1937 To Post-war Years
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 19 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.
On 22 December 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. 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.
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.
Read more about this topic: Protestant Reich Church
Famous quotes containing the words post-war and/or years:
“Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still “globaloney.” Mr. Wallace’s warp of sense and his woof of nonsense is very tricky cloth out of which to cut the pattern of a post-war world.”
—Clare Boothe Luce (1903–1987)
“Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they’ll find a means to be happy.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)