There was again a glitch in the system - while a pop-up told me my upload failed, it actually didn't. So after a while, I clicked again, and now I have a double of my previous blog. To distinguish between the two, I will add another image here on top.
GOLDEN BELL - created with Nightcafe AI
[ANTHEM by Leonard Cohen](https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-anthem-lyrics )
*Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in*Near the bottom of my post, find the video of ANTHEM
Recently I ran into a historical Story about the fate of bells in 1917, during the First World War. Not long ago, on August 1st, the AI platform Nightcafe ran a daily challenge, honoring bells. Below this, I try to tell the story about the fate of bells in Europe, in 1917, what I found out researching after initially seeing a interesting video on Facebook. Subsequently I found it was also available on YouTube.
THE BELL - created on Nightcafe AI
THE GREAT BELL MELT OF 1917
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EImWGczUw1M
Across Germany and other areas affected by the First World War, church bells that had marked generations of ordinary life were being taken down from their towers.
They were not simply pieces of old bronze.
For centuries, these bells had announced Sundays, weddings, funerals, celebrations, and moments of crisis. Then wartime shortages turned them into a strategic source of metal.
Beginning in 1917, German authorities systematically inventoried and classified church bells for possible requisition. Bells considered less valuable for historical or artistic reasons could be removed and sent away for their metal.
And the photographs reveal the part that official statistics cannot fully capture.
People gathered to watch their bells being lowered.
Some communities decorated them with flowers and garlands before they were taken away.
In some places, farewell services were held for bells that had been part of community life for generations.
This documentary follows that forgotten chapter of World War I history — from the shortage of strategic metals and the decision to requisition church bells, to the people who watched them disappear and the silence that remained behind.
The bells were removed.
The towers remained.
But the sound was gone.
This is The Great Bell Melt of 1917 — The Lost Frequencies of the Old World.
Source: [Old World Proof Org](https://www.youtube.com/@oldworldprooforg)
At first, I could not believe it, I thought it a conspiracy theory - but researching I found it actually happened, though I still think the angle about Rockefeller and Big Pharma is 'questionable' (in part).
Research Results
A bell field in Galicia [Source](https://visualheritage.eu/en/portfolio/surveys-of-church-bells-at-the-time-of-the-first-world-war/)
[Bells for bullets: metal collection](https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/bells-bullets-metal-collection)
Mining was stepped up during the war to ensure the supply of metals. Metal was also collected and melted down for military purposes. Examples included the Patriotic War Metal Collection committee and the melting of church bells.
The Patriotic War Metal Collection committee was founded at the end of 1914. Citizens were urged to hand in household appliances. There were a number of collection points including three in Vienna. A commission headed by Captain Alfred Walcher Ritter von Molthein was formed to rescue culturally important objects. He made decisions together with the heads of the artillery armoury, the provincial curators and the heads of the provincial museums. Some of the collected objects were put on display at the end of 1915 in the officers’ mess on Schwarzenbergplatz in Vienna. A richly illustrated catalogue was also published, showing kitchen and pharmacy mortars, pans, holy water bowls and pewter church chandeliers, shoe and belt buckles, furniture hardware, clock dials, clothing and book clasps, and snuffers. In view of the continuing shortage of metal, citizens were urged between late 1915 and mid-1916 to hand in appliances made of pewter and nickel and their alloys, copper, brass and bronze. Copper roofs without historical or artistic value were also dismantled. In early 1917 the handing in of ecclesiastical metal objects was ordered, although ultimately a large number of parishes were exempt. After the war some of the objects salvaged from the war metal collection were obtained by the Museum of Art and Industry (now Museum of Applied Art). The Technical Museum also acquired around 1,000 of these objects.
Bell metal contained large amounts of copper and tin. For centuries bells had been removed from belfries during times of war and melted down for military purposes. Their removal gave rise to strong protests among the population. In May 1915 a campaign was launched for the voluntary donation of church bells. They were divided into three categories by age, and only bells from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were melted down. By May 1917 they had been used up. A new order was issued and this time only bells from before 1600 were exempt. According to estimates at the time, 90 per cent of the bells in Lower Austria, Salzburg and Tyrol were requisitioned and as many as 96 per cent from Moravia and Silesia were melted down. To obtain even more tin, the organ pipes in churches, schools, concert halls and private homes were requisitioned, although historically important organs were again spared. Around 88 per cent of the organ pipes in the crown lands were used. In view of the army’s extreme demand for metals, measures like the war metal collection and church bell requisitioning were still completely inadequate.
