ABSTRACT
The church had been instituted as the custodian and dispenser of the sacrament, the means of grace. The enmity of the regime against the churches, indeed against Christianity with only a few tactical adjustments during the war. The Nazis were not just anti-clerical; they were anti-Christian. The secret public opinion reports of the Security Service are full of detailed observations of church opposition to and activities against the programme and policies of the regime, with considerably more attention given to the Catholics or ‘political Catholicism’ than to the Protestants, who were regarded as mere reactionaries and anyway always divided among themselves. The watchdogs of the regime were no doubt aware that the effects of pronouncements— there was a comparable one by the Confessing Church in Prussia later that year— reached well beyond the flock of churchgoers. The churches were crowded during the war, and the crowds included people who had not been in the habit of going to church.
