(representing the destroyed churches including the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union) issued a declaration of protest. Confessing congregations in the Ecclesiastical Province of Pomerania and the Congregation of Neubabelsberg handed in lists of signatures in protest against the exclusion of the stigmatised Protestants of Jewish descent. Also the Evangelical Supreme Church Council of the 'intact' Evangelical State Church in Württemberg and its Bishop Wurm sent letters of protest on 27 January and 6 February 1942, respectively. On 17–18 October 1942 the eleventh old-Prussian Synod of Confession convened again in Hamm, Hamburg. The majority of the synodal members voted against the motion to allow women to be ordained as pastors. However, the outspoken advocates of women's ordination continued to pursue their goal. On 12 January 1943 Kurt Scharf, praeses of the Brandenburg provincial Synod of Confession (Bekenntnissynode) and pastor in Sachsenhausen, ordained Ilse Härter and in his church, the two women wearing the full ministerial robes, as the first women in Germany as pastors equal to their male colleagues. Until 1943 almost all the remaining Jewish Germans and Gentile Germans of Jewish descent have been deported to the concentration camps. Thus on 10 June, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt dissolved the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland and deported the tiny rest of its collaborators 6 days later to Theresienstadt. There about 800 Protestants of Jewish descent from all German church bodies founded a Protestant congregation. Pastor Hans Encke (Cologne) had ordained parishioners from his congregation, who were to be deported and wanted to work as chaplains at the place, where they would come to. The only German Jews and German Gentiles of Jewish descent, who were in fact not deported, were those living in so-called privileged mixed marriage, which in 1933 amounted to about 40,000 couples nationwide. Shortly before the next old-Prussian Synod of Confession, in early October 1943 the old-Prussian Brethren Council of the Confessing Church decided to generally allow the ordination of women, followed by the ordination of Annemarie Grosch, Sieghild Jungklaus, Margarethe Saar, Lore Schlunk, and Gisela von Witzleben altogether on 16 October 1943 in Lichterfelde (a locality of Berlin). On the twelfth old-Prussian Synod of Confession (16–19 October 1943) in Breslau the synodals passed a declaration against the ongoing murder of Jews and the handicapped which was read from the pulpits in the confessing congregations. It backed its decisions with the commandment Thou shalt not kill, later issuing leaflets