Prussian Union of Churches - History - Under Nazi Reign

Under Nazi Reign

In the period of the so-called Third Reich the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union fell into deep disunity. Most clerics, representatives and parishioners welcomed the Nazi takeover. Most Protestants suggested that the mass arrests, following the abolition of central civic rights by Paul von Hindenburg on 28 February 1933, hit the right persons. On 20 March 1933 Dachau concentration camp, the first official premise of its kind, was opened, while 150,000 hastily arrested inmates were held in hundreds of spontaneous so-called wild concentration camps, to be gradually evacuated into about 100 new official camps to be opened until the end of 1933.

On 21 March 1933 the newly elected Reichstag convened in the Evangelical Garrison Church of Potsdam, an event commemorated as the Day of Potsdam, and the locally competent Gen.-Supt. Dibelius preached. Dibelius downplayed the boycott against enterprises of Jewish proprietors and such of Gentiles of Jewish descent in an address for the US radio. Even after this clearly anti-Semitic action he repeated in his circular to the pastors of Kurmark on the occasion of Easter (16 April 1933) his anti-Jewish attitude, giving the same words as in 1928.

The Nazi Reich's government, aiming at streamlining the Protestant churches, recognised the German Christians as its means to do so. On 4 and 5 April 1933 representatives of the German Christians convened in Berlin and demanded the dismissal of all members of the executive bodies of the 28 Protestant church bodies in Germany. The German Christians demanded their ultimate merger into a uniform German Protestant Church, led according to the Nazi Führerprinzip by a Reich's Bishop (German: Reichsbischof), abolishing all democratic participation of parishioners in presbyteries and synods. The German Christians announced the appointment of a Reich's Bishop for 31 October 1933, the Reformation Day holiday.

Furthermore the German Christians demanded to purify Protestantism of all Jewish patrimony. Judaism should no longer be regarded a religion, which can be adopted and given up, but a racial category which were genetic. Thus German Christians opposed proselytising among Jews. Protestantism should become a pagan kind heroic pseudo-Nordic religion. Of course the Old Testament, which includes the Ten Commandments and the virtue of charity (taken from the Torah, Book of Leviticus 19:18: "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD."), was to be abandoned.

In a mood of an emergency through an impending Nazi takeover functionaries of the then officiating executive bodies of the 28 Protestant church bodies stole a march on the German Christians. Functionaries and activists worked hastily on negotiating between the 28 Protestant church bodies a legally indoubtable unification On 25 April 1933 three men convened, Hermann Kapler, president of the old-Prussian Evangelical Supreme Church Council – representing United Protestantism -, August Marahrens (German), state bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran State Church of Hanover (for the Lutherans), and the Reformed Hermann-Albert Klugkist Hesse, director of the preacher seminary in Wuppertal, to prepare the constitution of a united church which they called the German Evangelical Church too.

This caused the later confusion when the streamlined Reich church and the Confessing Church alike identified as being the ligitimate church of that name. The Nazi government compelled the negotiators to include its representative, the former army chaplain Ludwig Müller from Königsberg, a devout German Christian. The plans were to dissolve the German Evangelical Church Confederation and the 28 church bodies and to replace them by a uniform Protestant church, to be called the German Evangelical Church (German: Deutsche Evangelische Kirche).

On 27 May 1933 representatives of the 28 church bodies gathered in Berlin and against a minority, voting for Ludwig Müller, Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, head of the Bethel Institution and member of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, was elected Reich's Bishop, a newly created title. The German Christians strictly opposed that election, because Bodelschwingh was not their partisan. Thus the Nazis, who were permanently breaking the law, stepped in, using the streamlined Prussian government, and declared the functionaries had exceeded their authority.