of our "WebWalking am Kiischpelt" (http://www.webwalking.lu only available in French and German)

Yours sincerely

Alwin Geimer

The following text was provided

It is a special honour for me to day to welcome illustrious guests to the inauguration of our war memorial here in Pintsch:

Mr Kraft, representative of the embassy of the United States of America in Luxembuourg

Mr Dan R Fleming, Silver Star veteran of the armed forces of the United State of America

Mr Camille Kohn, president of the "Cercle d'Etudes sur la Bataille des Ardennes"

Fellow Mayors

Members of Town councils

Reverend Francis Erasmy

Ladies and Gentlemen

We are standing here on a beautiful summer's day to look back,sixty-two years ago. Same place, same landscape, but circumstances beyond

today's carefree imagination. In the autumn of nineteen forty-four, we though that the dire winter of dictatorship and repression was over. Outside, nature

was invaded by autumn, followed by winter, but in your hearts it was still spring; the springtime of freedom and liberty.

Then winter returned with a sudden, unexpected blow. On December the sixteenth, the frosted tanks of von Rundstedt crushed their sinister path

through the Kiischpelt up to the Maas. That winter, the war front rolled twice across the Kiischpelt, leaving behind destruction, pain and countless dead

and injured.

We are gathered here to inaugurate a memorial. It is a simple stone, of local slate, but it is a stone of remembrance, a stone of gratitude and a

stone of celebration.

• We remember the years of the Nazi dictatorship and war.
• We remember the victims of the dictatorship, not only the Luxembourgers, but all the Europeans and Americans.
• We remember our Jewish fellow citizens who were deported and murdered in the Concentration Camps.
• We remember the refugees and the displaced.
• We remember the forcibly recruited, many of whom never returned.
• We remember our tortured nation: torn apart between collaboration and resistance, between adaptation and opposition, between denunciation and solidarity.
• We remember the pain, the mourning the bereavement, the countless scars that war left on the people, the animals and the land.

It is impossible to name all the wrongs; nothing of what I have mentioned and, nothing of what I am unable to mention, must ever be forgotten. Remembering is crucial, also for those who did not experience those times themselves. "He who closes his eyes to the past, is blind to the present", said Richard von Weiszacker, President in nineteen eight-five. Only when we keep our memories alive, when we know what happened, then we also know what must never be allowed to happen again. This memorial should assist us in this endeavor.

This is also a stone of gratitude. I am aware that our thankfulness will never suffice to repay all the sacrifices made for our liberation. Nevertheless this stone is a modest expression of our gratitude to those who fought for our freedom, who were injured for our freedom, who lost their lives for our freedom. We than in particular the soldiers of the three hundred and seventeenth Infantry regiment of the eightieth US infantry division, the so-called "Blue Ridge division". These soldiers, originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the east of the USA, belonged to Patton's army. On the nineteenth of December, they were loaded on open trucks in the Lorraine and transported on a perilous journey through the nights to the vicinity of Gonderange. They approached the war front from the South until they engaged in their first fight on Christmas Eve, north of Niederfeulen. They fought their way up to Wiltz and, swerving east, liberated the Kiischpelt on January the twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-five.

Everyone who experience the merciless winter of 44/45, the cold, the fighting, the dirty snow, the fear, can perhaps imagine what these soldiers did for our sake in four weeks between Niederfeulen and the Kiischpelt.

Despite this pain and the mourning, this stone is also a stone of celebration. The day the Kiischpelt was liberated was the beginning of a springtime of peace and freedom, that has lasted until today.

The trauma of the Second World War eventually created a bond among European nations and with the United States of America. The determination that such a catastrophe must never happen again, soon inspired people from both sides of the Atlantic, to construct a new Europe. There were influential men, like American Secretaries of Foreign Affairs, James Byrnes and George Marshall, Europeans like Jean Monnet and Robert Schumann. But there were also the numerous Americans who sent "care packets" across the Atlantic. This support was their way of telling us, that they believed in a free and peaceful Europe. This support has been a firm foundation: a foundation for freedom and peace in the past 60 years; a foundation for a community that Europe had never seen before on its soil. This support has made it possible that, in the Kiischpelt of today, people from many different nations can live together, work together and celebrate together.

A strong bond of friendship links us to the United States. This friendship, born amidst the toils of war, is not only a present; it is also a task. It must be kept up and spread to other countries. We should also engage ourselves to promote freedom and peace in other, less fortunate parts of the world.

Today we are honoured to welcome a very special guest in our midst. It was during this murderous winter of the Rundstedt Offensive that, a so-called ordinary, young man, was plunged by fate into a stream of events that made him accomplish extraordinary deeds and witness and survive some of the most ghastly moments in the course of human history: Mr Dan R. Fleming, you were 23 years old when you were recruited in the American army in June nineteen forty-four. Five months later, you came as a substitute to a company in General Patton's third army. For thirty days, you fought in the Osling/Eisleck until your unit receive the order to liberate first Wilwerwiltz and the Pintsch. That was on the twenty-fifth of January. This cemetery is probably a special place for you. Under relentless enemy fire from machine guns and artillery, you had to fight over every frosted centimetre of country road leading from Wilwerwiltz, across the bridge up to this cemetery. This small country road was 3900 miles away from your home, and many of your comrades died next to you. The fighting around the cemetery was particularly heavy. Here you just escaped being killed by a shell. Towards the evening, the wounded were brought to the cemetery and your unit entrenched itself behind its walls. That night, you captured a German officer in one of the houses; you were only armed with a torch! That night, lorries brought your company out of the frontline to Diekirch for ten days of holiday. Your incredible Odyssey took you further across Germany, through Mainz, Wiesbaden, Kassel, Thuringen, to Saxony/Sachsen, your unit were among the first allied soldiers to reach the concentration camp of Buchenwald. From there you went to Bavaria, crossed the river Inn at Braunau, where Hitler was born. You witnessed the end of the war in Kirchoff, Austria, only 11 months after you had joined the army. In nineteen forty-six, you were honourably discharged from the army and have lived in Hancock, Maryland since.

Dear Mr Fleming, as I have already intimated: no expression of gratitude can measure up to what you and your comrades did for us. As a token of respect and gratitude, let me quote the final lines of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. These lines honour you and your dead comrades, just as the honoured your countrymen, who had fought in another crucial moment of your great nation's history. These lines remind us, the living, that the best way to show our thankfulness is to preserve the gift of freedom you brought to dearly for us.

"The World will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

THANK YOU, MR DAN R. FLEMING, AND MAY GOD BLESS YOU