through their country’s defeat in World War I, inflation from the Great Depression, and a major land reduction during the Weimar Republic years. The war, depression, and the land reduction were only the commencement of the Protestant Churches’ tribulations. When the Nazi administration and Hitler took control, the Protestant Churches faced the dilemma of a total structural assimilation.
This land reduction would play an imperative role in the failure of the Protestant Churches’ structure of authority which weakened its effectiveness to impede Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Once the land reduction of the Old Prussian Empire had been triumphant during the Weimar years, Hitler almost effortlessly became Chancellor of Germany. After Hitler’s ascension to power was completed, he and the Nazi regime purposely and systematically dismantled the Protestant Churches’ muscle and influence by using an assortment of strategies against the Protestant Churches’ structure on an organizational level. Hitler and the Nazi regime used a “parallel organization” or the Deutsche Christens, German Christians, to assimilate the Protestant Churches’ leadership. Though this assimilation was not an easy feat, Hitler’s true brilliance was his dissimulation to eradicate the Protestant Churches as a structural entity. Put succinctly, he somehow managed to convince the Protestant Churches’ leadership time and time again that he had nothing to do with the Protestant Churches’ troubles. He somehow managed to convince the Protestant Churches’ leadership of his innocence up to the very end of the Nazi’s time in power.
Though some scholars recognized that the land reduction and restructure of authority was significant, they seem to overlook the Protestant Churches’ failures from an organizational level most often relating it to individuals acts. Most researchers look to other factors such as: anti-Semitism, common enemies or shared values, and other issues which seem to derive from a cultural or psychological explanation. Conversely this research uses these past findings, and it suggests new insight which builds new theories on the Protestant Churches’ failures. These new theories are derived by observing typical bureaucratic organizational behaviors along with applying theories of social conflict to the Protestant Churches’ actions.
This study is also performed to isolate the devices used during the Nazi’s supremacy in Germany. Both the Protestant Churches and the Nazi government used various methods to attempt to dismantle the others power. This research assesses these tactics of the Nazi regime, along with German Christians, to the counter-tactic of the Protestant Churches from an organizational level. Data such as church doctrines and other forms of historical information was further critiqued in an attempt to determine whether the Protestant Churches’ campaigns were successful or fruitless. Through this effort such questions as, “How did the German Christians and the Nazi regime effectively divest the Protestant Churches’ influence on the normal citizens of the state?” “How did the Protestant Churches’ authority reply to such maneuvers?” “Why were the Protestant Churches unproductive, in general, from an organizational perspective at hindering the Nazi regime?”
