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Origin and history

The Hartmannswillerkopf, renamed Old Armand after 1918, is a Vosges peak culminating at 957 meters, located on the border between the communes of Hartmannswiller, Wuenheim, Wattwiller and Soultz-Haut-Rhin. This place was a major strategic issue during the First World War, due to its dominant position on the plain of Alsace, between Thann and Cernay, where the front line between the French and German zones passed. The fighting, particularly intense in 1915 (January, March, April, December), killed nearly 25,000 people, mostly French, who were known at the site as "Manger of Men" or "Mountain of Death".

The national monument, erected at Silberloch Pass, includes an ossuary crypt and a 1.67 ha military cemetery with 1,256 individual graves and 6 collective ossuary. Designed by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, it is one of four national memorials dedicated to the Great War, alongside Douaumont or Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. The battlefield, classified in 1921, preserves 45 km of trenches, concrete shelters and remains illustrating the asymmetry of fortifications: on the German side, reinforced concrete dominates, while the French works, provisional, reflect an offensive logic.

The site is also a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation. In 2014, Presidents François Hollande and Joachim Gauck commemorated together the centenary of the war, marking the first binational official ceremony in this place. A Franco-German historic, inaugurated in 2017 by Emmanuel Macron and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, now presents the key events. The topography of the Old Armand, offering a view of the Rhine plain, the Black Forest and sometimes the Swiss Alps, makes it a point of memory as well as geostrategic.

The name "Old Armand" comes from a phonetic deformation by the Poilus of the Alsatian term Hartmannswillerkopf ("head of Hartmannswiller"), interpreted as "Old Town of Armand". This summit, where enemy lines were only 22 metres apart, was the scene of a war of extreme position, with constant artillery duels and silence imposed to avoid being spotted. The remains, such as the 20-metre sommital cross or the monument of the 152nd Infantry Regiment (known as "Red Devils"), recall the intensity of the clashes.

Ranked as historic monuments since 1921, the site benefited from renovations for the centenary, including geological diagnostics to secure the underground. Artists, such as painter François Flameng, immortalized these struggles, while film (e.g. Jules and Jim de Truffaut) or documentaries (HWK, the man-eater) contributed to his fame. Today, paths allow us to travel through this place of memory, where nature and history mix together to evoke the brutality of war and the fragility of peace.

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