On Christmas Day 1940 the British BBC broadcast a church service from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in central England, which had been destroyed by German bombers only a few weeks earlier. This is where Dick Howard, Provost of the cathedral, said: “we are trying, hard as it may be, to banish all thoughts of revenge … We are going to try to make a kinder, simpler – a more Christ-Child-like sort of world.” This impressive, brave self-commitment of the community was to be redeemed. It found its symbol in the Cross of Nails, made of nails from the burnt roof timbers of the cathedral.

In the years 1961/62 an International Centre for Reconciliation was established, which quickly sought to make a “Christian gesture of British-German reconciliation”. The designated place to that end was Dresden – the very city, which symbolically represented not only the consequences of war but also the German civilian population. Under the leadership of Howard’s successor, Provost Bill Williams, donations were collected in Great Britain and negotiations with the GDR authorities taken up to send a group of young people to Dresden. Together with Germans of the same age, they were to prepare a wing of the destroyed Evangelical-Lutheran Deaconesses’ Hospital for reconstruction.

On 14 March 1965 the community dismissed the group with a commemorative service. For a period of over six months some two dozen British youth worked in Dresden. Their duty ended with a service on 9 September 1965 where Provost Williams presented the Dresden Deaconesses’ Hospital Church with a Cross of Nails from Coventry. Two years later the reconstruction of the hospital was finished. The British helpers had taken up their work hoping to “surmount the bitterness they felt in the elders and arrive at a direct human cooperation”. They were successful: Removed from the propagandistic polemics of official commemoration in Dresden, an active process of reconciliation had been initiated.

Marked in 2010