During the National Socialist era, the church regime of the Lutheran Church of Mecklenburg was one of the most radical in the German Reich. With the exception of Ulrich Peter's study Lutherrose und Hakenkreuz. The German Christians and the League of National Socialist Pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Mecklenburg
has not yet received adequate attention. There is also a research gap with regard to the development of the regional church in the immediate post-war period and in the early years of the GDR up to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The three-year research project The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Mecklenburg in the Dictatorships of the 20th Century , funded by the DFG, addresses these gaps in research.

The project will examine the development of the Lutheran regional church of Mecklenburg - and until 1934 the regional churches of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz - in the years 1918/21 to 1961: i.e. the period from the military and political collapse of the German Empire and the subsequent formation of legally independent regional churches to the hermetic sealing of the GDR border on August 13, 1961 with the construction of the Berlin Wall. The chosen time frame enables a comparative study of the relationship between church and state in different political systems with different attitudes towards churches and religions. In this way, the significance of the church in and for the respective society can be determined on the one hand, and the transformation of the state church in an increasingly secular world and - this applies in particular to the time of the National Socialist ideological dictatorship and the emerging SED state - an environment far removed from or hostile to the church can be analyzed on the other.

The research project is being carried out by the historian Dr. Hansjörg Buss. He has written numerous articles on contemporary church history; his doctoral thesis on the Lutheran regional church in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck between 1918 and 1950, supervised by Manfred Gailus and Werner Bergmann, was published in 2011 under the title 'Entjudete' Kirche. The Lübeck regional church between Christian anti-Judaism and national anti-Semitism. As the result of a three-year research fellowship from the Schools of Theology at Georg August University, his study Wissenschaft - Ausbildung - Politik. Die Göttinger Theologische Fakultät in der Weimarer Republik, dem Nationalsozialismus und der Nachkriegszeit was published in 2021.