Germany 'Nazi bell' row erupts again

The authorities in the central state of Thuringia have received complaints from a campaigner about the local churches and the regional bishop of the Evangelical Church, Ilse Junkermann, the MDR Thüringen regional broadcaster reports.

Last year swastikas and pro-Hitler inscriptions were found on church bells in Herxheim in the south-west and Schweringen in northern Germany.

Herxheim parish council controversially voted to keep the bell as a "memorial against violence and injustice", but anonymous protesters took matters into their own hands in Schweringen by chiselling off the insignia in a "spring cleaning of the filth of National Socialism".

Gilbert Kallenborn, a resident of the Saarland on the border with France, brought the Herxheim case to public attention at the time, and has also brought the latest complaint.

He told MDR that he wrote to the Thuringian prosecutors at the start of the month, accusing the Evangelical Church of "preserving and continuing to use" six bells in the five churches, "in violation of the Penal Code, which bans the preservation and use of anti-constitutional, banned Nazi regalia", after his complaints to the Church itself before Christmas "went unanswered".