lines, leading to the virtually bloodless capture of the city on 17 April. By groups Christian resistance Though neither the Catholic nor Protestant churches as institutions were prepared to openly oppose the Nazi State, it was from the clergy that the first major component of the German Resistance to the policies of the Third Reich emerged, and the churches as institutions provided the earliest and most enduring centres of systematic opposition to Nazi policies. From the outset of Nazi rule in 1933, issues emerged which brought the churches into conflict with the regime. They offered organised, systematic and consistent resistance to government policies which infringed on ecclesiastical autonomy. As one of the few German institutions to retain some independence from the state, the churches were able to co-ordinate a level of opposition to Government, and, according to Joachim Fest, they, more than any other institutions, continued to provide a "forum in which individuals could distance themselves from the regime". Christian morality and the anti-Church policies of the Nazis also motivated many German resisters and provided impetus for the "moral revolt" of individuals in their efforts to overthrow Hitler. The historian Wolf cites events such as the July Plot of 1944 as having been "inconceivable without the spiritual support of church resistance". "From the very beginning", wrote Hamerow, "some churchmen expressed, quite directly at times, their reservations about the new order. In fact those reservations gradually came to form a coherent, systematic critique of many of the teachings of National Socialism." Clergy in the German Resistance had some independence from the state apparatus, and could thus criticise it, while not being close enough to the centre of power to take steps to overthrow it. "Clerical resistors", wrote Theodore S. Hamerow, could indirectly "articulate political dissent in the guise of pastoral stricture". They usually spoke out not against the established system, but "only against specific policies that it had mistakenly adopted and that it should therefore properly correct". Later, the most trenchant public criticism of the Third Reich came from some of Germany's religious leaders, as the government was reluctant to move against them, and though they could claim to be merely attending to the spiritual welfare of their flocks, "what they had to say was at times so critical of the central doctrines of National Socialism that to say it required great boldness", and they became resistors. Their resistance was directed