Page 7 - IAV Digital Magazine #449

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Thousand-year-old German Church's 'Hitler Bell' Will Remain In Place
by Alex Johnson, NBC News
An infamous bell dedicated to Adolf Hitler could ring again after the town council in a small German village voted not to dismantle it.
The local coun- cil in Herxheim am Berg, a town of about 700 people north of Heidelberg, in southwest Germany, voted 10-3 Monday night to reject requests to remove the massive 83- year-old bronze bell at Kirche St. Jakobus, or the Church of St. Jacob, the regional news- paper Die Rheinpfalz repor ted.
The bell bears a swastika and the inscription "Alles fuer's Vaterland — Adolf Hitler," or "Everything for the Fatherland — Adolf Hitler.
After having hung in the church tower with little notice for decades, the bell has been the object of
intense debate for almost a year after the church's organ- ist complained about it. The town's mayor, Roland
Becker, resigne d in
September after he gave a TV interview in which he quoted a local woman as saying Hitler should be remembered for
"the things he achieved." (Becker said he'd been taken out of context, but the damage was done.)
The new mayor, Georg Welker, supported keep- ing the bell in place — and even ringing it again — telling the public broadcasting program Kontra
ste last month that it could sound "the suf- fering of the vic- tims," both Jewish and non- Jewish. Before the vote Monday night, Welker submit- ted a report from a historian who said the bell is an official monument, meaning it can't be altered, Die Rheinpfalz
reported.
Welker pro- posed erecting a plaque intend- ed to put the bell in its histori- cal context, but the Central Council of Jews in Germany remained fierce- ly opposed.
"If the bell, which was hung in honor of Hitler, should again sound the call to worship, then — plaque or not — this to me would be a conscious renewed glorifi- cation of the Third Reich and the person of Hitler," the coun- cil's president, Josef Schuster, told Südwestrun dfunklocal radio on Tuesday
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