An excerpt from, "The seizing of Europe’s bells" by Stephen J. Thorne, Legion Magazine, October 8, 2025:
The bells that rang out across allied nations after the First World War ended what for many had been a four-year silence enforced by regulation in some places and imposed by confiscation in others.
In Germany and across Europe, tens of thousands of bronze bells—some imparting “the songs of the angels” since the 12th century—had been seized and melted down for arms and munitions.
During the First World War, 44 per cent of the bells in Germany alone were lost, many given willingly to support the war effort—and some not so willingly.
In the parish of Kusel in southwestern Germany, Deacon Karl Munzinger had grudgingly resigned himself to the inevitable after resisting a decree ordering the surrender of bells to be melted down and converted to guns and shells.
“They will speak a different language in the future,” Munzinger said in his sermon on July 22, 1917. “It goes against any feelings that they, who like no other preach peace and should heal wounded hearts, should tear apart bodies in gruesome murders and open wounds that will never heal.”
The practice wasn’t limited to the conflict of 1914-18, either.
Between 1939 and 1945, 175,000 bells across Europe were taken by Nazi Germany. They were transported to collection points, known as Glockenfriedhöfe, or bell cemeteries, the biggest of them in Hamburg. Some 150,000 were delivered to foundries and melted down to make shell casings and armaments.
Benito Mussolini’s government actually forged a prewar agreement with the Vatican providing for the “mobilization” of Italian bells under which half were to be claimed for war industries. As was the case in Germany, at least one bell designated by local authorities was to remain in every tower.
The bells were to be broken up in Italy and the scrap sent to Hamburg for processing because Italian smelting plants did not have the capacity to meet the deluge.
Bell metal is typically made of a hard alloy usually composed of four parts copper to one part tin. It is known for its hardness and rigidity, but the Germans broke up the bells, then smelted and refined the bell metal, separating the copper, tin and other metals, including lead, zinc, even silver and gold. A tonne of bell metal would typically yield 760 kilograms of copper and 180 of the more sought-after tin.
After the Second World War, Canadian Percival Price, Canada’s first dominion carillonneur and, in fact, the designer of the Peace Tower carillon in Ottawa, was dispatched to help investigate and repatriate as many bells as possible.
Price was serving as a consultant to the Vatican Commission for the Restoration of Bells and the Inter-Allied Commission on the Wartime Preservation of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, better known as the Monuments Men.
A member of the Canadian army’s Enemy Science and Technology Investigation Section, Price spent two years helping Austrian, Belgian, Dutch, West German and Italian government commissions locate and repatriate bells.
An excerpt from, "When Nazis Took All the Bells" The National Bell Festival:
Between 1939 and 1945, the National Socialist German Workers' Party under Adolf Hitler – the Nazis – confiscated over 175,000 bells from towers throughout Europe. That staggering sum is only part of the devastation and horror exacted by the Nazis during World War II, but it speaks to the plundering of identity and soul that made the Nazi occupation so catastrophic.
Much was destroyed during World War II. From human lives to cultural artifacts, the Nazis were unrelenting in their conquest. But to feed their war machine and keep their armies outfitted, the Nazis needed vast quantities of metals – and like plucking fruit from a tree, they turned to peaceable, defenseless bell towers to pillage their scrap.
Bells are composed of bronze, an alloy of roughly four parts copper to one part tin. Both metals were crucial to the German armament industry. Nations pleaded for their bells to be spared, but in blatant indifference to the 1907 Hague Convention treaty that prohibited such wartime conduct, they were ignored. In defiance, some communities attempted to hide their bells, often by burying them in surrounding grounds or on parishioners’ land. This, however, had to be completed before Nazis took a local inventory and in collusion with the presiding clergy. It was a grave risk.
The Nazis graded or categorized bells into four groups, A through D, based on their historical or cultural value. “A” bells were cast within the preceding ninety years and therefore generally considered without merit. They were the first to be destroyed. Similarly, “B” bells and then “C” bells were sent for smelting. “D” bells, or those cast before 1740, were treated more like art than commodity and preserved for their noble virtues, which the Nazis relied upon to build a façade of legitimacy. Often, the Nazis would allow one bell of insignificant size to remain in a tower, for the village or community to ring in emergency. The rest were transformed into weapons of war.
Confiscated bells from across the Third Reich’s conquered territories were funneled into Germany for processing – from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the USSR, and Yugoslavia. The Vatican, in a prewar agreement with Mussolini’s government, sought to preserve at least half of the bells in church towers. This, of course, all but guaranteed the other half would be claimed for war industries.
Video Title: The Hidden Truth About Church Bells. Source: Beyond the Bell. Date Published: March 31, 2025.
