High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Protestant Reich Church, officially German Evangelical Church (German: Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) and colloquially Reichskirche, formed in 1933 to merge the 28 regional churches into a unified state church that espoused a single doctrine compatible with National Socialism. The Protestant opposition to Nazism established a rival German Evangelical Church, called the Confessing Church, an umbrella of independent regional churches. After World War II, both of these bodies were replaced by the Evangelical Church in Germany.