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Who are some notable individuals interred at the Margraten American Cemetery?
Executive Summary
The available analyses converge on a clear finding: the Netherlands American Cemetery at Margraten is the final resting place for more than 8,200 U.S. service members who died in World War II, and among them are several specifically named individuals, including six Medal of Honor recipients and the highest-ranking interred officer, Major General Maurice Rose; local commemoration practices, such as Dutch families adopting graves, and institutional features like the Tablets of the Missing are also repeatedly noted [1] [2] [3]. The assembled sources disagree only on the completeness of single-name lists and on which individual graves are most frequently cited in human-interest reporting; they collectively establish the cemetery’s dual role as both a major American military burial ground and a locus of Dutch-American remembrance [4] [5].
1. What the records and reports actually claim about who is buried here—and what they omit
Primary summaries state plainly that the cemetery contains roughly 8,200 interments and lists 1,722 names on the Tablets of the Missing, reflecting casualties from campaigns including Market Garden and the Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge) [1] [6]. The compiled analyses show consistent high-level facts: grave counts, the Walls/Tablets, and the cemetery’s stewardship by the American Battle Monuments Commission. What the analytic sources omit—or treat variably—is a definitive roster of the most historically prominent individuals beyond a few widely noted names. Several civilian and news-oriented pieces instead emphasize human-interest elements, such as grave adoptions and memorial ceremonies, rather than producing exhaustive lists of notable interments [7] [8]. This leaves room for different outlets to highlight different individuals without contradicting the core facts.
2. Named individuals reported across sources—who is repeatedly identified
Multiple analyses identify specific servicemen by name and rank, revealing an overlapping but non-identical set of notable interments. Sources list names including Vernon D. Anderson, William M. Bryan, Robert G. Campbell, Marion B. Hamilton, Kenneth S. Hastings, Sherman S. Klein, Anthony N. Perry, Arthur P. Schmidt, Bill Wickens, Verl E. Miller, Henry W. Wolf, Royce Taylor, Hyman Ackerman, and Robert Cowen Rolph [4] [3] [5] [9]. Military-historical summaries call out six Medal of Honor recipients buried at Margraten but do not all agree on which names to foreground in feature reporting [2] [6]. The net effect is a verified list of individual graves that appears in multiple reports, but no single source among these provides an authoritative, exhaustive “top ten” of notable interments.
3. High-profile cases: Medal of Honor recipients and Major General Maurice Rose
All analytical strands identify Major General Maurice Rose as the highest-ranking service member interred at Margraten, a fact presented as uncontested across the dataset [2]. Multiple summaries and institutional descriptions also state that six recipients of the Medal of Honor are buried in the cemetery, signaling the presence of multiple valor-recognized servicemen, though the analyzed materials do not uniformly enumerate those six names in one place [2] [6]. This creates a solid, corroborated headline-level claim—MG Rose and multiple Medal of Honor recipients are interred at Margraten—while leaving detailed attribution of each recipient’s name to more specialized registries or ABMC records.
4. Local commemoration and individual human stories that reporters emphasize
Human-interest reporting and cemetery guides repeatedly highlight the Dutch tradition of adopting graves, in which local families tend specific plots and maintain personal remembrances; named examples such as Rob and Micha Brüll caring for a grave appear in multiple pieces [3] [9]. These narratives consistently single out individual graves and stories—such as those of Royce Taylor or Robert Cowen Rolph—to illustrate broader cultural bonds between Limburg communities and American veterans, rather than to produce authoritative lists of notable interments [5] [9]. The coverage therefore serves two roles: documenting the cemetery’s formal military significance and revealing its ongoing role in communal remembrance through individual stories.
5. How to reconcile differences and where authoritative confirmation lives
The differences across the analyses are matters of emphasis and granularity rather than contradiction: institutional facts (total interments, Tablets of the Missing, presence of Medal of Honor recipients, MG Rose’s burial) are consistent [1] [2] [8]. Variance arises when outlets pick particular graves or servicemen to profile; those selections reflect editorial aims—human-interest storytelling or local commemoration—rather than disputes over who is buried there [4] [3]. For definitive verification of names and honors, the American Battle Monuments Commission’s burial database and official cemetery registers remain the authoritative sources, while news and human-interest pieces supply contextual narratives and examples [8].