The story of this place
After the Battle of Verdun ended in 1916, the churned battlefield was strewn with the unrecovered and unidentifiable remains of tens of thousands of soldiers, French and German alike. The Douaumont Ossuary, inaugurated in 1932, gathers the commingled bones of an estimated 130,000 unknown men, visible through small windows at the base of the monument. Its 46-metre 'lantern of the dead' tower can be seen for miles; before it stretches a cemetery of 16,142 French crosses. Fort Douaumont nearby, the strongest of Verdun's forts, was captured by a handful of Germans in 1916 and became a focus of the battle's savagery. Each year Franco-German ceremonies of reconciliation are held here.