Following the second constitution of the GDR, enacted on April 9, 1968 and accounting for its de facto transformation into a communist dictatorship, the Council of Ministers of the GDR demoted all church bodies from statutory "Public-law Corporations" () to mere "Civil Associations". Thus the Council could force the Pomeranian Evangelical Church to remove the term "Pomerania" from its name, because East German propaganda silenced about all terms recalling former German territory annexed by Poland or the Soviet Union. The church body then chose the new name "Evangelical Church in Greifswald".