The politics of religion in Soviet-occupied Germany: The case of Berlin-Brandenburg, 1945--1949

This dissertation discusses the religious policies of the Soviet military authorities and their German allies in the Soviet zone, but more importantly, who devised them, how they did so, and how they attempted to implement them. In doing so, it illustrates how the Soviet authorities recreated the Soviet zone along Stalinist lines with regards to religious policy, a process which they implemented throughout all of Eastern Europe as well in East Germany. While I examine how these policies were devised, I place greater emphasis on their implementation in the central province of the Soviet zone, Berlin-Brandenburg. While the SVAG (Sovetskaia Voennaia Administratsiia v Germanii, Soviet military administration in Germany) and the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Socialist Unity Party of Germany) policies towards the Churches became more negative as the Stalinization of the Soviet zone accelerated, the foundations for later SVAG and SED attempts to minimize the public role of the Churches had been laid during the early period of the occupation. The Soviet zone of Germany, the lynchpin of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe proved to be both the exception and the rule with regards to post-1945 Soviet religious policies. My dissertation explains what this contradiction reveals about Soviet rule in Germany as well as the origins of the SED-regime's hostile but complex approach towards religious institutions.;Furthermore, this dissertation demonstrates how the leadership of the Churches responded to the policies of the SVAG and the SED, especially after they took an increasingly anti-religious tone during the late 1940s. The diverse responses of the Church leadership in the Evangelical Church during the Soviet occupation reveal the foundations of the eventual break within the leadership of the Evangelical Church in the 1960s over the issue of how to deal with the atheist SED-regime. At the same time, the stances of Dibelius and Preysing as stalwart opponents of the creation of the "second German dictatorship" in the 1940s demonstrate how the Churches became central actors in the East German dissident movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Ultimately, my dissertation reinforces the traditional analysis of the Soviet occupation as establishing the foundations for the GDR, including its policies regarding religious life, while also arguing this process did not end in 1949 but continued to resonate throughout the history of the two Germanies and the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe.