A church bell cast in honour of Adolph Hitler will remain in place after the parish council of Herxheim am Berg, southwest Germany, voted on Monday to keep it.

The bell has hung in the church since 1934 and the Church of St James had offered to remove and replace it. However, the council voted by 10 votes to three that it should stay as 'an impetus for reconciliation and a memorial against violence and injustice'.

The 1,000-year-old Jacobskirche will now display an explanatory plaque explaining the history of the bell.

It had remained in place with the inscription largely forgotten. A former organist, Sigrid Peters, drew attention to it when she told news agency DPA last summer: 'It can't happen that a baby is baptised and a bell with the words "Everything for the Fatherland" is chiming.'

The picturesque church attracts hundreds of couples wanting to be married there, some of whom have also express reservations about the bell after its incription became public knowledge.

Some residents feared the bell would spoil the church's reputation or that it would become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis.

The row over historic memorials – particularly sensitive in Germany because of the country's Nazi past – has become widespread in recent years with a greater appreciation of the crimes of public figures who were venerated in their day. A backlash against US Civil War memorials commemorating soldiers who fought in defence of slavery has seen many removed, while in the UK city of Bristol one of its most famous sons, Edward Colston, has seen his reputation re-evaluated with a greater acknowledgement of his role in the slave trade.