German Christians movement

German Christians (German: Deutsche Christen) were a pressure group and a movement within the German Evangelical Church that existed between 1933 and 1945, aligned towards the antisemitic, racist, and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal of aligning German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles. Their advocacy of these principles led to a schism within 23 of the initially 28 regional church bodies (Landeskirchen) in Germany and the attendant foundation of the opposing Confessing Church in 1934. Siegfried Leffler [de] was a co-founder of the German Christians movement.

During the period of the German Empire, before the Weimar Republic, the Protestant churches (Landeskirchen) in Germany were divided along state and provincial borders. Each state or provincial church was supported by and affiliated with the regnal house—if it was Protestant—in its particular region; the crown provided financial and institutional support to its church. Church and state were therefore, to a large extent, combined on a regional basis. Monarchies of Roman Catholic dynasties also organised church bodies that were territorially defined by their state borders. The same was true for the three republican German states within the pre-1918 Empire. In Alsace-Lorraine the Napoleonic system of établissements publics du culte for the Calvinist, Jewish, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic congregations and umbrellas remained in effect.

Karl Lueger's antisemitic Christian Social Party is sometimes viewed as a model for Adolf Hitler's Nazism. Hitler praised Lueger in his book Mein Kampf as an inspiration. In 1943, Nazi Germany produced the biographical film Vienna 1910 about Lueger; the film was awarded the standing of "special political value".

With the end of World War I and the resulting political and social turmoil, the regional churches lost their secular rulers. With revolutionary fervor in the air, the conservative church leaders had to contend with socialists who favoured disestablishment.

After considerable political maneuvering, state churches were abolished (in name) under the new Weimar government, but the anti-disestablishmentarians prevailed in substance: churches remained public corporations and retained their subsidies from the government. Religious instruction in the schools continued, as did the theological faculties in the universities. The rights formerly held by the princes in the German Empire simply devolved to church councils.

Accordingly, in this initial period of the Weimar Republic, the Protestant Church in Germany now operated as a federation of 28 regional (or provincial) churches. The federation operated officially through the representative German Evangelical Church Confederation (Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund (DEKB)); the League was itself established in 1922 by the rather loose annual convention called Church General Assembly (Kirchentag), which was composed of the members of the various regional churches. The League was governed and administered by a 36-member Executive Committee (Kirchenausschuss) which was responsible for ongoing governance between the annual conventions of the Kirchentag.

Save for the organisational matters under the jurisdiction of the national League, the regional churches remained independent in other matters, including theology, and the federal system allowed for a great deal of regional autonomy.

The German Christians were, for the most part, a "group of fanatically Nazi Protestants." They began as an interest group and eventually came to represent one of the schismatic factions of German Protestantism.