United Protestantism – August Marahrens, state bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran State Church of Hanover (for the Lutherans), and the Reformed Hermann-Albert Klugkist Hesse, director of the preacher seminary in Wuppertal, to prepare the constitution of a united church which they called the German Evangelical Church too. This caused the later confusion when the streamlined Reich church and the Confessing Church alike identified as being the legitimate church of that name. The Nazi government compelled the negotiators to include its representative, the former army chaplain Ludwig Müller from Königsberg, a devout German Christian. The plans were to dissolve the German Evangelical Church Confederation and the 28 church bodies and to replace them by a uniform Protestant church, to be called the German Evangelical Church (). On 27 May 1933 representatives of the 28 church bodies gathered in Berlin, and, against a minority voting for Ludwig Müller, elected Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, head of the Bethel Institution and member of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, Reich's Bishop, a newly created title. The German Christians strictly opposed that election, because Bodelschwingh was not their partisan. Thus the Nazis, who were permanently breaking the law, stepped in, using the streamlined Prussian government, and declared the functionaries had exceeded their authority. Abolition of religious autonomy Once the Nazi government figured out that the Protestant church bodies would not be streamlined from within using the German Christians, they abolished the constitutional freedom of religion and religious organisation, declaring the unauthorised election of Bodelschwingh had created a situation contravening the constitutions of the Protestant churches, and on these grounds, on 24 June the Nazi Minister of Cultural Affairs, Bernhard Rust appointed August Jäger as Prussian State Commissioner for the Prussian ecclesiastical affairs (). This act clearly violated the status of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union as statutory body () and subjecting it to Jäger's orders (see Struggle of the Churches, ). Bodelschwingh resigned as Reich's Bishop the same day. On 28 June Jäger appointed Müller as new Reich's Bishop and on 6 July as leader of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union, then with 18 million parishioners by far the biggest Protestant church body within Germany, with 41 million Protestants altogether (total population: 62 millions). Kapler resigned as president of the Evangelical Supreme Church Council, after he had applied for retirement on 3 June, and Gen.-Supt. Wilhelm Haendler (competent for Berlin's suburbia),