concentration camps for similar reasons. In general in the Prussian church province of Westphalia, Protestant churches were enmeshed in the Kirchenkampf between the pro-Nazi "German Christians" and the Confessing Church. Initially, German Christians who were closely associated with the regime won most priestly and synodal elections, but in 1934 a noted member of the Confessing Church, , was elected as the head of the church province. The resistance of members of the socialist and communist workers' movements was clearly politically motivated. Dortmund was the centre of a communist resistance which continued to renew itself continuously despite arrests. At the beginning of 1945, the Gestapo arrested twenty-eight communists, who were executed in Dortmund's Bittermark forest, along with other detainees and prisoners of war in March and April. Supporters of the SPD were generally less assertive, focussing on maintaining old contacts and exchanging information. Their fragmented organisation meant that the group revolving around Fritz Henßler generally went undetected by the secret police until around 1937. In Dortmund and other large Westphalian cities there were also groups of Edelweiss pirates, an informal youth movement which passively and actively resisted the Hitler Youth. Persecution of Jews and euthanasia On Kristallnacht, during and after 9 November 1938, synagogues were burnt and in some places, such as Lünen, Jewish citizens were murdered. Events in Medebach are well documented. As in the rest of Germany, the Jewish community in Westphalia was almost completely destroyed. In Dortmund in 1933 there were around 4,000 Jews, of whom 44 had fallen victim to the various persecutory measures by 1939. Over a thousand died between 1940 and 1945 in concentration camps and another 200 died from exhaustion in the months following the end of the war. Another portion of the Jewish population successfully made it out of the country before 1941. In the whole of Westphalia, the Jewish population sank from around 18,000 in 1933 to a little over 7,000 in 1939. By the beginning of systematic deportation in 1941, the number had fallen to 5,800. Oberpräsident Alfred Meyer participated in the Wannsee Conference in his role as state secretary in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. The deportations began in Westphalia on 10 December 1941, with transport from Münsterland. Bielefeld and Arnsberg followed a few days later. By the end of March 1943, there were only around 800 Jews in Westphalia. Most of these were probably protected persons