BID FOR GERMANY

When, in early 1933, Moni von Cramon arrived back in Silesia from being with Buchman in America and Canada, she soon found that the local Nazis 'did not want to have me running my school because I was too Christian. They wanted me to run it for them on their lines, but I refused.'1 The school was closed and she took a house in Breslau, renting her own home to a family. Unknown to her, a daughter of this family was a Nazi informer with instructions to search the house. She found an anti-Nazi pamphlet which had been given to Frau von Cramon by a French woman in Geneva and which she had stuffed into a bookshelf. On its cover was a swastika with its points hacked off by an axe so that a simple cross remained. Correspondence with theologians was also found. News reached Frau von Cramon in Breslau that she was to be arrested.

Just at this moment a leader of the SS in Silesia, a childhood friend, arrived unannounced to ask Frau von Cramon a favour. He wanted to marry her husband's niece. Would she introduce him to the girl's family? Frau von Cramon told him her predicament, and he took the matter out of the hands of the local officials on the grounds that so serious a case could only be dealt with at Himmler's headquarters, where a friend of his was an adjutant. So, after a nerve-racking 250-mile drive to Berlin, Frau von Cramon suddenly found herself face to face with Himmler.

Himmler received her, standing, in his large study. He kept her standing at the other end of the room, while he consulted a file. Taking out of it a picture of Buchman, he said: Is this Dr Buchman, the leader of this movement with which you work, a Jew?'

'I don't know his ancestry, but I don't think so. I'll ask him,' she replied.

'Do you think he will tell you?'

'If he knows, why shouldn't he?'

'What is the relation between the Oxford Group and Jews?'

'I can't give an answer to that because the Oxford Group is not an organisation. It has no rules or statutes.'

'How often have you been in England this past year?' Himmler continued.

'Three times, I think.'

'You're wrong. Four times.'

Then he told her the exact state of her bank account and asked how she had got the money for these journeys. Frau von Cramon replied that she had sold a treasured possession, her grand piano. 'I have faith that God leads people and gives us what we need when we do what He wants us to do,' she added.

203