Article Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency
Article: Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA)
Website: https://www.dpaa.mil
Subject: Huertgen Forest – Identification Project Information
NOTE: The data shown below is static (January 16, 2026) Visit the DPAA website for the latest info!
Hurtgen Forest
Identification Project Information
Overview / Summary
During the Huertgen Forest Battle, more than 30,000 American casualties were reported and nearly 200 were never accounted for. Identifying these servicemembers who remained unaccounted for after the war, is the task of the Huertgen Forest Project. Launched in 2016, the project examines remains recovered during fieldwork and disinterments from American Battle Monuments Commission Cemeteries in Europe.
The Huertgen Forest Battle
The Huertgen Forest is a primarily forgotten battle in American military history. It was a 50-square-mile-large, thickly forested and undulating region in Germany near the Belgian border. Due to unfavorable terrain, tanks and artillery were at times halted, leaving American infantry soldiers alone against a seemingly unending line of German defenders. American troops first entered the forest in September 1944 with hopes of a rapid advance against a retreating German army. Instead, the U.S. Army found itself locked in a brutal battle for nearly six months, before clearing the remaining areas of the woodland in February 1945. During the combat in the Huertgen Forest, almost 34,000 Americans were killed, wounded or captured. In contrast, the defeated German Army suffered approximately 28,000 casualties.
Historical Investigation
Army graves registration personnel recovered hundreds of American remains from the Huertgen Forest between 1945 and 1951. Many of the fallen were discovered when German demining teams painstakingly and methodically cleared hundreds of thousands of landmines from the region. By this time, the remains were often in poor condition with their possessions and identification tags missing. Nonetheless, American Graves Registration Command officials did an outstanding job recovering and identifying most American casualties from the Huertgen Forest. By 1951, fewer than 300 were unaccounted for of the thousands of men who lost their lives there. Among the recoveries were around 170 sets of remains that could not be identified with the technology of the1940s and 1950s.
Around 1951, the U.S. government concluded its proactive search for Huertgen Forest casualties. This coincided with the end of the World War II Return of the Dead Program, and the Army’s prioritization of graves registration efforts in the ongoing Korean War. Over the next 65 years, German farmers, construction crews and metal detectorists in the Huertgen Forest occasionally stumbled across remains of an American in an old foxhole or isolated grave, and the Department of Defense dutifully recovered and identified them, bringing the total number of missing down even further.
Modern Accounting Efforts
In the 2000s, Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command resurrected the search for missing Americans in the Huertgen Forest through proactive research and investigations, paving the way for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency Huertgen Forest Project. The project formally began in 2016, shortly after the establishment of DPAA. The agency began with a list of 200 unaccounted-for Americans who died in or near the Huertgen Forest.
The effort to account for the Huertgen missing proved challenging. Even when DPAA historians can determine a general area where a missing Soldier was likely killed, DPAA could not use traditional survey techniques to look for metal to pinpoint a location, since millions of bullets, shrapnel and other battle debris still litter the Huertgen soil making metal detection surveys of little value.
As a result, discovering the missing in Huertgen Forest requires innovative and collaborative methods. DPAA’s Huertgen Forest Project is a joint endeavor between historians, scientists, foreign area liaisons and partner organizations such as the American Battle Monuments Commission and the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System DNA Identification Lab. It also receives tremendous assistance from third-party organizations, such as the University of Osnabrück in Germany, Stichting M.I.A. in the Netherlands and several independent researchers in the United States and Europe.
The project has three main phases: 1) individual case analysis, 2) the disinterment of unknown remains previously recovered from the Huertgen Forest, and 3) field investigation and excavation. While these phases in general follow the above sequential order, they inherently overlap and data gathered during each informs the others.
A DPAA historian investigates the specific circumstances of each missing American Soldier, writes a narrative describing this information for the Soldier’s family and historical reference, and records that person’s last known location, based on witness accounts or the Soldier’s unit located at the time of their loss, on a geographical information systems database. When seen collectively, this data allows the historian to create a geographical map depicting the dispersal of casualties across the Huertgen’s 50-square kilometers of territory. As a result, the Huertgen Project investigates the missing as individuals and as a group.
