[2] The cemetery was created in November 1944 under the leadership of Lt. Col. Joseph Shomon of the 611th Graves Registration Company, as the Ninth United States Army pushed into the Netherlands from France and Belgium.

At the outset, it was determined that the cemetery would congregate war dead within 600 km of Margraten with the goal that no Americans would remain buried in enemy territory.

It would eventually comprise 65 acres on an historic former Roman highway that had carried the growth of Europe and movements of war since the Early Middle Ages.

As the winter went on the process was complicated by frozen dead, the constant flooding of graves before they could be filled and the inability of transport and machinery to maintain reliable solid ground.

The response of the village initiated a full relationship between south Limburg Province of the Netherlands and the American cemetery that remained active into the 21st century.

The cemetery was ceremonially opened on Memorial Day 1946[7] as an event of international attention and with the attendance of twenty trucks full with flowers from sixty surrounding villages.

There is a visitors' building and a museum with three engraved operations maps designed by Yale University graduate Lewis York (who is buried in Akron, Ohio) and executed by the Dura Company of Heerlen, Holland, describing the movements of the American forces in the area during World War II.

[11] At the base of the chapel tower, facing the reflecting pool, is a statue by Joseph Kiselewski representing the grieving mother for her lost son.

An approximate and regularly changing number (due to identification and other factors) of just more than 8,000 American dead, most of whom fell in nearby battles, are interred in the cemetery with headstones set in long curves.

"[14] In 2014, The Faces of Margraten[15] project opened an effort to gather photographs of each of those buried for display on alternate Memorial Days, and had assembled a library of 7,500 by 2020.

In 2018, attention turned to 172 African American soldiers found to have been buried at Margraten and the role that they had played in the liberation and restoration of the Netherlands.