itself remaining with Germany, which were located north of the Memel/Nemunas river and thus disentangled. After the nationalist demagoguery following the cession of the Klaipėda Region (northern Lithuania Minor), first a League of Nations mandate, after World War I, only nine Lutheran parishes continued Lithuanian services in the southern and central part of Lithuania Minor, which remained with Germany, but were mostly forbidden after the Nazi takeover in 1933. On 30 July 1919 a majority of 82 synodals from Klaipėda Region decided to keep the jurisdiction with the Ecclesiastical Province of East Prussia against two votes for a separation and 15 abstentions. However, after the Lithuanian annexation of the region, not hindered by the protecting powers combined in the Council of Ambassadors, the Lithuanian government demanded the separation of the Protestant church, announcing it would otherwise withhold the salaries of the clergy. The majority of the regional clergy and the Evangelical Supreme Ecclesiastical Council (Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat, EOK), the old-Prussian executive body, resisted this plan. Therefore, Viktoras Gailius, Land Director of the Klaipėda Region addressed the EOK in Berlin, which sent envoys to Memel, in order to conclude a contract on the future of the old-Prussian Lutheran parishes and the one single Reformed congregation in Memel city, on 27 and 29 September 1923. But an agreement turned out impossible. Superintendent Franz Gregor of Memel deanery preferred the regional synodal federation to be a subsection of the East Prussian ecclesiastical province, whereas the faction of sakytojai laymen within the regional Lutheran parishes, forming since 1919 the mostly Lithuanian-language unofficial Klaipėda Regional Synod (), demanded – also incited by the Lithuanian central government – under the government-appointed leader Pastor Valentinas Gailius (Ruß/Rusnė) an independent church body. However, Gailius, whom the Lithuanian government had granted the title general superintendent, failed to win the pastors and parishioners to also elect him general superintendent. His many decrees were simply ignored in the parishes, who considered his officiating an illegitimate intrusion of government interferment into affairs of ecclesiastical autonomy. The consistory in Königsberg, still the competent directing body, deposed him as pastor. So in April and June 1924 Gailius twice convened the Lithuanianian-language unofficial Klaipėda Regional Synod and formed a preliminary executive body for an independent church. However, the majority of the pastors and of the elected representatives of the parishioners rejected his approach. Embittered Gailius finally resigned. In 1925 then the Klaipėda Directorate sent for their