[SOURCE - The World of the Habsburgs](https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/bells-bullets-metal-collection)
*Church bells, today underestimated and hardly present in the everyday life, should be considered as an important and symbolic elements of a pan European cultural heritage.*
[SOURCE](https://visualheritage.eu/en/portfolio/surveys-of-church-bells-at-the-time-of-the-first-world-war/) - read the whole article from isualheritage.eu
[When church bells were transformed into weapons of war](https://www.dw.com/en/when-church-bells-were-transformed-into-weapons-of-war/a-45576884)
Church bells await their fate in Rostock ahead of shipment to an ironworks - [SOURCE](https://www.dw.com/en/when-church-bells-were-transformed-into-weapons-of-war/a-45576884)
The deacon had resigned himself to what was about to happen. For some time he had tried to evade the decree, to keep its consequences to a minimum. But then at the end of July 1917, he had to recognize that his efforts had been in vain: The bells of his parish in the Rhineland-Palatinate town of Kusel would be taken down from the tower. They would then go to an ironworks to be melted down and turned into guns.
"They will speak a different language in the future," Deacon Karl Munzinger said in his sermon on July 22, 1917 about the loss. "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."
With metal essential to the war industry in short supply, the Imperial Government issued a decree in March 1917 to turn bells into weapons of war. The decision distressed many citizens, even those who weren't Christian.
On September 21, bells will ring across Europe in remembrance of both this event and of the joy and relief attached to the end of the war on November 11, 1918.
[SOURCE - read more](https://www.dw.com/en/when-church-bells-were-transformed-into-weapons-of-war/a-45576884)
[The seizing of Europe’s bells](https://legionmagazine.com/the-seizing-of-europes-bells/)
*the following is a article from the Canadian Legion Magazine*Bell cemetery in Hamburg after the Second World War. *Bundesarchive* [SOURCE Legion Magazine](https://legionmagazine.com/the-seizing-of-europes-bells/)
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.
Six bells of the Vienna Church of St. Leopold on the way to the arsenal for melting down into armaments on Sept. 12, 1916. Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv
“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.
First World War German gas alarm bell captured in 1918 from the German trenches at Gavrelle near Vimy Ridge in France.
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.
German and Austrian troops remove bells from a church in occupied Romania in August 1917.
He brought a collection of 127 bell castings with him back to Canada. They remain in the collection of the Canadian Museum of History.
The current dominion carillonneur, Andrea McCrady, said Price spearheaded a study of the tonal qualities of Europe’s bells. In his 150-page report, Price said he capitalized on the unique opportunity to draw from 12,000 surviving at the Hamburg bell cemetery.
“A lot of these bells dated back hundreds of years,” McCrady said in an interview. The process of replacing lost bells allowed them to really analyze what bell is well-tuned and what sounds like a broken flower pot.
“After the Second World War, the Dutch and Belgian companies—the bell founders—learned so much that as they were casting new carillons they produced very well-tuned bells. So a modern carillon has a different voice entirely.”
Bells at a Hamburg Glockenfriedhof in 1942. German National Museum, Nuremburg
Bells have a special place in many religious and cultural traditions. They mark joyous occasions, like weddings, and somber ones, like funerals. They tell time, call dinner, celebrate holidays, summon students to class and send them home after school. They declare the arrivals of trains, ward ships away from shallow waters and alert residents to impending upheavals.
In Buddhist tradition, the bell can represent the heavenly enlightened voice of the Buddha imparting his teachings. For Buddhists, it is also a call for protection and to ward off evil spirits.
Rather than being summoned, Hindus ring the temple bell to inform the deity of their arrival. The bell’s sound is considered auspicious, welcoming divinity and dispelling evil.
After Good Friday services marking the crucifixion and death of Jesus, Christian church bells that traditionally call parishioners to worship typically remain silent until Easter morning, when they declare his resurrection.
“The silence of the bells makes clear that something has fallen apart,” Rev. Rüdiger Penczek, a Protestant pastor based near Cologne, recently told the German broadcast service, Deutsche Welle.
Falling apart, indeed.
The practice of confiscating and transforming church bells into tools of war is not new. It was a longstanding tradition of European warfare that artillery commanders had rights over the bells of conquered villages, towns and cities.
Napoleon, in particular, relished claiming this right, and added to his war coffers by requiring vanquished cities to buy back their bells. If they could not, the commanding general was entitled to dispose of them as he saw fit. Half the revenue would be his, the other half went to the central treasury. The practice was called “Rachat des cloches,” or “redemption of the bells.”
A Second World War Victory Bell made from a German aircraft shot down over Britain.
