required a different word. The Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg was the first to leave his church on 15 November 1933, but for the next three years he would be the only prominent Nazi leader to do so. In early 1936, SS leaders Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich terminated their membership of the Roman Catholic Church, followed by a number of Gauleiter including Martin Mutschmann (Saxony), Carl Röver (Weser-Ems), and Robert Heinrich Wagner (Baden). In late 1936, especially Roman Catholic party members left the church, followed in 1937 by a flood of primarily Protestant party members. Hitler himself never repudiated his membership of the Roman Catholic Church; in 1941, he told his General Gerhard Engel: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always be so." However, the shifting actual religious views of Adolf Hitler remain unclear due to conflicting accounts from Hitler's associates such as Otto Strasser, Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels, and others. Demography People who identified as gottgläubig could hold a wide range of religious beliefs, including non-clerical Christianity, Germanic Neopaganism, a generic non-Christian theism, deism, and pantheism. Strictly speaking, Gottgläubigen were not even required to terminate their church membership, but strongly encouraged to. By the decree of the Reich Ministry of the Interior of 26 November 1936, this religious descriptor was officially recognised on government records. The census of 17 May 1939 was the first time that German citizens were able to officially register as gottgläubig. Out of 79.4 million Germans, 2.7 million people (3.5%) claimed to be gottgläubig, compared to 94.5% who either belonged to the Protestant or Roman Catholic churches, 300,000 Jews (0.4%), 86,000 adherents of other religions (including Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Germanic Neopagans and other religious sects and movements, 0.1%), and 1.2 million (1.5%) who had no faith (glaubenslos). Paradoxically, Germans living in urban areas, where support for the Nazi Party was the lowest, were the most likely to identify as gottgläubig, the five highest rates being found in Berlin (10.2%), Hamburg (7.5%), Vienna (6.4%), Düsseldorf (6.0%), and Essen (5.3%). The term still appeared sporadically a few years after the war, and was recognised in the 1946 census inside the French Occupation Zone, before it faded from official documents. Himmler and the SS Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, himself a former Roman Catholic, was one of the main promoters of the gottgläubig movement. He was hostile towards Christianity, its values, the churches and their clergy.