The German Christians, an antisemitic and racist pressure group and Kirchenpartei,[1] gained enough power on boards of the member churches to be able to install Ludwig Müller to the office of Reichsbischof[de] in the 1933 church elections. The German Protestant Church Confederation was subsequently renamed the German Evangelical Church. In 1934, the German Evangelical Church suffered controversies and internal struggles which left member churches either detached or reorganised into German Christians-led dioceses of what was to become a single, unified Reich Church compatible with Nazi ideology for all of Nazi Germany.
In 1935, in wake of controversies and church struggles, the Ministry for Church Affairs removed Ludwig Müller and installed a committee headed by Wilhelm Zoellner to lead the confederation. As a result, the German Evangelical Church regained partial support as some of the member churches that left rejoined. In 1936, the Zoellner committee denounced German Christians and increasingly leaned towards the Confessing Church and its positions. In 1937, the Nazis removed the Zoellner committee and reinstalled German Christians into the leading position. In 1937–1945, the German Evangelical Church was controlled by German Christians and the Ministry. It was no longer considered a subject to the Kirchenkampf (struggle of the churches) to Adolf Hitler. It officially disbanded in 1945 after the war ended. It was succeeded by the Protestant Church in Germany in 1948.
Name
It is also known in English as the Protestant Reich Church (German: Evangelische Reichskirche) and colloquially as the Reich Church (German: Reichskirche).
Overview
In 1933, the German Christians took leadership in some member churches of the German Protestant Church Confederation. A new designation was voted on and adopted, with the organisation now being called the German Evangelical Church. In its early stages, it remained a loose confederation of churches just like its predecessor. It included a vast majority of Protestants in what was now Nazi Germany, excluding those affiliated with the free churches like the Evangelical Lutheran Free Church. In a 1933 voting to the Reichssynode, the German Christians were able to elect Ludwig Müller, a pro-Nazi pastor, to the office of Reichsbischof[de] ("Reich Bishop").[2] On 20 December 1933, Müller merged the church's Protestant youth organisations into the Hitler Jugend without consulting their leadership or any member churches. Many in the German Evangelical Church resisted this idea and a discussion began.
Müller tried to silence it by introducing discipline and using powers of the elected office. His attempts failed, prompting Adolf Hitler to meet with Protestant leaders on 25 January 1934. Although the meeting ended with Protestant churches declaring their loyalty to the state, removing Müller was not a subject to discussion for Hitler. After that, member churches began to either reorganise or detach from the German Evangelical Church. Initially, there was little resistance to the attempt to introduce elements of Nazi ideology into church doctrine. Most of the resistance came from confessing communities (bekennende Gemeinden) within "intact[de]" and "destroyed churches[de]" (see below) and the Pfarrernotbund (Emergency Covenant of Pastors) led by pastor Martin Niemöller.
In consequence of the 1934 meeting, many member churches distanced themselves from the increasingly Nazi-controlled Reich Church due to controversies pertaining to its constitution, the nazification of its theology, leadership, incorporation of its youth organisations into the Hitler Jugend, etc. Such churches became neutral or followed the Protestant opposition to Nazism that established an alternative umbrella organisation of their own that became known as the Confessing Church.[3] The Reich Church ultimately ended up being a confederation of those German Protestant churches that espoused a single doctrine named Positive Christianity, which was compatible with Nazism. Although it aimed to eventually become a unified Protestantstate church for all of Nazi Germany, this attempt utterly failed as the German Evangelical Church became fractured into various groups that bore an unclear legal status in relation to each other:
churches with a German Christians-dominated governing board reorganising them into dioceses of the Reich Church led by German Christians ("dioceses of the German Evangelical Church" [Bistümer der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche] in official usage, or "destroyed churches[de]" [zerstörte Kirchen] in the parlance of the Confessing Church)
the Confessing Church that saw itself as the true Protestant church for all of Germany, provided resistance to the German Christians-led German Evangelical Church and to its so-called dioceses ("destroyed churches"), and acted on principles of the "1934 church emergency law of Dahlem" that deemed the constitution of the German Evangelical Church "shattered" (the "Confessing Church", Bekennende Kirche)
Müller's influence declined after more constant clashes in the German Evangelical Church, triggering the foundation of the Ministry for Church Affairs led by Hans Kerrl on 16 July 1935. A decree issued by Kerrl in September 1935, appointed a committee led by Wilhelm Zoellner (Church of Westphalia) to head the Reich Church instead of Müller. It was received positively by intact churches and even confessing parts of the German Evangelical Church. In 1936, the committee denounced the teachings of the German Christians-controlled Church of Thuringia, and the regime feared that the Confessing Church would gain more support due to this. In February 1937, the committee was removed by the Nazis and leading figures of the Protestant resistance like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller and others were arrested. In 1939, Müller tried to regain his position in the German Evangelical Church but failed to do so. After 1937, the German Evangelical Church was not considered an issue in the Kirchenkampf by the Nazis as it became heavily controlled by the Ministry until 1945.
