Some Bells Survived

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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Church bells are certainly connected to the holiday season – which reminds me of one of the more overlooked depredations of World War II: The Nazis confiscated tens of thousands of bells from churches throughout Europe. Remarkably, some were returned . . . and are still being returned and restored.

According to the National Bell Festival, between 1939 and 1945, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler took over 175,000 bells from towers throughout Europe. That staggering sum speaks to how unrelenting their plundering was. To feed their war machine and keep their armies outfitted, the Nazis needed vast quantities of metals. Like plucking fruit from a tree, they turned to peaceable, defenseless bell towers to pillage their scrap.

Bells are composed of bronze, an alloy of roughly four parts copper to one part tin. Both metals were crucial to the German armament industry. Nations pleaded for their bells to be spared, but in blatant indifference to the 1907 Hague Convention treaty that prohibited such wartime conduct, they were ignored. In defiance, some communities attempted to hide their bells, often by burying them in surrounding grounds or on parishioners’ land. This, however, had to be completed before the Nazis took a local inventory, sometimes in collusion with the presiding clergy. It was a grave risk.

The Nazis graded or categorized bells into four groups, A through D, based on their historical or cultural value. “A” bells were cast within the preceding ninety years and therefore generally considered without merit. They were the first to be destroyed. Similarly, “B” bells and then “C” bells were sent for smelting. “D” bells, or those cast before 1740, were treated more like art than commodity and preserved for their noble virtues, which the Nazis relied upon to build a façade of legitimacy. Often, the Nazis would allow one bell of insignificant size to remain in a tower, for the village or community to ring in emergency. The rest were transformed into weapons of war.

Confiscated bells from across the Third Reich’s conquered territories were funneled into Germany for processing – from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the USSR, and Yugoslavia. The Vatican, in a prewar agreement with Mussolini’s government, sought to preserve at least half of the bells in church towers. This all but guaranteed the other half would be claimed for war industries.

Toward the end of the war, not even German bells were spared requisition. The bells made their way via river and rail to enormous Glockenfriedhöfe, or bell cemeteries, where they were broken down and melted into large bronze ingots, before being sent along to refineries for further processing. The two largest refineries were just outside the port city of Hamburg in northern Germany. There, the deluge of bells was reduced to component metals: mostly copper and tin, but also lead, zinc, silver, and gold. Tin, especially, became shell casings and armaments.

Of the 175,000 bells seized, postwar figures estimate that over 150,000 were destroyed. With bombings and air raids leveling additional towers throughout the war, the number of lost bells is even greater. Following Germany’s surrender, the Vatican Commission for the Restoration of Bells and the Inter-Allied Commission on the Wartime Preservation of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas (known more commonly as the “Monuments Men”) sought to repatriate bells to their original owners, but that process is ongoing. Most were lost entirely, some remain hidden or buried, and others are said to still reside in Hamburg warehouses.

Bells from World War II make news even today, when the odd one is unearthed or rediscovered. In some churches in Germany, congregations are continuing to reckon with the country’s dark past. A few bells cast in the 1930s and emblazoned with the swastika or a tribute to Adolf Hitler still hang in local bell towers – causing a rift between cash-strapped churches who can’t afford to replace them and concerned citizens.

Decades after the war, communities whose beloved church bells were hidden from the Nazis are still finding buried treasure. In 1994, a 450-pound bell was found buried in Emmaste, Estonia. In 2021, researchers near Krosno, Poland, uncovered a bell that had been buried for 80 years.

To end on an uplifting note: A few days before Christmas in 1943, Nazi soldiers confiscated bells from the church in the French city of Mittersheim. The bells were taken to the nearby town of Fénétrange, where German soldiers planned to ship them back to Germany. For some unknown reason, the bells were never transported and remained at the station until 1944.

When troops from the U.S. Fourth Armored Division liberated Fénétrange, they sent the bells back to Mittersheim just before Christmas in 1944. Several days later, the mayor of Mittersheim and two village pastors sent a letter to the general of the division:

“For all of us, Catholic, Protestant, it is the most beautiful Christmas gift imaginable. This Christmas, we shall again hear the chimes which we missed for so long a time, and which, thanks to the 4^th American Armored Division under your command, have this day been returned to us. Please accept the thanks of a grateful community.”

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one is Running Deep: Bravery, Survival, and the True Story of the Deadliest Submarine in World War II. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.