The son of a railroad official (Johann Heinrich), Ludwig Müller grew up in East Westphalia in a national Protestant milieu influenced by the revivalist movement. After leaving school he studied Protestant theology in Halle an der Saale and Bonn, before taking up a parish ministry in Rödinghausen (Herford district) in 1908. There he married the daughter of a wealthy Cuxhaven merchant, with whom he had two children. Just before the start of the First World War he became a naval chaplain in Wilhelmshaven and was deployed to theaters of war in Flanders and Turkey.
He remained a naval pastor after the war, first in Cuxhaven and from 1920 as a senior naval pastor in Wilhelmshaven again, where he led the local branch of the ‘Stahlhelm’, transforming the garrison church into a kind of hall of fame for the imperial navy. In 1926 he was promoted to military district pastor in Königsberg. It was here that he met Adolf Hitler in person, probably in 1927: Hitler stayed at Müller’s home during a propaganda trip, and Müller became a supporter. He successfully campaigned for Hitler among the East Prussian officers – including military district commander Werner von Blomberg, who later became Hitler’s Minister of War.
Müller joined the Nazi Party in 1931, co-founding the National Socialist church party of the DC in 1932 and becoming a member of its Reich Administration as well as provincial leader of East Prussia. In April 1933 Hitler appointed Müller his personal ‘Plenipotentiary for the Affairs of the Protestant Church’. After regional church representatives initially decided against Müller and in favor of the respected director of the Bethel institutions, Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Younger, as Reich Bishop of the planned unified Protestant Reich Church, the German Protestant Church (DEK), Müller did finally achieve his goal with the huge backing of the Nazi regime, with the latter forcing Bodelschwingh to resign and ordering general church elections in July 1933. Synods dominated by the DC first elected Müller Bishop of Prussia in August 1933 and then Reich Bishop in September.
His efforts to bring the church into line – by introducing an ecclesiastical ‘Aryan paragraph’, for example – soon met with internal resistance, resulting in the gradual establishment of the Confessing Church. From April 1934 the latter claimed to be the ‘legitimate Protestant Church of Germany’ (Declaration of Ulm), going on to adopt the Theological Declaration of Barmen as its theological foundation at the first Reich Confessional Synod in May 1934. For radical members of the DC, however, Müller’s efforts to bring the church into line did not go far enough. Vain and career-minded, but in no way capable of performing his leadership duties and with various illnesses literally providing a form of escape for him, Müller was caught up in the conflict between the two sides and felt compelled to resign as DC patron after the scandal of a radical DC rally at Berlin Sportpalast in November 1933 – even though this also meant losing his power base.
Müller also increasingly lost the support of the Nazi regime, as it withdrew to a position of neutrality with regard to the church and religious policy, at least officially. He attempted to maintain his position by integrating the Protestant youth organizations in the Hitler Youth, ensuring opposition clergy were harshly disciplined, bringing the regional churches into line with the Reich Church and establishing a veritable Reich Bishop dictatorship. At a reception for the Chancellor attended by DC church leaders and representatives of the church opposition in January 1934, Hitler once again backed Müller. But as the dispute within the Protestant Church continued to escalate, causing unrest both at home and abroad, Hitler dropped Müller in the fall of 1934, effectively removing him from power in the summer of 1935 by appointing Hanns Kerrl ‘Reich Church Minister’. Nominally the Reich Bishop continued to hold office until the end of the Nazi state – this was in fact Hitler’s express wish. Apparently Hitler did not want to openly admit that he had made a mistake in choosing Müller, who had failed to his expectations in every way.
Müller undertook lecture tours during which he was often denied access to church buildings, for example, and he also published three works: a ‘Germanized’ version of the Sermon on the Mount in the language of the National Socialists in 1936, followed two years later by a kind of doctrine of faith and morals in which he attempted to provide some substance for the enigmatic concept of ‘positive Christianity’ contained in the Nazi Party program of 1920, and in 1939 a war book of morale-boosting slogans for the Wehrmacht.
Müller was at home both in the pious language of his homeland and the military parlance of the officers’ mess. Despite his nationalist or National Socialist political views, he presented himself as comparatively moderate and ecclesiastical in the early stages of the Nazi regime so as to find acceptance among broader church circles as Reich Bishop. As his power rapidly declined from the end of 1933, however, he became increasingly extreme and joined the radical Thuringian DC, who were seeking to establish a non-denominational German national church. He even attempted to align himself with the so-called ‘ideological dissociation’ forces around Alfred Rosenberg, whose aim was more or less to replace the Christian faith with a Germanic blood and soil religion. In his thinking, traditional Christian teachings and theological reflections were increasingly supplanted by National Socialist political and ideological convictions. Already evident at a young age, his antisemitism became increasingly radical, too. In a handwritten letter to Hitler dated July 1941, he asked to be allowed to leave the church because he could no longer uphold its teachings; Hitler conveyed to him that he should not take this step. Müller died in Berlin shortly after the end of the war under rather ambiguous circumstances.
