Protestant Reich Church

The German Evangelical Church (German: Deutsche Evangelische Kirche), also known in English as the Protestant Reich Church and colloquially as the Reich Church (German: Reichskirche), was a unified state church of some German Protestant regional churches that espoused a single doctrine compatible with National Socialism. Since many regional churches declined to join this arrangement, these churches stayed neutral or followed the Protestant opposition to Nazism that established an alternative umbrella organization of their own that became known as the Confessing Church. After World War II, both of these bodies were replaced by a new umbrella organization that persists to this day.

In the reorganization of the German states during German mediatisation and the Napoleonic era, in many of the new or territorially extended states, churches previously under other meanwhile dethroned rulers came under the jurisdiction and control of new governments. Many rather monodenominational German states had turned into multidenominational between 1803 and 1815 due to the widespread annexations of smaller states whose people clung to other creeds. At that time in no German state were government and religion separated. State governments abolished older local or regional statutes prohibiting the settlement of adherents of certain creeds in municipalities, towns or even regions whose populations had consisted so far only of adherents of another creed. For example, the formerly Catholic free imperial cities of Überlingen and Ravensburg had to accept Protestant citizens, and provide a place for Protestant worship; similarly, formerly Protestant cities as Schwäbisch Hall had to offer Catholics a place of religious worship.

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