TheGerman Evangelical Church (German:Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) was a successor to theGerman Protestant Church Confederation from 1933 until 1945. It is also known in English as theProtestant Reich Church (German:Evangelische Reichskirche) and colloquially as theReich Church (German:Reichskirche).
TheGerman Christians movement, anantisemitic andracist pressure group and movement,[1] gained enough power on boards of the member churches to be able to installLudwig Müller to the office ofReichsbischof [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 ofNazi Germany.
In 1935, in wake of controversies and church struggles, theMinistry for Church Affairs removedLudwig Müller and installed a committee headed byWilhelm Zoellner [de] 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 theConfessing 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 theKirchenkampf (struggle of the churches) toAdolf Hitler. It officially disbanded in 1945 after the war ended. It was succeeded by theProtestant Church in Germany in 1948.
In 1933, theGerman Christians movement took leadership in somemember 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 the vast majority ofProtestants in what was nowNazi Germany, excluding those affiliated with thefree churches like theEvangelical Lutheran Free Church. In a 1933 vote to theReichssynode, the German Christians were able to electLudwig Müller, a pro-Nazi pastor, to the office ofReichsbischof [de] ("Reich Bishop").[2] On 20 December 1933, Müller merged the church's Protestant youth organisations into theHitler 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 the powers of the elected office. His attempts failed, promptingAdolf 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 thePfarrernotbund (Emergency Covenant of Pastors) led by pastorMartin 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, thenazification 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 alternativeumbrella organisation of their own that became known as theConfessing Church.[3] The Reich Church ultimately ended up being a confederation of thoseGerman Protestant churches that espoused a single doctrine namedPositive Christianity, which was compatible withNazism. Although it aimed to eventually become a unifiedProtestantstate church for all ofNazi 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:
Müller's influence declined after more constant clashes in the German Evangelical Church, triggering the foundation of theMinistry for Church Affairs led byHans 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-controlledChurch of Thuringia, and the regime feared that theConfessing 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 likeDietrich 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 theKirchenkampf 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 theProtestant Church in Germany.
Under theWeimar Republic, the system ofstate 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 ofLutheran,Calvinist andUnited churches. In 1920, Swiss Protestant churches came together in theSchweizerischer Evangelischer Kirchenbund (SEK). Following their example, the then 28 territorially defined German Protestant churches founded theDeutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund (DEK) in 1922. This was not a merger into a single church but a loosefederation of independent ones.
The founding of the German Evangelical Church was the result of work by theKirchenpartei of theGerman Christians who had gained a large majority at the 1933 church elections.[4] In September 1934, the merger finally failed when thesynods of two of the 28 churches, theEvangelical 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 theEvangelical State Church in Württemberg, refused to dissolve their church bodies as independent entities, and the Berlin-basedLandgericht I court restored the largest church body, the by then already mergedEvangelical 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.
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 theEmergency 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 inWuppertal-Barmen between 29 and 31 May 1934, it called itself theConfessing 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 GeneralSuperintendent of the old-Prussianecclesiastical 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, thebrethren councils had to go into hiding, and Kerrl successfully wedged the Confessing Church.
TheGestapo 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]
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 theLudington Daily News,YHWH was ordered to be erased from Protestant churches within theEvangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union byFriedrich Werner (Jurist) [de], 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 overAugust Marahrens, State Bishop of the "intact"Church of Hanover, and the theologiansWalther 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 Germanregional Protestant church bodies toTreysa 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, andThuringia, against any unification after the experiences during Nazi rule. It was decided to replace the formerGerman Federation of Protestant Churches with the new umbrella Protestant Church in Germany, provisionally led by the Council of theProtestant Church in Germany, a naming borrowed from the Reich's brethren council organisation.
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