Until recently, hardly anything was known in the Netherlands about the participation of over a million African American soldiers in the liberation of the Netherlands, nor about the segregated US Army during WWII.
African American soldiers were not allowed to fight – with only a few exceptions. They were part of the Quartermaster’s support companies.
In the Municipality of Margraten in the south of the Netherlands, hundreds of them were assigned with the heavy task of burying soldiers and civilians at an American military cemetery that the US army had developed since September 1944.
One of the gravediggers was the African American soldier Jefferson Wiggins, 19 years of age. Sixty-five years after those gruesome months at that cemetery, Dr. Wiggins was invited to visit the Municipality of Margraten. He then discovered that none of the people he met there had ever heard about the strict race segregation in the US Army during WWII.
It is thanks to this veteran that so much more is now becoming known in the Netherlands about the participation of African American troops in the liberation of our country. He asked oral historian Mieke Kirkels to help him document his memories of that traumatic time in Margraten.
The book ‘Van Alabama naar Margraten’ [From Alabama to Margraten] which documents the memories of gravedigger Jefferson Wiggins was published in 2014, a year after Dr. Wiggins had passed away. Based on new and additional facts researched by Sebastiaan Vonk (MA) and Mieke Kirkels, the comprehensive second edition of the book was published in May 2023 and an English edition will be published in 2025.