Located in one of the deadliest areas of the Alsace front, Sigolsheim National Cemetery is home to soldiers who died for France during the Battle of the Colmar Pocket (5 December 1944 – 9 February 1945). Construction work took place from 1962 to 1965 and the cemetery was inaugurated on 2 May 1965 by the Minister of Veterans Affairs and Madame de Lattre de Tassigny. The cemetery houses the bodies of soldiers exhumed from communal cemeteries in Haut Rhin, Vosges and Territoire de Belfort.
It also contains the bodies of 1,589 French soldiers buried in individual graves, including 792 graves of North African soldiers and 15 Jewish soldiers’ graves.
References:Saint-Georges de Boscherville Abbey is a former Benedictine abbey. It was founded in about 1113 by Guillaume de Tancarville on the site of an earlier establishment of secular canons and settled by monks from the Abbey of Saint-Evroul. The abbey church made of Caumont stone was erected from 1113 to 1140. The Norman builders aimed to have very well-lit naves and they did this by means of tall, large windows, initially made possible by a wooden ceiling, which prevented uplift, although this was replaced by a Gothic vault in the 13th century. The chapter room was built after the abbey church and dates from the last quarter of the 12th century.
The arrival of the Maurist monks in 1659, after the disasters of the Wars of Religion, helped to get the abbey back on a firmer spiritual, architectural and economic footing. They erected a large monastic building one wing of which fitted tightly around the chapter house (which was otherwise left as it was).