In 2015, the Department of Defense established a new policy that allows DPAA and its partner agencies to disinter the remains of unidentified American service members from military cemeteries after a thorough and lengthy approval process. The policy is meant to protect the sanctity of the grave, ensuring the nation’s fallen heroes are exhumed only with sufficient evidence the unknown remains will likely be identified. Therefore, DPAA must provide the Department of the Army with a historical and scientific justification for each disinterment. Starting from the individual case analysis, the DPAA historian turns to the unidentified remains found previously in the Huertgen Forest. The American Graves Registration Command found but could not identify around 170 sets of remains across the Huertgen battle area by field teams in the 1940s and 1950s. These remains were buried as Unknown Soldiers in American Battle Monuments Commission cemeteries in Europe. Historians can make historical and circumstantial connections by reviewing the grave registration records and maps of these remains. The DPAA anthropologists and odontologists then compare available documentation of the unknown remains, such as skeletal and tooth charts, to the personnel records of the missing Soldiers on the historian’s list. When historians and scientists agree that a set of unidentified remains likely can be identified as one of the missing Americans on the list, they recommend that the unknown be exhumed and sent to the DPAA laboratory for a full scientific evaluation.
On December 12, 2022, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that Pfc. William L. Simon had been accounted for, nearly 78 years after he was killed fighting German forces near the town of Germeter, Germany, during World War II. Simon’s identification answered his family’s questions and marked the 50th identification of DPAA’s Huertgen Forest Project.
As of 2023, 96 sets of previously recovered unknown remains from the Huertgen Forest have been disinterred and transferred to the DPAA Laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska for analysis and testing. When the remains arrive at the laboratory, they are subjected to the accredited laboratory’s strict protocols and procedures before being evaluated by a forensic anthropologist and forensic odontologist. The anthropologist’s job begins with inventorying the remains and deciding which bones will be examined for DNA. These samples are subsequently forwarded to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory for examination and comparison to DNA references provided by family members of missing service members from the Huertgen Forest. Anthropological analysis continues to estimate the biological profile of the remains sex, age, ancestry and stature, and check for any trauma present in the remains. Furthermore, the skeleton may contain alterations related to a person’s life events, such as a broken bone early in life. This data is then compared to the information for each of the missing service members to determine who matches a specific set of remains. Are they the same age? Are they the same height? When the estimated biological profile of the remains is consistent with a service member, they are still a candidate for this case. This is one line of evidence used to help narrow down the list of possible service members for a given set of remains.
A forensic odontologist also examines the dental remains to see which teeth are present, which are missing, and if there is any dental work present. This information is then compared to the dental charts known for each of the missing service members. If data discrepancy exists between teeth found in the remains of missing military personnel this could be explained or unexplained. An explainable difference would be a tooth that got a filling after the date of the last available dental record for a missing service member, since not all records are complete or available. An unexplainable difference would be if a specific tooth is present in the remains but was recorded as pulled in the records for a given service member. This would mean that the remains were not likely that person.
Once the DNA testing by Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and DPAA anthropological analysis and dental examinations are completed, the results are compared to the DPAA historian’s list of missing Soldiers lost in that area of the Huertgen Forest. When a service member is known to have been lost in the same area the remains were discovered, have a family reference DNA sample that matches the DNA of the remains, the same biological profile, and is also consistent with the teeth that are present, the case is then presented to the DPAA Medical Examiner for identification.
Analysis of these remains is ongoing in DPAA’s laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
Historical Timeline
- September 19, 1944: Start of the Battle of Huertgen Forest
- February 10, 1945: End of the Battle of Huertgen Forest
- 1945 – 1951: American Graves Registration Command recover Americans from the battle
- 2008: Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command begins compiling list of missing Americans and conducting research
- 2016: DPAA launches Huertgen Forest Project
- December 22, 2022: DPAA Announces 50th Identification of the project.
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