In the 18th century, bells routinely fed military campaigns. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the bishop of Nancy authorized every parish in his diocese to take down all but one of their bells to make cannons for the defence of France.
The Hague Conventions of 1910 declared church bells protected and untouchable for war purposes—to no avail.
Fearing the German advance in 1915, Russia removed 300 bells from its own churches, secreting them away at Nikolsy Monastery just outside Moscow to prevent their destruction.
Across Great Britain, regulations introduced under the sweeping Defence of the Realm Act of 1914 limited wartime bell-ringing, relegating them to the role of warning devices. That quieted about 5,000 bell towers across the British Isles. The silence, as they say, was deafening.
Beyond their role in feeding production, bell towers across Europe made ideal sniper nests and observation platforms during both wars—rendering them, in turn, prime targets for artillery, tanks and other destructive forces.
Seizing bells from St. Philip’s and James Church in Velesin, Czechoslovakia, on March 31, 1942.
The carillon, which is by definition made up of at least 23 bells, is the national instrument of both the Netherlands and Belgium. Together, the two countries have more than half the world’s 600 carillons, upwards of 200 of them in Holland alone.
The destruction of Belgian carillons, particularly, during the First World War resonated across the world and was depicted by allies as the brutal annihilation of a unique democratic music instrument created by a courageous people.
Both countries’ legacies were ravaged in the Second World War: The Nazis took two-thirds of Belgium’s bells; British investigators claimed every single bell was taken out of the Netherlands, with only 300 surviving the war in Hamburg.
To add insult to injury, in the early 1940s German occupation authorities had small bells cast in the Netherlands to commemorate their confiscation of European church bells. Bearing the inscription “the bells too are fighting for a new Europe,” they were given as mementos to leading Nazis who played key roles in implementing the seizures.
The only countries in occupied Europe spared confiscation of their church bells were Norway, Denmark, Luxemburg and most of France, where the collaborationist Vichy government struck a deal with the devil, so to speak, by claiming desecration of French cultural heritage and offering up the country’s bronze statues instead.
Bells taken by the Austro-Hungarian army in a storehouse near Lviv, Ukraine, in 1916.
Note by me: at that time it was Lemberg, Galizien, part of the Habsburg Empire
The deal, known as The Vichy Exception, failed, however, to save every Vichy French bell. Many were destroyed in attacks and bombing raids. Price reported that Rouen Cathedral lost its five swinging bells, as well as “Jeanne d’Arc,” at 20 tonnes, the largest bell in France. He said it was reduced to a pile of light ash.
Across Europe, church bells that survived First World War fighting and theft were often used to warn troops of gas attacks—an application, one could imagine, that would forever colour the sound of church bells for veterans of every stripe.
Some fallen or plundered church bells were actually taken out to the trenches themselves, where they proved more effective warning systems than the usual improvised gongs such as frying pans suspended from rope.
Bells were also powerful symbols in the all-important bond drives and propaganda campaigns of both world wars. Upon joining the allied effort in 1917, the United States used the Liberty Bell on propaganda posters and leaflets as a symbol of American freedom and a promoter of Liberty Loans.
First World War Germany also used images of bells to rally support for its war loans.
A German soldier weighs a seized church bell on the eastern front circa 1915. The tally: 567 kg.
There is more to this article by The Canadian Legion ▲ check it out
Only the first two image, AI creations, are my own, all other images and photos are from the respective sources.
1) https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/bells-bullets-metal-collection
2) https://visualheritage.eu/en/portfolio/surveys-of-church-bells-at-the-time-of-the-first-world-war/
3) https://www.dw.com/en/when-church-bells-were-transformed-into-weapons-of-war/a-45576884
4) https://legionmagazine.com/the-seizing-of-europes-bells/ (this was my main source)
Additional sources I consulted and cross-checked for information:
5) https://vintagenewsdaily.com/bell-cemeteries-in-germany-during-the-wars/
6) https://www.bells.org/blog/church-bells-which-might-have-become-enemy-shells
Russian Bells at Nikolsky Monastery in World War I Source
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Bonus Special: ANTHEM by LEONARD COHEN
MY INTRODUCTION - ABOUT MY WORK
should you not be on the blockchain, or have no upvote power, or this post is already older than 7 days, you can always just buy me a coffee.
Final Words of wisdom and a pet concern of mine, especially about art diplomas:
I had in years past come across quite a few 'fake diplomas' that pretend to be academic credentials. Next to 'Pay to Play Galleries' they are the scourge to be avoided. The summary of a paper about this spells it out
DEGREE MILLS - THE BILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY
If you google the title you will find where this book is available, but also there are many videos on this subject.
