From whom does Germany’s Herxheim am Berg Hitler Bell toll?
By Kevin Fobbs
[Originally Published on commdiginews.com on February 28, 2018]
WASHINGTON, February 28, 2018 – For more than seventy years the visions, memories and horrors of the Nazi genocidal extermination of over six million Jewish people are still mourned. The Hitler bell has hung in the Protestant Church of St. James in Herxheim am Berg, a tiny German municipality about 50 miles southwest of Frankfurt, since 1934. A swastika is displayed front and center. Above the symbol the German inscription says “EVERYTHING FOR THE FATHERLAND.” And it includes the name, Adolf Hitler.”
The Hitler bell rings for weddings, baptisms and more 1934 marks the year Hitler came to power. For the last 84 years, the bell with his name and the dreaded image of the swastika has rung over the inhabitants of Herxheim am Berg every quarter of an hour. With the extinction of every innocent life of a Jewish child, mother, father, grandchild, sister, brother, aunt or uncle in German concentration camps this ‘Hitler Bell’ kept time.
Yet, recently the town council of Herxheim voted 10-3 to reject an offer by the Protestant Church of St. James to remove and replace the bell by the Protestant Church of St James. It appears that the memory of the deaths of over six million human beings is far less important than keeping the bell.
