How do Bavaria’s Roman Catholic and Protestant communities reflect postwar migration?

Following World War II, Bavaria experienced significant shifts in its religious composition due to large-scale population movements. The influx of refugees from the Sudetenland and other parts of eastern Europe, where many ethnic Germans had resided for centuries, brought a heavy arrival of Protestants into the state.1

These postwar migrations fundamentally altered the religious landscape of Bavaria, which had historically been predominantly Roman Catholic. While Roman Catholicism remains the majority faith in the early 21st century, the postwar period established Evangelical Lutherans as the second-largest religious group in the state. This demographic change reflects the broader trend across Germany, where population movements after the war helped to even the numbers of adherents between the two major Christian denominations.12