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Stealing church bells to make weapons of war, just how Jesus would have wanted. Poetic in a sad sense, really.
The nazis never gave a fuck about any religion
the churches should have paid taxes then if they wanted to not have the government take their own stuff back.
I'm not a supporter of tax free churches, but to say that merits the state plundering these ancient bells for their war machine sounds a bit like Trump saying countries that don't pay their NATO fees should be invaded by Putin.
My great grandmother's garden railings were taken for the same reason in the UK. So it wasn't really just a german thing
Yep, and the metal was not weapons-quality so almost none of it was used as ‘advertised’ was mostly a propaganda thing to make people feel like they were helping.
they then replaced many of these railings with regular mar materiel after the war. I've seen British fences made out of stretchers, rifle barrels, and cannon barrels
For anyone interested: https://9801.cz
Crowd funding campaign to make a large bell in this place for all 9801 bells confiscated in war times.
I looked in to it more and the bell is already made but crowd funding is still active to replace some of these bells (or for something else).
Was this voluntary?
No, they confiscated them for the copper and tin despite the Hague convention of 1907 where it was decided to not do this during war. Needless to say they didn't care.
Macht macht Recht.
It would be neat to collect scrap metal from battlefields to make a symbol of peace and complete the circle.
English kings would strip the lead from church rooves to make their trebuchets. nothing has changed (a great many of these bells in many countries were probably donated; patriotism and religion go hand in hand. not sure how it went with the Nazis though)