The story of the destruction of art in Nazi Germany—the paintings that disappeared for decades or forever, the artists maligned in the Nazis’ Degenerate Art exhibition—is familiar to many. Less well-known is the story of the art destroyed to aid the war effort—metal church bells and statues melted down to make munitions. Saint Mary’s University history professor Kirrily Freeman’s PhD thesis focused on the topic of melted statues in France, but it was a graduation gift that led her to her current area of research.
The exhibition Silence and Memory: The Lost Bells of Europe is a collection of plaster casts of details of the decoration on German church bells that were melted for metal by the Nazis during the Second World War. The bells come from the 12th century to the 20th. The Nazis melted down thousands of church bells across Europe in occupied countries, but only for German bells did they hire art historians as advisers and made casts to preserve some of the imagery, the German bells being tied to the sort of “authentic” German culture the Nazis pushed.
Even the evidence of the lost bells was lost for many years. A Canadian bell expert, Percival Price, was sent to Germany by the Allies at the close of the war to discover what had happened to the country’s church bells and find out if any had survived. Price met with Nazi art historians and found the casts, returning home with 127 of them, which sat in his office and were bequeathed to Ottawa’s Museum of Civilization upon his death. One of these casts came into the possession of a friend of Freeman, who gave it to her as a graduation gift, along with one of Price’s books on bells.
Freeman began researching Percival Price and found a note about the casts in the national archives, eventually discovering the collection at the Museum of Civilization, where no one seemed to know quite what they were. The casts are on loan to SMU’s gallery from the museum. Freeman has yet to contact German historians about the collection, but admits it’s a bit of a tenuous situation. “Legally [Price] had the permission of the government at the time”—the British occupation government at the end of the war—“but there’s some moral ambiguity for sure,” Freeman says. Price used a loophole to bring the casts back to North America, describing them as “enemy technology.”
“The bells were melted down to make into munitions to achieve the racist, expansionist aims of the regime. These melted church bells are tied to the Holocaust,” Freeman says. “There was very little resistance from German churches when they came to take the bells away. People generally considered this a sacrifice they were making for the good of Germany.” Freeman is also teaching a summer course tied in with the exhibit, where she focuses on some of this history, as well as the earlier history of the bells.
For Freeman, the bells represent community, and a sense of community lost. The exhibition resonates on many levels—to those connected with the communities lost in the war, to artists and historians who resent the bells’ loss. A talk on June 19 connects the bells to another lost community: Sandy Moore’s “Book of Names,” composed for the Needham Park bell tower, compiled works based on the book of names of Halifax Explosion victims at the Halifax North library, bringing together lost Europe and loss closer to home.
This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2011.
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