[2] Under the influence of the centralising movement of absolutism and the Napoleonic Age, after the defeat of Napoléon I in 1815, rather than reestablishing the previous denominational leadership structures, all religious communities were placed under a single consistory in each of the then ten Prussian provinces.

Frederick William III took notice of Daniel Amadeus Neander [de], who had become his subject by the annexation of Royal Saxon territory in 1816, and who had helped the king to implement the agenda in his Lutheran congregations.

In 1830, Johann Gottfried Scheibel, professor of theology at the Silesian Frederick William's University, founded in Breslau the first Lutheran congregation in Prussia, independent of the Union and outside of its umbrella organisation Evangelical Church in the Royal Prussian Lands.

In a compromise with some dissenters, who had now earned the name Old Lutherans, in 1834 Frederick William issued a decree, which stated that Union would only be in the areas of governance, and in the liturgical agenda, and that the respective congregations could retain their denominational identities.

But there were also congregations of emigrants and expatriates in other areas of the Ottoman Empire (2), as well as in Argentina (3), Brazil (10), Bulgaria (1), Chile (3), Egypt (2), Italy (2), the Netherlands (2), Portugal (1), Romania (8), Serbia (1), Spain (1), Switzerland (1), United Kingdom (5), and Uruguay (1) and the foreign department of the Evangelical Supreme Church Council (see below) stewarded them.

The Middle Party's long-serving president and member of the general synod (1891–1915) was the well-known law professor Wilhelm Kahl [de] (DVP), who provided important input into the section of the Weimar Constitution dealing with the relationship between church and state.

So when in 1926 the leftist parties successfully launched a plebiscite to the effect of the expropriation of the German former regnal houses without compensation, the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union called up for an abstention from the election, holding up the commandment Thou shalt not steal.

In this respect Dibelius regarded himself as consciously anti-Jewish, explaining in a circular to the pastors in his general superintendency district of Kurmark, "that with all degenerating phenomena of modern civilisation Judaism plays a leading role".

[39] In February 1932 Protestant Nazis, above all Wilhelm Kube (presbyter at the Gethsemane Church, Berlin, and speaker of the six NSDAP parliamentarians in the Prussian State Diet) initiated the foundation of a new Kirchenpartei, the so-called Faith Movement of German Christians (German: Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen, DC), participating on 12–14 November 1932 for the first time in the elections for presbyters and synodals within the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union and gaining about a third of the seats in presbyteries and synods.

Once the Nazi government figured out that the Protestant church bodies would not be streamlined from within using the German Christians, they abolished the constitutional freedom of religion and religious organisation, declaring the unauthorised election of Bodelschwingh had created a situation contravening the constitutions of the Protestant churches, and on these grounds, on 24 June the Nazi Minister of Cultural Affairs, Bernhard Rust appointed August Jäger as Prussian State Commissioner for the Prussian ecclesiastical affairs (German: Staatskommissar für die preußischen kirchlichen Angelegenheiten).

[59] On the basis of the theses of Günter Jacob its members concluded that a schism was a matter of fact,[66] a new Protestant church was to be established, since the official organisation was anti-Christian, heretical and therefore illegitimate.

On 27 September the pan-German First National Synod convened in the highly symbolic city of Wittenberg, where the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church in 1517.

Niemöller, Rabenau and Kurt Scharf (Congregation in Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg)) circulated an appeal, calling the pastors up not to fill in the forms, meant to prove their Aryan descent, distributed by the Evangelical Supreme Church Council.

[70] On 29 November the Covenant gathered 170 members in Berlin-Dahlem in order to call up Ludwig Müller to resign so that the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union could return into a constitutional condition.

In the convention, following suit on 30 and 31 May, the participants from all 28 Protestant church bodies in Germany – including the old-Prussian synodals – declared Protestantism were based on the complete Holy Scripture, the Old and the New Covenant.

For the time being the Confessing Christians found a compromise and appointed – on 22 November – the so-called first Preliminary Church Executive (German: Vorläufige Leitung der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche, 1.

[91] But soon Barth, Hesse, Karl Immanuel Immer [de] and Niemöller found the first Preliminary Church Executive to be too compromising so that these Dahlemites resigned from the Reich's Brethren Council.

Between end of 1934 and March 1937 the central office of the Preliminary Church Executive was located in the Burckhardt-Haus of the school for social workers (German: Lehrhaus für Gemeindehelferinnen der ev.

Instead – as was typical for the Nazi government – they established a new parallel authority, the Decision-Taking Office for Affairs of the Evangelical Church (German: Beschlußstelle in Angelegenheiten der Evangelischen Kirche).

Peter Conze (Berlin-Halensee), Senate President Engert (Berlin-Lichterfelde West), Pastor Gustav Heidenreich (Church of the Well of Salvation, Berlin-Schöneberg), General Forest-Master Walter von Keudell (Hohenlübbichow, Brandenburg), Supt.

But Künneth (Inner Mission) and a number of renowned professors of the Frederick William University of Berlin, who worked for the Confessing Church before, declared their readiness to collaborate with the committee, to wit Prof. Alfred Bertholet, Gustav Adolf Deissmann (Volkskirchlich-Evangelische Vereinigung; VEV.

This body was recognised by the brethren councils of the destroyed churches of the old-Prussian Union, of Bremen, of Nassau-Hesse and of Oldenburg as well as by a covenant of pastors from Württemberg (the so-called Württembergische Sozietät).

[71] On 7 October the Gestapo arrested Weißler, then office manager and legal advisor of the second preliminary church executive, erroneously blaming him to have played the memorandum into the hands of foreign media.

Sylten found additional office rooms in the street An der Stechbahn #3–4 opposite to the southern façade of the Berlin City Castle, and on 25 January 1939 the Bureau's emigration department, led by Ministerial Counsel rtrd.

From September 1939 the Bureau Grüber had to subordinate to the supervision by Eichmann, who worked as Special Referee for the Affairs of the Jews (German: Sonderreferent für Judenangelegenheiten) in an office in Kurfürstenstraße #115–116, Berlin.

[138] The Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, since July replacing the Reichsvertretung as the new and only central organisation competent for all persons and institutions persecuted as Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws, supervised the school.

[144] Then the bureau, named today Evangelical Relief Centre for the formerly Racially Persecuted (German: Evangelische Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte), moved to its present site in Berlin-Zehlendorf, Teltower Damm #124.

[152] All pastors of the United Evangelical Church in Poland there were subjected to strict state control and expelled at the slightest suspect of criticism of the murders and expulsions carried out daily in the Warthegau.

In July 1948 the provisional executive of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union had to convene separately in East and West, because the Soviets blocked the interzone traffic after the introduction of the Deutsche Mark in the Bizone and the French zone of occupation.

[175] On 5 April of the same year Karl Steinhoff, then Minister of the Interior of the GDR, opposed the continued identity of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, especially the use of the term "Prussian" in its name.