- A claim circulated online in November 2025 that the Trump administration removed a memorial honoring fallen African-American soldiers in the Netherlands.
- The claim originated from a report in Dutch media that said the visitor center at the American Cemetery in Margraten, the Netherlands, removed two panels about the contributions of African-American soldiers in the U.S. armed forces during World War II. The report suggested the removal could be connected to U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
- The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), which manages American commemorative military cemeteries and memorials worldwide, said in an emailed statement that it temporarily removed one panel from display because it was part of a rotating exhibition that also featured other African-American soldiers. The group said it “rotated out” another panel following a review by former ABMC Secretary Charles Djou, whom former U.S. President Joe Biden nominated to the post.
- Janice Wiggins, the widow of one of the soldiers featured in the removed panels who lobbied for the display’s creation, said via email the panels were never meant to be rotating exhibitions and that she was not aware of the ABMC’s alleged review.
- The timing of the removal remained unclear. Dutch media and Black Liberators in the Netherlands, a project researching the contributions of African-American soldiers in the Netherlands during World War II, said visitors spotted the removal during the summer of 2025.
- Lawmakers in Margraten, where the American Cemetery is located, called for a temporary memorial to African-American World War II soldiers to be placed outside the cemetery grounds. According to reports, Theo Bovens, the chair of Black Liberators in the Netherlands, said he would ask Joseph Popolo, Trump’s appointed ambassador to the Netherlands, about the removal of the panels.
In November 2025, a claim (archived) circulated online that the Trump administration removed a memorial honoring fallen African-American soldiers in the Netherlands.
The Facebook page Occupy Democrats wrote, “BREAKING: The Trump regime has removed a memorial honoring fallen Black soldiers who helped liberate Europe in WWII!”
The claim also circulated on Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), X (archived) and Bluesky (archived). Snopes readers wrote in asking if the claim was true.
According to a series of posts (archived) from the Bluesky user @chriso-wiki.bsky.social, who writes about military history, Dutch media first reported that two panels (archived) at the American Cemetery in Margraten, a village in the Limburg province of the Netherlands, had gone missing from the cemetery’s visitors’ center. The panels reportedly informed visitors about the role of African-American soldiers in World War II.
The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), which manages American commemorative military cemeteries and memorials worldwide, said in an emailed statement on Nov. 10, 2025, that one panel featuring Technician Fourth Class George H. Pruitt “is currently off display, though not out of rotation.” The ABMC said that the agency “rotated out” a second panel based on “internal review of interpretive content under ABMC’s previous secretary.” The statement did not clarify what the review, allegedly carried out by Charles Djou, former U.S. President Joe Biden’s nominated ABMC Secretary, entailed.
Snopes reached out to Djou to confirm whether he carried out a “review of interpretive content” that resulted in the removal of the panel in question and await a reply to our query.
The date of removal was also uncertain, as the ABMC did not confirm that detail in its statement. The reputable Dutch newspaper NRC reported the visitor center removed the panels “sometime this year,” meaning 2025. Sebastiaan Vonk, a researcher with Black Liberators in the Netherlands, a project dedicated to sharing the contributions of African-American soldiers in the Netherlands during World War II, said via email that a visitor first noticed the panels disappeared “this summer.” Given the above, we leave the claim unrated.
Black Liberators in the Netherlands, whose researchers contributed to the wording on the removed panels, did not know about the removal ahead of time, according to Vonk.
Panels part of push to show history of African-American soldiers
Vonk said the visitor center installed the panel in part following a push from then-U.S. Ambassador Shefali Razdan Duggal as part of “an effort to ensure that the African American experience in the U.S. armed forces during World War II would be represented in the main exhibition of the new visitor center.”
Janice Wiggins, the widow of Jefferson Wiggins, an African-American soldier who worked as a gravedigger at Margraten and whose story was featured on one of the removed panels and in the Black Liberators in Europe research project, told Snopes via email that she and Duggal had lobbied for the creation of the panels.
Wiggins wrote, “Despite some current news reports, these panels were never intended to be part of a traveling exhibit or rotation. They were intended to be a permanent part of the Visitors Center exhibits.”
Wiggins added that she was “not familiar” with the ACMB’s claimed review.
Researcher linked Trump admin policies to panel removal
Theo Bovens, the chair of Black Liberators in the Netherlands, reportedly told Newsweek that Black Liberators could only “guess” at the reasons behind the removal of the panels. Wiggins also told Snopes she had no advance notice about the removal of the panels or the reason behind it.
In the NRC report, Kees Ribbens, senior researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, speculated that the removal could be “aligned” with the Trump administration’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Ribbens said that “a complaint against the ABMC appeared on the website of The Heritage Foundation” in March 2025 relating to the ABMC’s compliance with Trump administration policies. The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank in the U.S. that oversaw the creation of Project 2025, a proposed plan for a Republican presidential administration that it hoped the Trump administration would follow.
A Heritage spokesman said Ribbens was likely referring to an Op-Ed piece by a former staffer written in March 2020. The Op-Ed claimed the ABMC still employed a “Chief Diversity Officer” months after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”
The spokesman said claims that the Heritage Foundation published a “complaint” against the ABMC were “untrue—no such complaint exists.” ABMC reportedly told the Heritage Foundation at the time that it had placed its chief diversity officer on administrative leave.
Uncertainty remains over panel removals
ABMC’s statement did not directly corroborate speculation that the removal of the panels was due to Trump administration policy. According to the statement, the Pruitt panel was part of a rotating exhibition of 15 panels, four of which reportedly featured African-American soldiers. The ABMC said it “rotated out” the Wiggins panel following a content review carried out by the previous Biden-appointed agency secretary, according to the statement.
Snopes reached out to Djou, the secretary in question, to ask about this review and await a reply. We also asked Djou about Wiggins’ claim that the panels were meant to be permanent exhibitions.
Wiggins said she was not informed about the review that allegedly resulted in the removal of the Wiggins panel.
Gemeente Eijsden-Margraten, the local authority in Margraten, issued an appeal (archived) to the ABMC to “reconsider the removal of the panels and to give the stories of the Black Liberators a permanent place in the Visitor Center.”
Local lawmakers had also reportedly proposed a temporary “memorial for Black American liberators” outside the grounds of the cemetery.
Google Translate provided translations from Dutch into English.
