politics. When negotiating the concordat with the Catholic Church, Hitler said he supported religious education in schools. Once in office however, Hitler then pursued a policy of suppression of denominational schools and church youth organizations. Clergymen teachers were removed from virtually all state schools. By 1939 all denominational schools had been disbanded or converted to public facilities. In that year, Evans notes, some 95% of Germans still called themselves Protestant or Catholic, while only 3.5% "Deist" (gottgläubig) and 1.5% atheist. Most in these latter categories were "convinced Nazis who had left their Church at the behest of the Party, which had been trying since the mid 1930s to reduce the influence of Christianity in society". John Conway notes that the majority of the three million Nazi Party members continued to pay their church taxes and register as either Roman Catholic or Protestant Christians, "despite all Rosenberg's efforts." Aggressive anti-Church radicals like Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann saw the kirchenkampf campaign against the Churches as a priority concern, and anti-church and anticlerical sentiments were strong among grassroots party activists. From 1938, writes Overy, "Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery and a prominent party atheist, took a leading role in trying to sever all state financial support for the churches, and to limit their legal status and activities, but the need to mobilise church support for the war effort from September 1939 led, as it did in the Soviet Union after 1941, to a limited political truce between church and state." Speer considered Bormann to be the driving force behind the regime's campaign against the churches and thought that Hitler approved of his aims, but wanted to "postpone this problem to a more favourable time": Jehovah's Witnesses Jehovah's Witnesses numbered around 30,000 at the start of Hitler's rule in Germany. For refusing to declare loyalty to the Reich, and refusing conscription into the army, they were declared to be enemies of Germany and persecuted. About 6,000 were sent to the concentration camps. Judaism Anti-Judaism as well as racial anti-Semitism were central planks of Hitler's philosophy. His regime perpetrated the Final Solution an effort to exterminate the Jews, which resulted in a genocide estimated by historians to have killed between 4,204,000 to 7,000,000 Jews. Hitler's ideology presented the Jews as a biological challenge to the "purity" of German blood. See also Antisemitism and the New Testament The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century