Four bells are hung in a wooden frame in front of the church “Maria Hilfe der Christisten” and are solemnly decorated with flowers.

One was cast in Opava in the Czech Republic in 1649 shortly after the Peace of Westphalia, it weighs 350 kilograms and hung in Pist in the Czech Republic until 1940.

A second comes from Danzig and was cast in 1704, it weighs 240 kilograms and rang in Frombork, Poland, until the Second World War.

Rudiger Soldt

Political correspondent in Baden-Württemberg.

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“We want to make amends injustice.

The bells were taken away by an injustice state in an act of violence, we are now bringing them back to Poland and the Czech Republic, ”says Gebhard Fürst, Bishop of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart.

Next to him are the Polish bishop Jacek Jezierski and his Czech colleague Martin David.

Peace bells instead of looted property

76 years after the end of the war, the looted property of the National Socialists is now being returned.

For the empty spaces in the bell towers in the churches of the diocese in Germany, new peace bells are being cast, designed by the artist Massimiliano Pironti.

They were also decorated by the community members in Grötzingen.

About ten years ago, during the renovation of the Rottenburg Cathedral, Bishop Fürst noticed that there was a bell from Poland in the ring of the church. Fürst did some research, it turned out that the bell had been stolen by the Nazis. Then Fürst began to develop the international understanding project “Peace Bells for Europe”.

For the bishop, the bell robbery is an “unsolved consequence of the Second World War” and an “unjust story”, which he now wants to turn for the better with church “peace and reconciliation work”. Fürst cannot answer why it had to take more than seven and a half decades before the church noticed that it was ringing in its church towers with stolen, historically valuable bells. This chapter of the history of the world war has not yet been adequately researched. In search of raw materials, Hermann Göring, Commander in Chief of the Air Force and representative for the four-year plan, ordered in March 1940 “to create metal reserves necessary for long-term warfare.The amounts of metal contained in bells made of bronze and parts of buildings made of copper are to be recorded and immediately made available to the German armaments reserve. "

"Bell cemetery" in the port of Hamburg

The National Socialists then confiscated more than 100,000 bells, including in the occupied territories.

In the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart alone, 2,799 church bells were destroyed during the Second World War; shortly after the end of the war in May 1945, around 16,000 bells were still stored at assembly points.

Around 1,300 church bells, mainly from the former German eastern regions, fell into the hands of the British occupation authorities in Hamburg.

The British initially stored the bells in a "bell cemetery" in the port of Hamburg.

When safekeeping and guarding became too time-consuming and expensive for them, they began to lend the bells to German communities in the early 1950s.

The complicated ownership structure and the legal background have not yet been fully clarified.

During the Cold War, the British evidently did not want to return the bells to the Warsaw Pact states either.

Hans Schnieders, the head of the “Peace Bells for Europe” project, found out that the two bells that are now being returned were brought by rail from Hamburg to the diocese on March 19, 1952 with 65 other bells.

54 of them are still hanging in the churches of the diocese, 13 were returned more or less by chance in the past 60 years.

The story can be told with every bell

"Since younger bells were usually melted down immediately during the war, the bells we are dealing with as part of the project are almost without exception historically significant instruments," says Schnieders. "We give back what belongs in another place, because bells always connect local history with major historical events," says Bishop Fürst.

The Frombork bell was cast in Danzig after a conflagration as a sign of hope; the one from Pist was donated by a Silesian-Moravian noble family. Place names, patronage, donor and foundry names, as well as the year and place of casting are almost always found in the bells. With every bell, especially if it is several hundred years old, history can be clearly told. References to the provenance of the church bells can be found in the "German Bell Archive" in the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg. “We are at the beginning of a process,” says project manager Hans Schnieder. "Everywhere we make contact there is interest in the project."

Fürst says he informed the German Bishops' Conference and its former secretary, Paul Langendörfer, about his peace project.

He does not know whether other bishops will follow his example.

The bishop will invest 400,000 euros in the project over the next six years.

“When a bell returns to its old home, we cast a new one in its place,” says Fürst.

The old and the new bells would then be blessed, they were "symbols of the Christian conviction of fraternity".