Once you enter the church, walk to the high altar and then turn to your left. Here, you will find the Memorial Chapel, also known as Gedenkkapelle. It has an iron gate in the front with two massive bells, partially melted on the floor. They've been lying here since Palm Sunday of nineteen hundred and forty-two, exactly where they fell, and they haven't been moved. Let me tell you what happened that night. On the twenty-eighth of March, the RAF chose Lübeck for its first successful major area bombing raid. The city was selected specifically because its medieval timber buildings would burn easily. The RAF wanted to prove that firestorm bombing worked, and Lübeck was the experiment. A fifth of the Old Town was destroyed. Around three hundred people were killed. Three great churches—this one, the Cathedral, and Saint Petri—were gutted. Here in Saint Mary's, as the fire roared through the building, something extraordinary happened. The heat created such powerful updrafts that the bells in the tower began to swing before crashing from the bell loft and smashing into the floor. Chancellor Adenauer donated a new bell when this memorial was inaugurated. Remember Bernt Notke, the artist who created the seventeen-metre Triumphal Cross at the Cathedral? He also painted a Danse Macabre here, a Dance of Death, around the late fifteenth century. It was approximately thirty metres long, showing twenty-four figures dancing with Death before the Lübeck cityscape, the only Dance of Death anywhere to depict the actual city where it hung. This too was destroyed in the bombings. You can see its modern replacement in the Totentanz Chapel if you turn to your left and walk a few steps. Here, you will see a door with stained glass windows above it. The skeletal imagery above the door serves as a memento mori, meaning a reminder of mortality. The stained glass windows reinterpret the theme of burning Lübeck, with a baby's cradle at the end, symbolising death overcome. Look at the astronomical clock to your right. This was built single-handedly by a Lübeck clockmaker named Paul Behrens in the late twentieth century. At noon, eight figures representing people of the world process before Christ. Now walk to the ambulatory behind the high altar, and play the next stop.