Allied Military Government Policy and the Religious Situation in Germany

Abstract

If it be assumed that in any survey of the religious situation in post-war Europe, reconstruction and the struggle against Stalinist communism are the two main themes, Germany is deserving of attention on both counts. By the end of the war, approximately fifty per cent of the church's physical property in cities of more than thirty thousand people had been destroyed. The Nazi penetration into the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Evangelical Church and practically all the minor Protestant sects also presented a reconstruction problem of major proportions. In the matter of communism, Germany at the crossroads of East and West was soon subjected to a determined leftist drive, conducted in the guise of anti-fascism, to remake its society on an anticlerical and irreligious pattern.