Dutch honor American war dead by ‘adopting’ their graves

In the fall of 1945, a Dutch teenager named Frieda van Schaik wrote a letter to the US military seeking the address of the mother of an Army officer and Harvard-trained architect who was killed about a month before the German surrender.

“He is buried at the large US military cemetery in Margraten, Holland, a place of six miles from where I live,” she wrote. “I am taking care of his grave.” 

Van Schaik’s letter inquiring about Army Capt. Walter “Hutch” Huchthausen sent US businessman and author Robert Edsel on an eight year odyssey to document the history of the little known Netherlands American Cemetery in the village of Margraten near the city of Maastricht. At the end of the Second World War, the cemetery

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