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The spreading of Protestant architecture was slower in other parts of Germany, however, such as the city of Cologne where its first Protestant church was constructed in 1857. [28] Large Protestant places of worship were commissioned across Germany, such as the Garrison Church in the city of Ulm built in 1910 which could hold 2,000 congregants. [29]
In 1948, the Protestant Church in Germany was organized in the aftermath of World War II to function as a new umbrella organization for German Protestant churches. As a result of tensions between West and East Germany , the regional churches in East Germany broke away from the EKD in 1969.
Eventually, the fascist German Christians movement forced the final national merger of Lutherans and Reformed into a single Reich Church, the German Protestant Church in 1933. After World War II, the German Protestant Church was re-founded with the new name Protestant Church in Germany.
The movements based on these early reform movements, such are also considered Protestant today, although their origins date back to more than 100 years before Luther. In particular, the Waldensians who survived the Counter-Reformation affiliated with the Reformed Church (which is more commonly known to be Protestant), and still do today.
In 1920, Swiss Protestant churches came together in the Schweizerischer Evangelischer Kirchenbund (SEK). Following their example, the then 28 territorially defined German Protestant churches founded the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund (DEK) in 1922. This was not a merger into a single church but a loose federation of independent ones.
Those Protestant church bodies, covering the territory of former monarchies with a ruling Protestant dynasty, had been state churches until 1918, with the exception of the Protestant church bodies in territories annexed by Prussia in 1866.
In 1841, the Old Lutherans who had stayed in Prussia convened in a general synod in Breslau and founded the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Prussia, which merged in 1972 with Old Lutheran church bodies in other German states to become today's Independent Evangelical-Lutheran Church (German: Selbständige Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche, or SELK ...
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.