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Village in southwest Germany votes to keep ‘Hitler bell’ as memorial

A German village has decided to keep a contentious Nazi-era church bell that bears a swastika and the words "All for the Fatherland - Adolf Hitler", arguing it serves as a reminder of the country's dark past.

Published: 27 February 2018 10:45 CET
Village in southwest Germany votes to keep 'Hitler bell' as memorial
Photo: DPA

The parish council of Herxheim voted 10-3 on Monday that the bronze bell from 1934 should remain as “an impetus for reconciliation and a memorial against violence and injustice”.

The council rejected an offer by the regional Protestant Church to pay for taking down the 240 kilogram bell and replacing it.

A memorial pointing to the bell's history will now be fixed on the heritage-listed church, the Jakobskirche.

The village of just 700 people has repeatedly caught national attention for the controversial “Hitler bell” since a former church organist complained about the inscription.

Some church-goers were dismayed to find out that they had got married, baptized their children or joined other religious ceremonies and events under the Hitler bell.

Last year the former town mayor, Roland Becker, resigned over comments that appeared to defend not just the bell but the Nazi era.

Amid the controversy, the bell was silenced last September and a second one used, pending the municipal decision in the southwestern village near the university city of Heidelberg.

At Monday evening's meeting, village mayor Georg Welker said that “the community needs clarity which way we should go”, national news agency DPA reported.

He presented an expert's opinion that judged the bell had heritage value and should either stay in place or be taken to a museum.

Disposing of it would represent “an evasion of a reasonable and enlightened culture of remembrance”, the expert's opinion found.

The decision by the council to keep the bell was greeted with applause from many community members, DPA reported.

TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

Published: 16 May 2023 08:29 CEST
France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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