"The bells, too, are fighting": the fate of European church bells in the second world war.(Report)

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Allied governments sent experts to Germany in search of resources, intelligence, scientific data, and personnel. (2) Project Paperclip was the codename for the well-known Ameriean programme that brought foreign scientists to the United States. Canada had its own version of this intelligence-gathering initiative. One of the experts sent to Germany by the Canadian government in 1945 was Percival Price. Price was seconded both to the Inter-Allied Commission on the Wartime Preservation of Artistie and Historic Monuments in War Areas, and to the Joint Committee on Enemy Science and Technology (JCEST). (3) The unlikely objects of Price's investigations were European church bells found in German refineries--the remnants of Nazi efforts to confiscate non-ferrous metal across Europe. (4)

Price's findings paint a vivid picture of the impact on European patrimony of the Nazi thirst for strategic raw materials. A closer look at the fate of European church bells, however, reveals that this one minor episode in the history of wartime Europe can tell us a good deal about the war, its aftermath, and its legacy. The Nazi programme of recovering and smelting church bells throughout Germany, Austria, and Occupied Europe illustrates both the ideological aims of National Socialism and of Nazi occupation policy in Eastern and Western Europe, and the practical constraints that shaped the Nazi war effort. The "Vichy exception" to the Europe-wide confiscation of bells testifies to the degree of autonomy and latitude enjoyed by Marshal Petain's collaborationist regime. Finally, efforts on the part of Allied occupation forces to repatriate surviving bells after the war were shaped by postwar debates over reconstruction and reparations, German victimhood, the relationship between German churches and Hitler's regime, and the postwar politics of memory.

I. Bells Do Battle

In the early 1940s, German occupation authorities had a few small bells cast in the Netherlands to commemorate the confiscation of European church bells to support the Nazi war effort. Bearing the inscription "The bells too are fighting for a new Europe," they were commissioned as mementos for leading Nazis involved in implementing this facet of Germany's economic exploitation of Europe. (5) By the end of the Second World War, almost 150,000 church bells dating from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, from church towers all over the European continent, had been melted down. (6)

The confiscation and destruction of church bells in wartime is a practice of long standing. It is a tradition in European warfare that an artillery commander has rights over the bells in conquered towns. (7) Napoleon in particular relished claiming this right, and added to his war coffers by requiring vanquished cities to buy back their bells. (8) If communities could not, the commanding general was entitled to dispose of the bells as he saw fit, one half of the revenue was his, the other half went to the central treasury. (9)

There is an equally lengthy tradition of nations looking to their own church bells to support their war efforts. During the eighteenth century, bells routinely fed various military campaigns. (10) During the Franco-prussian War, the bishop of Nancy authorized every parish in his diocese to take down all but one of their bells to make cannons for the defence of France. (11) By the time it was internationally agreed, under the Hague Conventions in 1910, that church bells should be protected and not used for war purposes, there existed a long chain of memories linking the loss of bells to warfare, either through voluntary sacrifice, or through invasion, defeat, and punishment. (12)

In spite of the Hague Conventions, German church bells were "mobilized" once again during the Great War, but it was between 1939 and 1945 that this trend reached its zenith, and the greatest damage to European church bells occurred. (13) The Nazi occupation of Europe saw a volume of confiscation and subsequent destruction of bells that that was unprecedented. This was the result of the nature of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Europe, the priorities of the Nazi regime, and the industrial capacity of the Nazi state. All of these considerations have roots in National Socialist ideology.