During the two world wars, Britain’s wartime enemy lost their lives in all corners of the country. German soldiers and civilians died in internment camps from sickness, disease and wounds, while in the skies above, German airmen died in First World War Zeppelin raids and in even great numbers some 25 years later during the Battle of Britain. Yet there are very few signs of these large-scale losses today. Despite the enemy generally being buried near where they died, most of the graves are long since gone, exhumed in the early 1960s to a new German military cemetery on Cannock Chase.

This paper explores how and why the enemy dead were moved in what became one of the largest post-war exhumation projects undertaken on British soil. Concentrating the German (and Austrian) dead into a single site was apparently needed to secure their graves and to make it easier for relatives to visit. Yet, as this paper argues, the exhumation project also transformed the British understanding of the German dead. First, the loss of the enemy graves, many of which had lain undisturbed for decades, destroyed the relationship to the original British custodians. Second, with move, a connection between the dead and the landscapes in which they had originally inhabited was lost. Third, in the new Cannock Chase cemetery, the enemy dead from the two World Wars, were unwittingly drawn together as Germans, regardless of their previous identities as First World War soldiers, Second World War airmen or even as civilians.