This cemetery, located about two kilometres from the village of Łambinowice (Lamsdorf in German, Opole Voivodeship), was initially built during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 for the 52 French prisoners who died in detention in a former Prussian training camp nearby, which held between 3,500 and 4,000 prisoners. In the following years, German soldiers as well as people working in the service of the camp were buried there alongside the French soldiers. During the First World War, a second cemetery was built right next to it, bounded by a separate fence, where prisoners from the Entente countries (Poles, Serbs, Romanians, Russians, Britons, Italians…) held in the surrounding camps were buried (approximately 7,000 graves). This second cemetery expanded during the interwar period with the graves of German immigrants held in a German immigrant camp. During this period, some remains of prisoners were exhumed (Britons, French, Italians, Belgians). The two cemeteries were merged in the 1930s. The Second World War also brought its share of prisoners who died in captivity, held in one of the largest groups of Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war camps, located near the village (Stalag VIII-B, Stalag 318 / VIII F and Stalag 344).
Although the exact number of prisoners is not known (between 40,000 and 100,000 prisoners died, out of a total of around 300,000 prisoners of various nationalities), exhumations carried out at the end of the war made it possible to count about 40,000 remains of prisoners, most of them Soviet, buried in common graves outside the cemetery fence. The cemetery was placed on the list of national historic monuments in 1968 and is part of the national places of remembrance of Łambinowice (together with all the remains of the former camps near the village).
In the middle of the French plot stands a war memorial with a marble cross sculpted by Mr F. Stenzel, erected by the French soldiers at the end of the war of 1870-71. Three inscriptions are engraved on its base: "In memory of the French soldiers who died in 1870-71" followed by a quotation from the Bible in Latin ("Et nunc meliorem patriam appelunt", Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 16), then "Erected by their compatriots". Very recently, a project to renovate the graves and the monument was undertaken by the Souvenir Français.