German Christians movement
movement within the German Evangelical Church
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 was a co-founder of the German Christians movement.
History
Antecedents
Lutheranism
Imperial Germany
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.
Austria-Hungary
Karl Lueger's antisemitic Christian Social Party is sometimes viewed as a model for Adolf Hitler's Nazism.
“German Christians movement” enters the record as movement within the German Evangelical Church. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what German, Christians and movement can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“German Christians movement” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, German, Christians and movement provides the most credible route into that argument.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q700820. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1933, 1945, 1934 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “German Christians movement” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.