A Dance with Death: The Imperial War Graves Commission and Nazi Germany

Abstract

In the mid-1930s, Fabian Ware and the other leading members of Britain’s Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) sought to strengthen relations with Nazi Germany. Their efforts are generally seen as another example of appeasement, misjudging Hitler in a search for international peace. This article, in contrast, places this relationship into a much longer history of wartime death and post-war remembrance. As was the case elsewhere, the IWGC, to the anger of some relatives of the deceased, chose not to repatriate the war dead buried in Germany, and instead concentrated them into four new British war cemeteries. This decision created a clear division between the treatment of the dead of the victors and those of the defeated. While the British and Empire dead in Germany were made more visible, Germany’s war dead buried in Britain remained in their original wartime graves and faded slowly from sight. When Hitler rose to power, the IWGC was suddenly forced to confront these disparities, particularly as Nazis in both Britain and Germany used the war graves to rally support. This article argues that the IWGC started to negotiate with the Nazi regime not to broker peace but purely to defend the cemeteries that it had placed on German soil. However, with Britain and Germany having competing narratives of war and defeat, these discussions were always doomed to fail.