protests the regime faced were by women and Catholics, primarily. Some of the earliest work on resistance examined the Catholic record, including most spectacularly local and regional protests against decrees removing crucifixes from schools, part of the regime's effort to secularize public life. Although historians dispute the degree of political antagonism toward National Socialism behind these protests, their impact is uncontested. Popular, public, improvised protests against decrees replacing crucifixes with the Führer's picture, in incidents from 1935 to 1941, from north to south and east to west in Germany, forced state and party leaders to back away and leave crucifixes in traditional places. Prominent incidents of crucifix removal decrees, followed by protests and official retreat, occurred in Oldenburg (Lower Saxony) in 1936, Frankenholz (Saarland) and Frauenberg (East Prussia) in 1937, and in Bavaria in 1941. Women, with traditional sway over children and their spiritual welfare, played a leading part. German history of the early twentieth century held examples of the power of public mobilization, including the Kapp military Putsch in 1920, some civilian Germans realized the specific potential of public protest from within the dictatorship. After the Oldenburg crucifix struggle, police reported that Catholic activists told each other they could defeat future anti-Catholic actions of the state as long as they posed a united front. Catholic Bishop Clemens von Galen may well have been among them. He had raised his voice in the struggle, circulating a pastoral letter. A few months later in early 1937, while other bishops voiced fear of using such "direct confrontation," Galen favored selective "public protests" as a means of defending church traditions against an overreaching state. Some argue that the regime, once at war, no longer heeded popular opinion and, some agencies and authorities did radicalize use of terror for domestic control in the final phase of war. Hitler and the regime's response to collective street protest, however, did not harden. Although a number of historians have argued that popular opinion, brought to a head by Galen's denunciations from the pulpit in the late summer of 1941, caused Hitler to suspend Nazi "Euthanasia," others disagree. It is certain, however, that Galen intended to have an impact from the pulpit and that the highest Nazi officials decided against punishing him out of concern for public morale. A Catholic protest in May the same year against the closing of the Münsterschwarzach monastery in Lower Franconia illustrates the