The onset The start The current situation
It must have been in 1996 when one of the future founders of V.O.G.W. was passing the cemetery at the St. Jansplein in the centre of Waalwijk. His attention was drawn to a green shield at the gate that told him an Allied serviceman was buried there. He decided to look for the grave and pay it a visit.
To learn more about the young soldier buried there, he went straight to the town archives only a short distance away. Here, he expected to be told everything he wanted to know. But that was not the case! The archives could not provide all that much information about the subject, or the soldier. The question was whether this would be the case for the entire region.
It turned out that another thirteen War Graves were to be found in the area and in all the local archives they had little or no information about the servicemen buried there. This just didn't seem right to our future founder, thinking: "This is not the way we should treat our liberators, who paid the highest price of all for our liberation in 1944-1945!".
A start was made by collecting as much information as possible about the military servicemen and the first results came slowly but encouragingly. Still, after two years it became clear that more time and money was needed to keep up this work. Three other people equally interested in the issue were found and on January 5th, 1998 V.O.G.W. was officially established.
At present all operations are running smoothly and the V.O.G.W. foundation has already done a lot of work. Every year we go out to give tutorials and lectures about our field of interest. Many relatives and war veterans have been our guest, and they had an excellent time over here. And we will carry on.