The Protestant Reich Church, officially German Evangelical Church (German: Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) and colloquially Reichskirche, was formed in 1936 to merge the 28 regional churches into a unified state church that espoused a single doctrine compatible with National Socialism. The Protestant opposition to Nazism established a rival German Evangelical Church, called the Confessing Church, an umbrella of independent regional churches.[1] After World War II, both of these bodies were replaced by the Evangelical Church in Germany.
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In the reorganization of the German states during German mediatisation, in many of the new states, churches came under the jurisdiction and control of the state. State governments sought to reorganize—modernize—the cumbersome system of congregational fragmentation into a streamlined, economical ecclesiastical structure. In the 19th century, states such as the Grand Duchy of Baden, and the kingdoms of Prussia, Württemberg, and Saxony sought to reduce religious conflict among their subjects by legitimating a range of religious practices that required individual communities to accept individuals of many creeds. In Prussia, for example, Frederick William III established this with Prussian Union, or sometimes, simply, the Union. In the Grand Duchy of Baden, and in Württemberg, the unified churches were established via organization edicts issued following mediatisation. For example, the formerly Catholic imperial cities of Überlingen and Ravensburg had to accept Protestant citizens, and provide a place for Protestant worship; similarly, formerly Protestant cities as Schwäbisch Hall had to offer Catholics a place of religious worship. The practice was not universally accepted; dissenting groups frequently sought permission to migrate to Australia, the United States, Canada and Brazil so that they could practice their own particular "brand" of Lutheran or Evangelical worship. In particular, the Old Lutheran communities in Missouri, South Australia, and Ontario, Canada came from this movement. These communities maintained strong ties to the homeland, continued to speak German over generations, and developed extensive education and mission programs such as that offered at the seminary in Neuendettelsau, in Franconia.
In the state reorganization after 1871, a consequence of unification, new tensions of what it meant to be a German merged with notions of religious differences, creating a so-called Kulturkampf, or War of Culture in the 1870s. To prevent criticism of state policies, whether national or regional, an 1871 Pulpit Law prohibited pastors and priests from discussing state policy in their homilies. In particular, this law targeted a nascent German Catholic Church movement, one free of ultra-montanism, or control by the Vatican. A widely spread belief in a Jesuit conspiracy to taint the new "Germany" gathered momentum, particularly focused against the regions in which Catholicism had a long-standing foothold, such as Bavaria, the Duchy of Baden, and the upper Rhineland, in the vicinity of the old Electorate of Cologne. The movement further targeted Jews, (especially those newly-arriving from Russian Poland), Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses as suspect. At the same time, political organizations, such as the Catholic Centre Party, acquired political clout by supporting religious liberty, defending access of Catholics and other groups to primary, secondary and university education, employment, and professions, promoting the idea that justice was the basis of government.
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 organization 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, the Swiss churches came together in the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches. Following their example, the then 28 territorially defined German Protestant churches founded the German Federation of Protestant Churches (Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund) 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 German Christians who had gained a large majority at the 1933 church elections.[2] 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. Ludwig Müller was elected "Reich Bishop".[3]
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 May 29-31, 1934, it called itself the Confessing Church.
On July 16, 1935, Hanns Kerrl was appointed Reichsminister for Church Affairs, a newly created department.[4] 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.[5]
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 December 19, 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.[6] 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 February 2, 1937, paralysing the Ecclesiastical Committee which lost all recognition among the opposition.[7] 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.[8]
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 Christian churches. After 1937, relations between the Reich Church and the Nazi government began to sour.
On 19th November 1938, as reported on in the Ludington Daily News, the name of Jehovah was ordered erased from Protestant churches throughout Nazi Germany by President Friedrich Werner of the supreme Evangelical church council. His order said the name of the God of Israel must be obliterated wherever it is 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 the Old-Prussian Evangelical Supreme Church Council, won over August Marahrens, State Bishop of the "intact" Evangelical Lutheran State 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 afterward.[9]
On December 22, 1941, the German Evangelical Church called for suited actions by all Protestant churches to withhold baptised non-Aryans from all spheres of Protestant church life.[10] Many German Christian- dominated congregations followed suit. The Confessing Church's executive together with the conference of the state brethren councils (representing the destroyed churches) issued a declaration of protest.[11]
After World War II, Theophil Wurm invited representatives of the most important Protestant church bodies to Treysa (a part of today's Schwalmstadt) for August 31, 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, the Free State of 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 Evangelical Church in Germany, provisionally led by the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, a naming borrowed from the Reich's brethren council organisation.
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