St. Urban church in Gelsenkirchen in the German Ruhr District intends to return a bronze historic bell, confiscated by Nazis during World War II to the parish in Radoszów in the Opole province. The Catholic weekly “Neues Ruhrwort” informed about the planned return of the over 400-year-old artefact.

During World War II, the Germans confiscated about 100,000. church bells as reserves of metal for armament purposes. Most of them were melted down, and about 16,000 survived and returned to their native parishes. Nevertheless, around 1,300 bells ended up in the “bell cemetery” in Hamburg and were redistributed. One of such bells is in possession of the parish of St. Urban in Gelsenkirchen.

Gelsenkirchen priest Markus Pottbaecker said he hadn’t noticed the bell before – and he did not suspect that such an old bell was hidden in a church built in 1954. In Pottbaecker’s opinion, the return of the bell to its home parish was an obvious matter, and the church council immediately endorsed the idea.

The German parish can organize transport of the bell on its own. Pastor Pottbaecker wrote to the parish in Radoszów on this matter.

Fr. Grzegorz Sonnek from Radoszów emphasized that the oldest inhabitants of the village knew that two of the three bells had been taken during the war, but no one had any idea where they were hidden. The people of Radoszów are glad that one of them will return to the parish. He added that the bell found in Gelsenkirchen was the larger of the two stolen artefacts and it stems from 1616.

This is not the first such case. Last year, the diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart in southern Germany announced that it would be returning bells stolen by the Third Reich, which were hidden in Württemberg after the war, instead of being sent to their rightful owners. The announcement concerned 54 bells belonging to over 40 parishes.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński