A Tale of Two D-Day Cemeteries

Reflections, for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, on my recent trip to the American — and German — military cemeteries in Normandy.

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Eighty years ago, today, countless brave men off the coast of France moved through choppy waves on hulks of steel before disembarking into a hellfire of bullets.

Within hours, thousands were dead.

On the deadliest beach, Omaha, a man named Robert Capa didn’t die. A Hungarian Jew who had moved to Germany to study, then fled when the Nazis rose to power, Capa became one of the greatest war photographers of all-time. He embedded himself with the American army, making shore with the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division. Capa captured the unfolding human tragedy—and the beginning of European liberation—on film, using his Contax II camera. His eleven surviving images are now known as The Magnificent Eleven.²

“People say there are no atheists in foxholes,” Kurt Vonnegut once wrote. “A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it’s a much better argument against foxholes.”

Humans have fallen victim to countless tragedies throughout history, wiped out by natural disasters, plagues, and famines. Wars, however, are of our own creation. We unleash them on ourselves.

Capa survived the war and continued to document our depressingly human instinct to kill one another. He died when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam.

Two Cemeteries of Normandy

My grandfather was a telephone company man who was in the U.S. Army during World War II. He was shipped off to London to help prepare for the D-Day invasions, though he wasn’t part of the invasion force.

Human tragedy envelops you when you visit the beaches of Normandy, as I did last summer, for the second time in my life. The horrors unleashed by the Nazi regime are overwhelmingly visceral there, particularly as I drove from Omaha Beach to two cemeteries—one American, one German—and tried to make sense of the senseless.

Today, Omaha Beach is just a picturesque beach seemingly like any other, vast stretches of sand overlooked by beautiful cliffs. But when you’re standing on it, mentally aware that the sand was previously soaked with blood, it’s impossible not to feel a sense of awe for what those soldiers did. They stepped off their landing craft into the shallow sea, knowing full well that thousands upon thousands of bullets would be flying at them, with nowhere to hide.

Who is worthy of remembrance?

Throughout human history, there has been a tension between memorials for soldiers and the merits of the causes they died to defend. Can you still celebrate the life of a soldier who died trying to kill others to advance an unjust cause?

In the early incarnations of America’s Memorial Day, for example, there was sharp debate: how should one commemorate those who died in the Civil War, but who fought to destroy the Union—and to defend slavery? For many, it was understandably impossible to separate the cause from the person—without exception.

But how are we supposed to make sense of David Bailey Freeman, the youngest Confederate soldier, who enlisted when he was eleven years old? Or Charley King, the Union drummer boy who, at the age of thirteen, died at Antietam? Surely, these children, regardless of which side they fought on, were both victims of war. Are we supposed to hate an eleven year-old in the wrong uniform?

Memorials inevitably bring us face to face with philosophical questions of justice, collective memory, free will, moral culpability, and individual vs. national responsibility. Nowhere is that tension more on display than in Normandy.

From shining white marble to rough black stone

The American military cemetery in Normandy is an astonishing sight. Perched above the beaches below, it is hauntingly beautiful. There’s row upon row of shining white marble headstones—mostly crosses, but peppered with Stars of David, marking the Jewish soldiers who gave their lives fighting a regime that was perpetrating the Holocaust.

The site shimmers as you walk through it, sunlight reflecting off the marble, as it stretches seemingly endlessly, through the ranks of 9,387 graves.

I first visited the American cemetery when I was 19 years old, my first trip outside the United States, as I was studying abroad in Paris. I went alone, on a quiet day, when a cemetery is at its most peaceful. And while I was overwhelmed by the scale of the loss, it was also a gut punch to realize how many people buried there were younger when they died than I was at the time, a mere teenager, feeling like I was just beginning my life. They, unlike me, would never return home.

A photo I took last summer in the American cemetery in Normandy.

The largest military cemetery in Normandy isn’t, however, the American one. It’s La Cambe, the Nazi military cemetery. This time, I decided to visit it.

The contrast is immediate. Whereas the American cemetery is bright and white, the German one is dark and black. The gravestones are cut from a rough, plain dark stone, a striking juxtaposition with the pristine white marble. And rather than being perched on a clifftop overlooking the vast expanse of ocean, La Cambe is on an ordinary field, a few dozen meters from a busy two-lane highway, a rural afterthought.

La Cambe contains the graves of 21,222 German soldiers.

Some were monsters—the worst of the worst. Adolf Diekmann is buried there, a Nazi officer in the Waffen SS who orchestrated the skin-crawling massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. Diekmann ordered the killings, in which 643 civilians, including 247 women and 205 children, were either burned to death in a church, or slaughtered with machine guns. Only one villager survived.

