Was the term 'Gottgläubig' used solely by Nazis or was there a significant Deist/Spiritual movement in Germany before then?

1)You say that the term for atheists and irreligious people was banned by the Nazis but Wikipedia cites a source which claims 1.5% of Germans identified as irreligious on the 1939 census. Did they use a different, legal term?

Prior to 1936 people who had left Christian churches, but maintained their faith were called dissidents. That term was banned and gottgläubig was used in its place (banned in the way that official paperwork only used gottgläubig after the ban). Technically, both terms are not restricted to Christian believes, but on any form of religious believe.

Those 1.5% that identified as non religious or atheists opted for glaubenslos (no faith) or konfessionslos (no confession). Terms regarding people having no religion were not altered as far as I know. Sorry if I did not made that clear from the get go.

TL;DR: People with faith but without any institutional religious affiliation were legally called dissidents/Dissidenten until 1936 and gottgläubig/believing in god after that. People without faith were legally called glaubenslos/no faith or konfessionslos/no confession.

I saw the usage of glaubenslos and konfessionslos in migration & citizenship paperwork within the state of Brunswick between 1910 and 1944. If someone is interested, those files can be found at the state archive in Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony for example NLA WO, 12 Neu 14, Nr. 70.

2) You say it describes people who left the two big churches but were still Christians but Wikipedia claims that neo-pagans and deists also used the term.

The Wikipedia article contradicts itself on that front. It claims that Gottgläubige could have neo-pagan believes while it groups them with "other religious believes" and therefore not gottgläubig two sentences later. I do not know much about Germanic Neo-Paganism except that is was only a really tiny movement even at the peak of German national socialism, contrary what that Wikipedia article made of Richard Steigmann-Gall's book "The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity".

Samuel Koehne suggested that two groups existed in the völkisch movement. One aimed for an Aryanized Christian faith and another for a revival of the "pre-Christian religion of the ancient Germans [sic]", and that because the two groups didn't really contradicted themselves, paganism and Christianity can be seen as part of a single continuum. Steigmann-Gall states that we do not know how "anti-Christian" the Neo-Pagans in the NSDAP really were. Koehne comes to the conclusion that neither paganism nor the esoteric or the "Aryanized Germanic Christianity" were excluded from the NSDAP at any given point, but in fact that a broad range of believes were embraced during the 1920s. But after all, "that we cannot assume an inherent dichotomy within the Nazi Party between those adhering to paganism and those adhering to Aryan Christianity" and that there was some kind of "Ethnotheism" prominent that drove the debate away from the aforementioned groups and connected basic Christian believes with Nazi racial ideology to achieve maximal efficiency within the population.

But again: this is not an area of expertise of mine. Maybe somebody else can answer this question more thoroughly.

Further reading and sources:

• Samuel Koehne: Reassessing "The Holy Reich": Leading Nazis' Views on Confession, Community and 'Jewish' Materialism, in: Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 48, No. 3 (JULY 2013), pp. 423-445.

• Samuel Koehne: Were the National Socialists a "Völkisch" Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas, in: Central European History Vol. 47, No. 4 (DECEMBER 2014), pp. 760-790.

3) Wikipedia also mentions a ‘paradox’ as areas where most people identified as gottgläubig did not containing large numbers of Nazis?

That's not really a paradox in my book. Correlation doesn't imply causation. The phenomenon that the NSDAP did not have as much support in larger cities in comparison to other areas of the country has not necessarily something to do with the amount of people describing themselves as gottgläubig. If for example Berlin citizen and member of the Social Democratic Party Max Muller left the church in 1922, he would have had to opt for "Dissident" the next time he had business at the registration office. After 1936 he would not have had this option available and would have (most likely) opted for gottgläubig.

Even though gottgläubig was coined and introduced by the Nazis and was used to show support for the movement by some, there were still citizens that used it because it described what their attitude to religion was like and because the other options didn't fit like gottgläubig did. Especially because another available option konfessionslos (no denomination) and dissident as well were also used for Jews since at least the 1840s, because only the Protestant and Catholic churches were official denominations. So, getting rid of a label that grouped someone up with Jews and the ability to take on a label that was made by the new ruling regime that also despised your "old label" should have attracted some people.

There are multiple other explanations possible for why there were comparably more gottgläubig identifying people in larger cities in spite of less support for the Nazi party - one could write an entire book on that - but I hope this one or two examples make it a little more clear.

Sources:

• Steven M. Lowenstein: Jewish Intermarriage and Conversion in Germany and Austria, in: Modern Judaism Vol. 25, No. 1 (Feb., 2005), pp. 23-61.

• Todd H. Weir: The Specter of "Godless Jewry": Secularism and the "Jewish Question" in Late Nineteenth Century Germany, in: Central European History Vol. 46, No. 4 (Dec. 2013), pp. 815-849.