Committee for the repatriation of the bells
The Committee for the Return of Bells ( ARG for short ) was a facility for collecting and returning the German church bells confiscated for war purposes under National Socialism .
description
During the Second World War , a total of 42,583 German church bells made of bronze were smelted or smashed to break bells, as bronze was an important alloy for the manufacture of ammunition and weapons. Of these, 18,553 came from Protestant and 24,030 from Catholic communities. After the end of the war, around 13,500 bronze bells that had been confiscated for smelting but not melted down were stored at the bell cemetery in Hamburg ( Norddeutsche Affinerie ) and in Harburg, Oranienburg, Hettstedt ( Mansfelder Kupferschieferbergbau AG ), Ilsenburg ( Kupferwerk Ilsenburg AG ) and Lünen ( Hüttenwerke Kayser AG ) . To ensure this, the Allied authorities set up an initially bizonal committee in 1947 , which later also coordinated the return to the French and Soviet occupation zones. Christhard Mahrenholz took over the chairmanship of the then Oberlandeskirchenrat in the Landeskirchenamt Hannover . Reichsbahnrat Fritz Severin was one of the members responsible for transport matters. The ARG was not involved in the repatriation of the bells confiscated in the later years of the war from the occupied territories (Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary). It was carried out by the occupying powers directly or through agents.
The committee took over the negotiations with the allied military authorities and the competent authorities of the regional churches and dioceses . By 1953 all the bell camps were cleared and the bells, as far as they could still be identified, were returned to the former communities. Around 1,300 bells from the Polish and Soviet-occupied areas on the other side of the Oder and Neisse rivers , around 600 of them from Protestant and 700 from Catholic churches, were initially confiscated by the British military government and placed in a collective camp by the ARG. In order to avoid the costs of permanent landfill, the confiscation was lifted after the military government was replaced by the civil administration and the ARG loaned the bells to parishes in West Germany as so-called “godfather bells”.
In addition to securing the still intact bells, the committee also took over the collection of broken bells from German bells. In the largest German bell warehouse in Hamburg, there were still around 150 tons of broken bells that had been caused by bombing the warehouse. They were mainly given to communities in the GDR for the Neuguss to compensate for not being taken into account in the sponsorship bells . The churches in the GDR also received 63 bells whose hometown could no longer be identified. The rest was handed over to the regional churches in the Federal Republic, which suffered particularly heavy losses.
swell
The ARG ended its work towards the end of the first half of 1953. It was planned to divide the files that had arisen up to that point as follows: a) bell file, b) delivery card file c) correspondence. Accounting.
The following partial collections are currently in the Evangelical Central Archive in Berlin (holdings 52):
- 1) Articles of association, office, finances
- 2) return the bells
- 3) Loan and godparent bells
- 4) Press coverage
- 5) bell losses
- 6) correspondence
The inventory is almost completely limited to files created after 1945; For answering questions in connection with the delivery of bells in the war years, it seems less helpful. The circulars of the ARG from February 1947 to May 1960 (EZAB 52/181) and in particular the judgment of the LG Hamburg 1. WiK 891/51 appear to be particularly useful for a first insight into the context.
The estate of Christhard Mahrenholz is in the State Church Archives Hanover (holdings N 48).
literature
- Christhard Mahrenholz : The fate of the German church bells. Memorandum on the loss of bells in the war and the return of the saved church bells. Hanover 1952.
See also
Web links
- Got away again. Homecoming from the bell cemetery In: “Der Spiegel” 15/1947. Retrieved June 5, 2014