But as you walk through the cemetery and read the stones, you mostly see teenagers. Roughly eighty percent of the gravestones in La Cambe are for men and boys under the age of 20. The youngest soldier buried there was 16 when he was killed. (The oldest was 72).

Consider this gravestone I photographed, covered with fresh rain, of two boys—one barely 18, the other still a few months from his 18th birthday. They died within a few weeks of D-Day. Both, by fighting in a Nazi uniform, were perpetrators. There can be no moral equivalency here, no downplaying of the horrific abuses of the regime they fought for. Their actions helped advance the cause of one of the worst ideologies in human history.

But it was impossible for me to not also see these boys—one still legally a child—simultaneously as victims of the Nazi regime. Perpetrators and victims.

The dilemma emerges because war graves have a dual purpose: one part individual and personal, the other part collective and pragmatic.

A war grave, for the family of the fallen, is about the person. This was a 17 year-old kid who was someone’s son. They, like all of us, had a personality, dreams, aspirations. But a war cemetery, as a public space, isn’t about individuals. It serves a broader social purpose: to teach future generations about justice, virtue, and the perils of evil.³

Even if we accept that a 17 year-old conscript bears less moral responsibility than a 40 year-old Waffen-SS officer who ordered a massacre, there can be social utility in ignoring that nuance in pursuit of reinforcing the more important message: that the Nazi blight on humanity must never repeat itself. Moral complexity may not always be the most useful tool against fascism.

And yet, social science research—from the Milgram Experiment to studies of brainwashing and propaganda—has demonstrated how seemingly ordinary people can commit extraordinarily brutal acts. If you study authoritarianism, as I do, it’s impossible to ignore this complexity. Ideology, twinned with powerful demagogues, provides a catalyst of mass atrocities. When destructive, hateful ideology is at its most potent—as in totalitarian states—few are immune from its poison. How would you behave today if you had been born in North Korea?

This is not to absolve perpetrators, or to water down condemnation of the regimes they fight for, but a reminder that we must understand them—because only by understanding how a 17 year-old German teenager ends up dead in a war cemetery in France can we hope to cease the endless, but avoidable, replication of mass atrocities in human affairs.

The Glorious Dead?

Shortly after World War II ended, Major General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr. was asked to give a speech to dedicate the American cemetery at Nettuno in Italy.

Truscott wasn’t a man for fanfare. He had no time for the political blowhards who knew nothing of the horrors of war, but who were eager to celebrate the fallen dead with a speech and a ceremony. Empty words meant nothing to a man who had watched young men die in hordes.

When it was Truscott’s time to speak, he stood up, turned his back on the gathered crowd, and instead addressed his former troops—the men he had commanded—who were now buried in the ground.

Bill Mauldin, a journalist with Stars and Stripes, who was there for the speech, recounts what Truscott said:

He apologized to the dead men for their presence here…He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances...Truscott said he would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn't see much glory in getting killed in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do.

Then, he turned, without looking back at the gathered crowd, and left.

Wars sometimes become necessary—to defend innocent people from horrific aggression wrought by tyrants and dictators. But we must remember the broader lessons: that totalitarian, fascist ideologies are a stubbornly enduring scourge of our species and that the human cost of wars, past and present, is a nauseating waste.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. If you’re interested in similarly thorny ethical debates, I’ve made two podcast episodes about the complexity of moral blame and collective punishment: The Unthinkable Olive Branch and War Criminal or Victim?

1. Part of this article is recycled from a similar piece I wrote last year, back when I had a tiny subscriber base. Apologies if you’re one of those heroic early readers who has now seen some of this writing before, but…it’s the eightieth anniversary, most readers haven’t seen this, and there won’t be many more anniversaries with living survivors of D-Day left, so I figured one last hurrah was worthwhile.

2. Capa claims that he took more than a hundred photos on D-Day but that most of them were lost. This account is disputed and it’s now widely believed that he only took eleven shots, all of which survived.

3. If you’ve read Fluke, you know that I don’t believe in libertarian free will, a complex debate that I can’t fully explain in a footnote. But even if you do believe in free will, it’s obvious there are structural factors that affect moral decision-making. It’s clearly not true that Germany was full of millions of moral monsters and America or Britian or Canada were full of moral angels during World War II. Yet, even in a world without free will, memorials that teach moral lessons—and condemn atrocities—are worthwhile because they serve a useful social function beyond individuals and the neural and social origins of their behavior. As

Sam Harris

has previously written “If we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well…Clearly, we can respond intelligently to the threat posed by dangerous people without lying to ourselves about the ultimate origins of human behavior.”