Tân Sơn Nhứt French military cemetery

Coordinates: 10 ° 47 '44.3 "  N , 106 ° 39' 17"  O The French Militärfriedhof Tan Son Nhut ( cimetière militaire français de Tan Son Nhut ), also called by the adjacent intersection cemetery Bảy Hiền referred was a cemetery for the French fallen in the Indochina War (1946–1954) in South Vietnam . It was located on the northwestern outskirts of Saigon in the south of the suburb of Tân Sơn Nhứt (known for the local airport ).

The cemetery was established in 1955, one year after the end of the war, as a collective cemetery ( cimetière de regroupement ); to have many thousands of casualties that had been previously buried distributed in local tombs over South Vietnam, Cambodia and southern Laos, here reburied . In addition to the European French, there were also numerous members of the North and West African colonial troops among the buried. In addition to the Ba Huyên necropolis in North Vietnam and the military part of the European cemetery in Vũng Tàu , the Tân Sơn Nhứt cemetery was one of the three major French war cemeteries in the former Indochina .

During the Vietnam War there was fighting on the cemetery grounds. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the communist government announced the leveling of European cemeteries in the early 1980s - thereby revoking one of the agreements concluded at the Indochina Conference. The French government then successfully endeavored until 1986 to exhumate and repatriate the dead to the Indochina War Memorial in Fréjus, southern France . In total, the remains of 27,239 dead were transferred from Vietnam to France in 1986/87, 7,640 of them from the southern part of the country. At the end of 1986 the cemeteries in Tân Sơn Nhứt and Vũng Tau were demolished. The old European cemetery of Saigon had been destroyed three years earlier, as was the mausoleum ( Lăng Cha Cả ) of Pierre Pigneau de Behaine, also located in Tân Sơn Nhứt .

The Tân Bình Exhibition and Congress Center ( Trung Tâm Triển lãm và Hội chợ Tân Bình ) is located on the site of the cemetery .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ron Steinman: The Soldiers' Story: An Illustrated Edition: Vietnam in Their Own Words , Wellfleet Press, 2015, p. 154 ( Google Books )
2. ↑ William Logan, Nguyen Thanh Binh: Victory and defeat at Dien Bien Phu: memory and memorialization in Vietnam and France , In: Martin opponent, Bart Ziino (ed.): The Heritage of War , Routledge, 2011, p. 50
3. ↑ archives.chez.com: Dépliant du Ministère des Anciens Combattants et Victimes de Guerre sur le mémorial des guerres en Indochine - LE RAPATRIEMENT DES CORPS
4. ↑ L'Association Nationale des Anciens et Amis de l'Indochine * (ANAI): Le mémorial de Fréjus
5. ↑ Guy Simon: Étude sur les sépultures militaires françaises au Vietnam  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ vnexpress.net: Bảy Hiền - đại điền chủ được đặt tên một ngã tư ở Sài Gòn

Web links

• Pictures of the cemetery: [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] , [5] , [6] , [7] , [8] , [9]