page_title: Religion in Nazi Germany
section_title: Protestant groups
hierarchical_section_title: Religion in Nazi Germany / Specific groups / Protestantism / Protestant groups
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Scherl BIlderdienst: Wehrkreispfarrer Müller Verbindungsmann Hitlers zur Evangelischen Kirche. Reichskanzler Hitler hat den Wehrkreispfarrer Müller aus Königsberg als Verbindungsmann zu den amtlichen Stellen der Evangelischen Kirche berufen. Pfarrer Müller soll an den Bestrebungen zur Schaffung einer Deutsch-Evangelischen Landeskirche beteiligt werden und die Auffassungen des Reichskanzlers vertreten. U.B.z.: Pfarrer Müller, der der Glaubensbewegung "Deutsche Christen" angehört. 13977-33
context_page_description: In 1933, 5 years prior to the annexation of Austria into Germany, the population of Germany was approximately 67% Protestant and 33%
  Catholic, while the Jewish population was less than 1%. A census in May 1939, six years into the Nazi era and after the annexation of mostly Catholic Austria and mostly Catholic Czechoslovakia into Germany, indicates that 54% considered themselves Protestant, ‹See TfM› 40% Catholic, ‹See TfM› 3.5% self-identified as Gottgläubig, and 1.5% as "atheist".
  Smaller religious minorities such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and Bahá'í Faith were banned in Germany, while the eradication of Judaism by the genocide of its adherents was attempted. The Salvation Army, the Christian Saints and the Seventh-day Adventist Church all disappeared from Germany, while astrologers, healers, fortune tellers, and witchcraft were banned. However, the small pagan "German Faith Movement" supported the Nazis.
  Nazi ranks had people of varied religious leanings. They were followers of Christianity, but were frequently at odds with the Pope, which gave an anti-catholic veneer to the party.
context_section_description: Different German states possessed regional social variations as to class densities and religious denomination. Richard Steigmann-Gall alleges a linkage between several Protestant churches and Nazism. The German Christians (Deutsche Christen) were a movement within the Protestant Church of Germany with the aim of changing traditional Christian teachings to align with the ideology of National Socialism and its anti-Jewish policies. The Deutsche Christen factions were united in the goal of establishing a national socialist Protestantism and abolishing what they considered to be Jewish traditions in Christianity, and some but not all rejected the Old Testament and the teaching of the Apostle Paul. In November 1933, a Protestant mass rally of the Deutsche Christen, which  brought together a record 20,000 people, passed three resolutions:
  Adolf Hitler is the completion of the Reformation,
  Baptized Jews are to be dismissed from the Church
  The Old Testament is to be excluded from Sacred Scriptures.
  The German Christians selected Ludwig Müller (1883–1945) as their candidate for Reich bishop in 1933. In response to Hitler's campaigning, two-thirds of those Protestants who voted elected Ludwig Müller, a neo-pagan candidate, to govern the Protestant Churches. Müller was convinced that he had a divine responsibility to promote Hitler and his ideals, and together with Hitler, he favoured a unified Reichskirche of Protestants and Catholics. This Reichskirche was to be a loose federation in the form of a council, but it would be subordinated to the National Socialist State.
  The level of ties between Nazism and the Protestant churches has been a contentious issue for decades. One difficulty is that Protestantism includes a number of religious bodies and many of them had little relation to each other. Added to that, Protestantism tends to allow more variation among individual congregations than Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which makes statements about the official positions of denominations problematic. The German Christians were a minority within the Protestant population, numbering one fourth to one third of the 40 million Protestants in Germany. With Bishop Müller's efforts and Hitler's support, the German Evangelical Church was formed and recognized by the state as a legal entity on 14 July 1933, with the aim of melding the State, the people and the Church into one body. Dissenters were silenced by expulsion or violence.
  The support of the German Christian movement within the churches was opposed by many adherents of traditional Christian teachings. Other groups within the Protestant church included members of the Bekennende Kirche Confessing Church, which included such prominent members as Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer; both rejected the Nazi efforts to meld volkisch principles with traditional Lutheran doctrine. Martin Niemöller organized the Pfarrernotbund (Pastors' Emergency League) which was supported by nearly 40 percent of the Evangelical pastors. They were, however, (as of 1932) a minority within the Protestant church bodies in Germany. But in 1933, a number of Deutsche Christen left the movement after a November speech by Reinhold Krause urged, among other things, the rejection of the Old Testament as Jewish superstition. So when Ludwig Müller could not deliver on conforming all Christians to National Socialism, and after some of the German Christian rallies and more radical ideas generated a backlash, Hitler's condescending attitudes towards Protestants increased and he lost all interest in Protestant church affairs.
  The resistance within the churches to Nazi ideology was the longest lasting and most bitter of any German institution. The Nazis weakened the churches' resistance from within but the Nazis had not yet succeeded in taking full control of the churches, which was evidenced by the thousands of clergy who were sent to concentration camps. Rev. Martin Niemöller was imprisoned in 1937, charged with "misuse of the pulpit to vilify the State and the Party and attack the authority of the Govern
caption: Ludwig Müller was a main proponent of implementing Nazi elements into German Protestantism, which caused major disruptions in the German Evangelical Church and eventually led to the creation of the Confessing Church by some alarmed pastors such as Martin Niemöller
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