In Germany, Protestant church bodies of Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist) and United denominations celebrate a day of repentance and prayer.
7And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink water: 8But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands.
In the following centuries different feast days of repentance and prayer were fixed within the many different Holy Roman German states of Protestant population.
In 1939 Buß- und Bettag was abolished as a statutory non-working holiday, in order to gain more working days during World War II, and thus it was celebrated on the Sunday following its actual date.
For this purpose the federal government, then led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), proposed to the German states, which have the power to define religious feast days as statutory non-working holidays, to abolish the Protestant Buß- und Bettag as a statutory non-working holiday.