In August 1945, the German Evangelical Church was officially dissolved by the council of the newly founded Protestant umbrella organisation called the Protestant Church in Germany.
Beginnings, German Christians and Nazi influence (1933–1934)
Under the Weimar Republic, the system of state churches disappeared with the German monarchies. At this point, the unification of the Protestant churches into a single organisation seemed like a possibility, albeit a remote one. Since unification, clergy and ecclesiastical administrators had discussed a merger, but one had never materialised due to strong regional self-confidence and traditions as well as the denominational fragmentation of Lutheran, Calvinist and United churches. In 1920, Swiss Protestant churches came together in the Schweizerischer Evangelischer Kirchenbund (SEK). Following their example, the then 28 territorially defined German Protestant churches founded the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund (DEK) in 1922. This was not a merger into a single church but a loose federation of independent ones.
The founding of the German Evangelical Church was the result of work by the Kirchenpartei of the German Christians who had gained a large majority at the 1933 church elections.[4] In September 1934, the merger finally failed when the synods of two of the 28 churches, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria right of the river Rhine, the portion of Bavaria which forms today's Free State (without the Palatinate left of the Rhine), and the Evangelical State Church in Württemberg, refused to dissolve their church bodies as independent entities, and the Berlin-based Landgericht I court restored the largest church body, the by then already merged Evangelical Church of the Old-Prussian Union by its resolution in November the same year, thus resuming independence. Consequently, the German Evangelical Church, created as a merger, then continued to exist as a mere umbrella.
Controversies, internal struggles and conflict with the Confessing Church (1934–1937)
Some Protestant functionaries and laymen opposed the unification. Many more agreed but wanted it under Protestant principles, not imposed by Nazi partisans. The Protestant opposition had organised first among pastors by way of the Emergency Covenant of Pastors and then—including laymen—developed into grassroots meetings establishing independent synods by January 1934. At the first Reich's Synod of Confession (erste Reichsbekenntnissynode) held in Wuppertal-Barmen between 29 and 31 May 1934, it called itself the Confessing Church.
On 16 July 1935, Hanns Kerrl was appointed Reichsminister for Church Affairs, a newly created department.[5] He started negotiations to find a compromise and dropped the extreme German Christians, trying to win moderate Confessing Christians and respected neutrals. On 24 September 1935, a new law empowered Kerrl to legislate by way of ordinances within the German Evangelical Church, circumventing any synodal autonomy.[6]
Kerrl managed to gain the very respected Wilhelm Zoellner (a Lutheran, until 1931 General Superintendent of the old-Prussian ecclesiastical province of Westphalia) to form the Reich's Ecclesiastical Committee (Reichskirchenausschuss, RKA) on 3 October 1935, combining the neutral and moderate groups to reconcile the disputing church parties. The official German Evangelical Church became subordinate to the new bureaucracy, and Müller lost power but still retained the now meaningless titles of German Reich's Bishop and old-Prussian State Bishop.
In November, Kerrl decreed the parallel institutions of the Confessing Church were to be dissolved, a move which was protested and ignored by Confessing Church leaders. On 19 December, Kerrl issued a decree which forbade all kinds of Confessing Church activities, namely appointments of pastors, education, examinations, ordinations, ecclesiastical visitations, announcements and declarations from the pulpit, separate financial structures and convening Synods of Confession; further the decree established provincial ecclesiastical committees.[7] Thus, the brethren councils had to go into hiding, and Kerrl successfully wedged the Confessing Church.
