List of bishops of Hamburg

In 1934 through a second putsch by German Christians, backed by secular Nazi authorities, one of their acolytes assumed the episcopate.

They … formed four incorporated bodies (Petri, Nikolai, Katharinen, Jacobi) in which the “allodial” (property-owning) burghers and the heads of guilds - thus only a fraction of the male population - were entitled to vote.

"[2] "At about the same time, three deacons from each parish (twelve altogether), acting as “chief elders”,[3] took on the task of centralizing, administering, and uniformly distributing relief to the poor.

"Beginning in 1685, there were thus fifteen chief elders: sixty deacons instead of forty-eight and 180 assembly members altogether, rather than 144.

In 1593 the superintendency was given up and the pastors of the five urban congregations formed the spiritual ministerium (Geistliches Ministerium), collegially wielding spiritual leadership of the state church and electing from its midst one of the head pastors the senior as primus inter pares only.

Reforms started with granting citizenship to non-Lutherans, and the full emancipation of Calvinists, Catholics and Jews until 1849.

[4] Rather than the senate directly governing and administering Lutheran church matters, separate bodies were developed.

[6] The spiritual ministerium, comprising all the Lutheran clergy, with many more than the five head churches and parishes being established in the 19th century, was redefined as a mere advisory and reviewing body.

[6] With the introduction of the general and equal suffrage also for women and people with no or only low incomes in Hamburg in 1919 also the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Hamburgian State established equal suffrage in presbyterial and synodal elections by an emergency ordinance in 1919 and its revised constitution in 1923.

After Hindenburg's suspension of central Weimar Constitutional civil liberties, followed by the Nazi takeover on the Reich's level and with its Empowerment Act de facto doing away with state autonomy the last democratic senate was deposed, and the Hamburg parliament restaffed disregarding Hamburg's state election outcome but mirroring the rather Nazi-preferential allocation of seats realised on the Reich's level.

[11] So when Hitler's government imposed an unconstitutional premature reelection of all presbyters (elders) and the synod for 23 July 1933 – also in the other regional Protestant church bodies in Germany – the so-called German Christians and the Kirchenpartei[12] Gospel and Church [de] (a merger including the Young-Reformatory Movement, dominated by the latter's proponents) presented the Lutheran Hamburg electorate united lists of candidates for the synod and all presbyteries, each staffed with 51% German Christians and 49% proponents of Gospel and Church.

With the defeat of Germany and its Nazi government the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Hamburgian State returned to its pre-1933 constitution, only reluctantly cleansing its staff and bodies from few of the most extreme proponents of the German Christians.