Ss. Peter and Paul Church on Nikolskoë is a Protestant

Evangelical Church in Germany

The Evangelical Church in Germany is a federation of 22 Lutheran, Unified and Reformed Protestant regional church bodies in Germany. The EKD is not a church in a theological understanding because of the denominational differences. However, the member churches share full pulpit and altar...

 church in the Volkspark Glienecke in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

. Its today congregation forms part of the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia

Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia

The Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia is a Protestant church body in the German states of Brandenburg, Berlin and a part of Saxony. The seat of the church is in Berlin. It is the most important Protestant denomination in the area....

.

The church has a Russian Orthodox profile, with the noteworthy difference that it has only one onion dome

Onion dome

An onion dome is a dome whose shape resembles the onion, after which they are named. Such domes are often larger in diameter than the drum upon which they are set, and their height usually exceeds their width...

, instead of the five usually seen in Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

.

King Friedrich Wilhelm III had the church built for the residents of Klein-Glienicke and Pfaueninsel

Pfaueninsel

Pfaueninsel is an island in the River Havel situated in Berlin-Wannsee, in southwestern Berlin, near the borders with Potsdam and Brandenburg. The island is part of the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin World Heritage Site and a popular destination for day-trippers...

 on a bluff on the Havel

Havel

The Havel is a river in north-eastern Germany, flowing through the German states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Berlin and Saxony-Anhalt. It is a right tributary of the Elbe river and in length...

 near the Pfaueninsel and the Nikolskoë Blockhouse. It was designed by the architects Friedrich August Stüler

Friedrich August Stüler

Friedrich August Stüler was an influential Prussian architect and builder. His masterwork is the Neues Museum in Berlin, as well as the dome of the triumphal arch of the main portal of the Berliner Stadtschloss.-Life:...

 and Albert Dietrich Schadow and inaugurated on August 13, 1837.

Ss. Peter and Paul contains the grave of Prince Carl of Prussia. Its current glockenspiel

Glockenspiel

A glockenspiel is a percussion instrument composed of a set of tuned keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. In this way, it is similar to the xylophone; however, the xylophone's bars are made of wood, while the glockenspiel's are metal plates or tubes, and making it a metallophone...

 leans against that of the Potsdam

Potsdam

Potsdam is the capital city of the German federal state of Brandenburg and part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. It is situated on the River Havel, southwest of Berlin city centre....

 Garrison Church

Garrison Church (Potsdam)

The Garrison Church was a Baroque church in Potsdam, eastern Germany. It was built under the second Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I. between 1730 and 1735. During World War II, the church burned down on 14 April 1945. The ruin was demolished on 23 June 1968 by the SED leadership under Walter...

.

History

Until 1961, when the Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin...

 cut the parish into three separate parts, Ss. Peter and Paul Church was part of the Evangelical Congregation of Neubabelsberg, then comprising a parish in Potsdam-Babelsberg

Potsdam-Babelsberg

Babelsberg is the largest district of the Brandenburg capital Potsdam in Germany. The affluent neighbourhood named after a small hill on the Havel river is famous for Babelsberg Palace and Park, part of the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as for Studio...

, Klein-Glienicke (divided between Berlin and Potsdam), Nikolskoë and Potsdam-Sacrow with the further chapel in Klein-Glienicke and the beautiful Church of the Redeemer, Sacrow

Church of the Redeemer, Sacrow

The Protestant Church of the Redeemer is located in the south of the village of Sacrow, which since 1939 is incorporated to Potsdam, the capital of the German Bundesland of Brandenburg. It is famous for its Italian Romanesque Revival architecture with a separate campanile and for its...

.

On December 22, 1941 the official German Evangelical Church called for suited actions by all Protestant church bodies to withhold baptised non-Aryans from all spheres of Protestant church life. Many German Christian

German Christians

The Deutsche Christen were a pressure group and movement within German Protestantism aligned towards the antisemitic and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal to align German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles...

-dominated congregations followed suit. However, the Evangelical Congregation of Neubabelsberg handed in a list of signatures in protest against the exclusion of the stigmatised Protestants of Jewish descent.