German Evangelical Church
In a 1933 vote to the Reichssynode, the German Christians were able to elect Ludwig Müller, a pro-Nazi pastor, to the office of Reichsbischof [de] ("Reich Bishop").
Although the meeting ended with Protestant churches declaring their loyalty to the state, removing Müller was not a subject to discussion for Hitler.
In February 1937, the committee was removed by the Nazis and leading figures of the Protestant resistance like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller and others were arrested.
After 1937, the German Evangelical Church was not considered an issue in the Kirchenkampf by the Nazis as it became heavily controlled by the Ministry until 1945.
Since unification, clergy and ecclesiastical administrators had discussed a merger, but one had never materialised due to strong regional self-confidence and traditions as well as the denominational fragmentation of Lutheran, Calvinist and United churches.
Following their example, the then 28 territorially defined German Protestant churches founded the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund (DEK) in 1922.
Consequently, the German Evangelical Church, created as a merger, then continued to exist as a mere umbrella.
On 16 July 1935, Hanns Kerrl was appointed Reichsminister for Church Affairs, a newly created department.
On 24 September 1935, a new law empowered Kerrl to legislate by way of ordinances within the German Evangelical Church, circumventing any synodal autonomy.
[6] Kerrl managed to gain the very respected Wilhelm Zoellner (a Lutheran, until 1931 General Superintendent of the old-Prussian ecclesiastical province of Westphalia) to form the Reich's Ecclesiastical Committee (Reichskirchenausschuss, RKA) on 3 October 1935, combining the neutral and moderate groups to reconcile the disputing church parties.
On 19 December, Kerrl issued a decree which forbade all kinds of Confessing Church activities, namely appointments of pastors, education, examinations, ordinations, ecclesiastical visitations, announcements and declarations from the pulpit, separate financial structures and convening Synods of Confession; further the decree established provincial ecclesiastical committees.
[8] Kerrl now subjected Müller's chancery of the German Evangelical Church directly to his ministry and the national, provincial and state ecclesiastical committees were soon after dissolved.
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 EOK, won over August Marahrens, State Bishop of the "intact" 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).
[14] After World War II, Theophil Wurm, Landesbischof of Württemberg, invited representatives of the surviving German regional Protestant church bodies to Treysa for 31 August 1945.