The Gestapo increased its suppression, undermining the readiness for compromises among the Confessing Church. Zoellner concluded that this made his reconciliatory work impossible and criticised the Gestapo activities. He resigned on 2 February 1937, paralysing the Ecclesiastical Committee which lost all recognition among the opposition.[8] Kerrl now subjected Müller's chancery of the German Evangelical Church directly to his ministry and the national, provincial and state ecclesiastical committees were soon after dissolved.[9]
German Christian takeover until dissolution (1937–1945)
Although the church was initially supported by the regime, the Nazis eventually lost interest in the experiment after it failed to supplant or absorb traditional Protestant churches. After 1937, relations between the Reich Church and the Nazi government began to sour.[10]
On 19 November 1938, as reported on in the Ludington Daily News, YHWH was ordered to be erased from Protestant churches within the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union by Friedrich Werner, the president of its executive board (Evangelical Supreme Church Council; EOK). His order said the name of the 'God of Israel' (which contemporarily has Judaic connotations) must be obliterated wherever it was displayed in Protestant churches.
On 1 September 1939, Kerrl decreed the separation of the ecclesiastical and the administrative governance within the official Evangelical Church. The German Christian Friedrich Werner, president of EOK, won over August Marahrens, State Bishop of the "intact" Church of Hanover, and the theologians Walther Schultz, a German Christian, and Friedrich Hymmen, vice president of the Old-Prussian Evangelical Supreme Church Council, to form an Ecclesiastical Council of Confidence (Geistlicher Vertrauensrat). This council exercised ecclesiastical leadership for the church from early 1940 and afterwards.[11]
On 22 December 1941, the German Evangelical Church issued a request for the relevant authorities "to take suitable measures so that baptized non-Aryans remain separate from the ecclesiastical life of the German congregations", a call for strict segregation between "non-Aryan" Protestants, and German Protestant congregations and facilities.[12][13] Many German Christian-dominated congregations followed suit. The Confessing Church's executive together with the conference of the state brethren councils (representing the Confessing Church adherents within the destroyed churches) issued a declaration of protest.[14]
After World War II, Theophil Wurm, Landesbischof of Württemberg, invited representatives of the surviving German regional Protestant church bodies to Treysa for 31 August 1945. As to co-operation between the Protestant churches in Germany, strong resentments prevailed, especially among the Lutheran church bodies of Bavaria right of the river Rhine, the Hamburgian State, Hanover, Mecklenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia, against any unification after the experiences during Nazi rule. It was decided to replace the former German Federation of Protestant Churches with the new umbrella Protestant Church in Germany, provisionally led by the Council of the Protestant Church in Germany, a naming borrowed from the Reich's brethren council organisation.
The Confessing Church was a movement within German Protestantism during Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church.
The Protestant Church in Germany, formerly known in English as the Evangelical Church in Germany, is a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant regional Churches in Germany, collectively encompassing the vast majority of the country's Protestants. In 2020, the EKD had a membership of 20,236,000 members, or 24.3% of the German population. It constitutes one of the largest Protestant bodies in the world. Church offices managing the federation are located in Herrenhausen, Hanover, Lower Saxony. Many of its members consider themselves Lutherans.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Thuringia was a Lutheran member church of the umbrella Protestant Church in Germany. The seat of the church was in Eisenach. The church covered those parts of the state of Thuringia that were not part of the former Province of Saxony. It was the largest Protestant denomination in this area.
The Pomeranian Evangelical Church was a Protestant regional church in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, serving the citizens living in Hither Pomerania. The Pomeranian Evangelical Church was based on the teachings brought forward by Martin Luther and other Reformators during the Reformation. It combined Lutheran and Reformed traditions. The seat of the church was Greifswald, the bishop's preaching venue was the former Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Greifswald.
German Christians were a pressure group and a movement within the German Evangelical Church that existed between 1932 and 1945, aligned towards the antisemitic, racist and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal to align the whole of German Protestantism towards those principles. Their advocacy of these principles led to a schism within 23 of the initially 28 regional church bodies (Landeskirchen) in Germany and the attendant foundation of the opposing Confessing Church in 1934. The same year, the theologians Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed their opposition to Nazi doctrines by drafting the Barmen Declaration.
Johan Heinrich Ludwig Müller was a German theologian, a Lutheran pastor, and leading member of the pro-Nazi "German Christians" faith movement. In 1933 he was appointed by the Nazi Party as Reichsbischof of the German Evangelical Church.
