Evangelical Church in Germany
As to co-operation of all the Protestant church bodies in Germany, strong resentments prevailed, especially among the Lutheran church bodies of the Bavaria right of the river Rhine, "the Hamburgian State", Hanover, Mecklenburg, "the Free State of Saxony", and Thuringia, against any unification after the experiences during the Nazi reign with the German Evangelical Church. But it was decided to replace the pre-1933 German Federation of Protestant Churches with the new umbrella Evangelical Church in Germany, provisionally led by the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, a naming borrowed from the brethren council organisation. Beginning in 1949, Dibelius was chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany.