Denomination
Lutheran
The Lutheran tradition encompasses the Evangelical-Lutheran state churches of Germany and Scandinavia, the Lutheran World Federation member churches across Africa and Asia, and the conservative confessional Lutheran bodies in North America (LCMS, WELS). The umbrella German Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) is technically a union of Lutheran, Reformed, and United bodies, but it is treated here as Lutheran-anchored because the predominant constituent tradition is Lutheran.
The Lutheran entries currently in this archive concern the Cold War — specifically the documented Stasi infiltration of the East German EKD, anchored in the BStU file releases of the 1990s. The post-Reformation Lutheran territorial churches' role in continental witch panics (especially Saxony and Württemberg in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) is within scope and pending writeup.
Filed
2 entriesStasi Infiltration of the East German Lutheran Churches
The East German Ministry for State Security operated extensive agent networks within the EKD-bloc Evangelical-Lutheran churches throughout the 1950–1989 period; the BStU archive opening after 1990 made the operation publicly documentable down to individual *Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter* identities.
FILED · 1819–1969 · CATHOLIC · INSTITUTIONALUS Federal Indian Boarding Schools
United States Department of the Interior investigative reports released in 2022 and 2024 established that the federal government had operated, or funded religious institutions to operate, 408 Indian boarding schools across 37 states between 1819 and 1969, with at least 973 documented child deaths confirmed across both volumes of the investigation.