The Prussian Union of Churches was a major Protestant church body which emerged in 1817 from a series of decrees by Frederick William III of Prussia that united both Lutheran and Reformed denominations in Prussia. Although not the first of its kind, the Prussian Union was the first to occur in a major German state.
Positive Christianity was a religious movement within Nazi Germany which promoted the belief that the racial purity of the German people should be maintained by mixing racialistic Nazi ideology with either fundamental or significant elements of Nicene Christianity. Adolf Hitler used the term in point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, stating: "the Party as such represents the viewpoint of Positive Christianity without binding itself to any particular denomination". The Nazi movement had been hostile to Germany's established churches. The new Nazi idea of Positive Christianity allayed the fears of Germany's Christian majority by implying that the Nazi movement was not anti-Christian. That said, in 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, explained that "Positive Christianity" was not "dependent upon the Apostle's Creed", nor was it dependent on "faith in Christ as the son of God", upon which Christianity relied, rather, it was represented by the Nazi Party: "The Führer is the herald of a new revelation", he said. Hitler's public presentation of Positive Christianity as a traditional Christian faith differed. Despite Hitler's insistence on a unified peace with the Christian churches, to accord with Nazi antisemitism, Positive Christianity advocates also sought to distance themselves from the Jewish origins of Christ and the Christian Bible. Based on such elements, most of Positive Christianity separated itself from traditional Nicene Christianity and as a result, it is in general considered apostate by all mainstream Trinitarian Christian churches, regardless of whether they are Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant.
The Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia is a United Protestant church body in the German states of Brandenburg, Berlin and a part of Saxony.
Friedrich "Fritz" von Bodelschwingh, also known as Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Younger, was a German pastor, theologian and public health advocate. His father was Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Elder, founder of the v. Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel charitable foundations.
Friedrich Karl Otto Dibelius was a German bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg, a self-described anti-Semite and up to 1934 a conservative, who became a staunch opponent of Nazism and communism.
The Pfarrernotbund was an organisation founded on 21 September 1933 to unite German evangelical theologians, pastors and church office-holders against the introduction of the Aryan paragraph into the 28 Protestant regional church bodies and the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (DEK) and against the efforts by Reich-bishop Ludwig Müller and the German Christians (DC) since April 1933 to merge the German Protestant churches into one Reich Church that would be Nazi in ideology and entirely lacking any Jewish or Christian origins. As a Christian resistance to National Socialism it was the forerunner of the Confessing Church, founded the following year.
The Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life was a cross-church establishment by eleven German Protestant churches in Nazi Germany, founded at the instigation of the German Christian movement. It was set up in Eisenach under Siegfried Leffler and Walter Grundmann. Georg Bertram, professor of New Testament at the University of Giessen, who led the Institute from 1943 until the Institute's dissolution in May 1945, wrote about its goals in March 1944: "'This war is Jewry's war against Europe.' This sentence contains a truth which is again and again confirmed by the research of the Institute. This research work is not only adjusted to the frontal attack, but also to the strengthening of the inner front for attack and defence against all the covert Jewry and Jewish being, which has oozed into the Occidental Culture in the course of centuries, ... thus the Institute, in addition to the study and elimination of the Jewish influence, also has the positive task of understanding the own Christian German being and the organisation of a pious German life based on this knowledge."
Jerusalem Church is one of the churches of the Evangelical Congregation in the Friedrichstadt, a member of the Protestant umbrella organisation Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia. The present church building is located in Berlin, borough Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, in the quarter of Friedrichstadt. Jerusalem Church is fourth in rank of the oldest oratories in the town proper.
(Georg) Friedrich Weißler was a German lawyer and judge. He came from a Jewish family but was baptized as Protestant as a child. He belonged to the Christian resistance against National Socialism.
Jesus Church (Kaulsdorf) (German: Jesuskirche, colloquially also Dorfkirche, village church) is the church of the Evangelical Berlin-Kaulsdorf Congregation, a member of today's Protestant umbrella organisation Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia (under this name since 2004). The church building is located in Berlin, borough Marzahn-Hellersdorf, in the locality of Kaulsdorf. The church was named after Jesus of Nazareth. The congregation's parish comprises the area of the historical village of Kaulsdorf, which had been incorporated into Berlin by the Prussian Greater Berlin Act in 1920.
The German Protestant Church Confederation was a formal federation of 28 regional Protestant churches (Landeskirchen) of Lutheran, Reformed or United Protestant administration or confession. It existed during the Weimar Republic from 1922 until replaced by the German Evangelical Church in 1933. It was a predecessor body to the Protestant Church in Germany.
The Protestant Church in Baden is a United Protestant member church of the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD), and member of the Conference of Churches on the Rhine, which now functions as a regional group of the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE). The Evangelical Church in Baden is a united Protestant church. Its headquarter, the Evangelical Superior Church Council is located in Karlsruhe.
Heinrich Grüber was a Reformed theologian, pacifist and opponent of Nazism.
The Reich Ministry for Church Affairs also sometimes referred to as the Reich Ministry for Ecclesiastical Affairs, existed in Nazi Germany from 1935 until 1945 under the leadership of Hanns Kerrl and Hermann Muhs and attempted to unify the churches and align them with the goals of National Socialism.
References
Notes
↑ A Kirchenpartei (church party) in German Protestantism is a group nominating candidates in a list for church elections and compares roughly to nominating groups in the Church of Sweden.
↑ Schneider, Thomas M. Reichsbischof Ludwig Müller: eine Untersuchung zu Leben und Persönlichkeit. (=Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Series B: Darstellungen; 19.) (384 pp) Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993
↑ Barbara Krüger and Peter Noss, "Die Strukturen in der Evangelischen Kirche 1933-1945", in: Kirchenkampf in Berlin 1932-1945: 42 Stadtgeschichten, Olaf Kühl-Freudenstein, Peter Noss, and Claus Wagener (eds.), Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 1999, (Studien zu Kirche und Judentum; vol. 18), pp.149–171, here p. 160. ISBN3-923095-61-9
↑ The law was euphemistically called Act on Safeguarding the German Evangelical Church (German: Gesetz zur Sicherung der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche, or colloquially Sicherungsesetz. Cf. Krüger and Noss, pp. 149–171, here p. 161.
↑ Krüger, Barbara & Noss, Peter (1999) "Die Strukturen in der Evangelischen Kirche 1933-1945", in: Kühl-Freudenstein, Olaf, et al. (eds.), Kirchenkampf in Berlin 1932-1945: 42 Stadtgeschichten (=Studien zu Kirche und Judentum; vol. 18) Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum ISBN3-923095-61-9 pp.149–171 (here p. 166)
↑ Wolfgang Gerlach, & Barnett, V. (2000). "And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews" (p. 194). University Of Nebraska Press. Reproduced and translated text of decree originally in Beckmann, "Kirchliches Jahrbuch, 1933-1944".
↑ Circular (Rundschreiben) by the church chancery of the German Evangelical Church to all governing bodies of the major Protestant Landeskirchen (22 December 1941), published in Kurt Meier, Kirche und Judentum: Die Haltung der evangelischen Kirche zur Judenpolitik des Dritten Reiches, Halle upon Saale: Niemeyer, 1968, pp. 116seq. No ISBN.
↑ Published in Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland; vol. 60-71 (1933–1944), Joachim Beckmann (ed.) on behalf of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1948, pp. 482–485. ISSN 0075-6210.
(in German) Beckman, Joachim, (ed.). Published in Kirchliches Jahrbuch für die Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland; vol. 60-71 (1933–1944), Joachim Beckmann (ed.) on behalf of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1948, pp.482–485. ISSN 0075-6210.
(in German) Krüger, Barbara & Noss, Peter (1999) "Die Strukturen in der Evangelischen Kirche 1933–1945", in: Kühl-Freudenstein, Olaf, et al. (eds.)Kirchenkampf in Berlin 1932–1945: 42 Stadtgeschichten (Studien zu Kirche und Judentum; vol. 18) Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum ISBN3-923095-61-9 pp.149–171.
(in German) Krüger, Barbara & Noss, Peter, "Die Strukturen in der Evangelischen Kirche 1933–1945", in: Kirchenkampf in Berlin 1932–1945: 42 Stadtgeschichten, Olaf Kühl-Freudenstein, Peter Noss, and Claus Wagener (eds.), Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 1999, (Studien zu Kirche und Judentum; vol. 18), pp.149–171, here p.160. ISBN3-923095-61-9
(in German) Schneider, Thomas M. (1993) '"Reichsbischof Ludwig Müller: eine Untersuchung zu Leben und Persönlichkeit." Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Series B: Darstellungen; 19. (384 pp) Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
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