The German Evangelical Church () was a successor to the German Protestant Church Confederation from 1933 until 1945.
The German Christians, an antisemitic and racist pressure group and Kirchenpartei, gained enough power on boards of the member churches to be able to install Ludwig Müller to the office of 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 () and colloquially as the Reich Church ().
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 ("Reich Bishop"). 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 "" and "" (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. 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 Protestant state 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: