The Protestant-Lutheran church of St. Mary Magdalene in Salder is one of the few Baroque transverse hall churches in northern Germany and was commissioned by the hereditary prince and later Duke August Wilhelm of Brunswick and Lüneburg between 1713 and 1717. He had acquired the Renaissance castle built around 1660 (today's Salder Castle Museum) and the village of Salder with all rights from the impoverished Lords of Salder around 1695/96. In 1709 - perhaps a few years earlier - he also secured the right of patronage over the old Romanesque parish church, which - now dilapidated - was to be demolished and replaced by a new church. August Wilhelm was thus able to implement his plan to build a new church, which was to serve both as a parish church and a palace church and for which he chose a spatial form whose optimal orientation towards the Protestant parish service made it more or less unsuitable for holding Catholic masses - a sign of distancing himself from his father, who had converted to Roman Catholicism, and a visible document of his own Protestant faith.
Further information can be found in the Lower Saxony Monument Atlas:
https://denkmalatlas.niedersachsen.de/viewer/metadata/31202920/1/-/
