Ghosts from Nazi Germany rise again as a local historian discovers that a bell that the Austrian government plans to sell has a swastika and praises to Hitler engraved on it.
The bell was placed in a castle by Nazi supporters in 1939.
Historian Johannes Kammerstaetter recently raised concerns that selling the 74-year-old bell may be a crime under current Austrian law. Austria passed laws to help make amends for crimes in which the government participated during the Nazi era.
Making amends includes turning Mauthausen into a museum so that the horrors of the former concentration camp will not be forgotten.
The bell at the center of this controversy is located in a castle in Wolfpassing, Austria. The bell has engravings that praise Hitler for annexing Austria.
The inscription says that “[Hitler is] the unifier and Fuehrer of all Germans” who freed Austria “from the yoke of suppression by foreign elements and brought it home into the Great-German Reich” the Jewish Press reports.
Kammerstaetter claims that villagers would have known about the bell, but Mayor Josef Sonnleitner disagrees. He claims that the villagers had no idea that the bell had those engravings until the media said so.
"Nobody cared until all this publicity,"Sonnleitner told the Associated Press . The infamous "Fuehrer Bell" became news when the government sold the castle with all of its contents last month.
Government officials are trying to figure out how the bell could have escaped notice for so long. Praising Nazi era values, which is exactly what the bell does, is currently a crime in Austria.
Image: By Guillaume Speurt from Vilnius, Lithuania, via Wikimedia Commons