I arrived in New York from Europe on the following day when the paper was on the streets, and lunched with the reporter, William Birnie, the day after. While gleeful, as was natural in any young journalist recently imported from a small country town who found his story leading the paper, Birnie seemed a good deal surprised at its editorial treatment. Thirty years later, when Bimie was a senior editor of the Reader's Digest, he told a visitor that he was always 'proud of his interviewee' for not haggling over the interview as printed, which he had expected him to do. 'My memory of our talk is that he was not endorsing or condemning Hitler,' he said.11

Buchman's statements were probably condensed or highlighted in the editorial process. It is, however, clear that Buchman said something to the effect that we could be grateful that Hitler had turned back Communism in Germany. Stroh recalls, 'In the summer of 1934, at the Oxford house-party, Buchman gathered all the Germans present together and told us that the greatest danger to the world was that materialism was undermining society. National Socialism had built a temporary wall against Communism, but that was not enough. The real problem was that people were not guided by God. People in Germany needed to change if they were to give inspiration to the world.'

Buchman refused, at the time as later, to be drawn into further public comment, which he believed would only lead to more newspaper controversy and endanger his friends already facing difficulties in Germany. Nor did he ever yield to the frequent demands that he should denounce Hitler. In fact, he never denounced anyone in public, even his most virulent personal defamers.

To a few friends, he made one comment some time in 1937: 'I have been much criticised because I said, "A God-controlled dictator could change the position in a country overnight." That doesn't mean in any sense when I made that statement that I identify myself with and approve of that dictator. I cannot deny the possibility of change in any man.'

Also, on 7 March 1940, Buchman's secretary noted in his diary that Buchman said to a group of friends, 'Hitler fooled me. I thought it would be a bulwark against Communism.'12

This admission is a long way from justifying the charges of pro-Nazism so frequently levelled against him. In the same month as Buchman's press interview, Lloyd George described Hitler as 'the George Washington of Germany',13 and over two years later Winston Churchill wrote, 'I have always said that if Britain were defeated in war, I hope we would find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful place among the nations.'14

No democrat in the 1920s and 1930s, if he thought at all, wanted to see the whole of Europe from the Urals to the Rhine united under the single totalitarian ideology of Communism, which was, right up to the time that Hitler took over, a likely scenario. Buchman, with many others, feared that this would take place, and in the early Hitler years he saw Communism, avowedly based on atheism and the suppression of religion, as the more dangerous force. In later years, too, he considered Communism, with its power to capture the allegiance of people in every land, as the more universal and long-term threat. He hoped that Hitler would be a temporary bulwark; but he knew that Hitler's fundamental need was to become transformed by an experience of Jesus Christ, and this he had tried with unflagging faith, optimism, naivety - call it what you will - to bring about.

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