the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union as an integrated church body. The three ecclesiastical provinces of Danzig, East Prussia, and Posen-West Prussia, all completely located in today's Poland, today's Russian Kaliningrad Oblast and Lithuania Minor, were in the process of complete vanishing after the flight of many parishioners and pastors by the end of the war and the post-war Expulsion of Germans carried out by the Polish and Soviet governments in the years of 1945–1948. In December the lawyer and Supreme Church Councillor Erich Dalhoff issued his assessment that the newly formed provisional executive bodies on the overall and provincial levels of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union are to be regarded legitimate under the given emergency circumstances. As to cooperation of all the Protestant church bodies in Germany strong resentments prevailed, especially among the Lutheran church bodies of Bavaria right of the river Rhine, the Hamburgian State, Hanover, Mecklenburg, the Free State of Saxony, and Thuringia, against any unification after the experiences during the Nazi reign with the German Evangelical Church. But it was decided to replace the former German Federation of Protestant Churches by the new umbrella Evangelical Church in Germany, provisionally led by the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, a naming borrowed from the brethren council organisation. Until 1951 all the six still existing ecclesiastical provinces of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union assumed new church constitutions declaring their independence. In 1946 the Silesian ecclesiastical province, presided by Ernst Hornig, held its first post-war provincial synod in then already Polish Świdnica. But on 4 December 1946 Hornig was deported from Wrocław beyond the Lusatian Neisse, where he took his new seat in the German part of the divided Silesian city of Görlitz. In 1947 the Polish government also expelled the remaining members of the Silesian consistory, which temporarily could continue to officiate in Wrocław. Görlitz became the seat of the tiny territorial rest of the Silesian ecclesiastical province, constituting on 1 May 1947 as the independent . All of the church property east of the Oder-Neiße Line was expropriated without compensation with the church buildings mostly taken over by the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, and most of the cemeteries were desecrated and devastated. Very few churches – namely in Silesia and Masuria – are owned today by Protestant congregations of the Evangelical-Augsburg Church in Poland (see e.g. Churches of Peace). In