RECONCILIATION FROM CAUX

Five thousand people from some fifty countries went to Caux for the summer assembly in 1947. President Etter of Switzerland fulfilled his promise to make an official visit, and General Guisan, war-time commander of the Swiss Army, came three times. Others included the Prime Ministers of Denmark and Indonesia, Count Bernadotte of Sweden, the Smith-Mundt Committee of the United States Congress, and two hundred Italians, including twenty-six Members of Parliament and eight senior editors, representing all the major democratic parties.

The crowds were so great that another large hotel, the Grand Hotel, had to be bought to accommodate them. The unusual pattern of work at Caux attracted as much press attention as the numbers. Guests were encouraged to help in the running of the assembly - and Ministers and workers could end up preparing the vegetables or washing up together. Cartoonists and photographers had a field-day; but the Prior of the monastery of Kremsmünster found it natural. 'We Benedictines', he said, 'know that working together is the best way of tilling the soil of each other's minds.' A French anarchist declared with enthusiasm, 'I have seen anarchy actually lived out here!'

Asian visitors included G. L. Nanda, Labour Minister in Bombay state and later twice stop-gap Prime Minister of India, and U Tin Tut, the first Foreign Minister of independent Burma. Nanda went on from Caux to the British coalfields to verify what he had heard from miners there, and was much impressed by what he found.

However, the country most on Buchman's mind in that summer of 1947 was Germany. What was its future to be? How could any worthwhile future be brought about?

These questions had long been the subject of urgent, and often acrimonious, discussion among Allied statesmen. In September 1944 Churchill had been surprised, on arrival at the Quebec Conference, to find that President Roosevelt was accompanied not by his Secretary of State but by the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and that the main issue on their minds was how to treat Germany after victory.1 Morgenthau, it turned out, had been outraged by the 'soft' treatment proposed for Germany in a US War Department paper sent to General Eisenhower in August, and had won the President's support for his so-called 'Morgenthau Plan' whereby Germany would be reduced to a pastoral nation, with her industry removed, her standard of living reduced and segments of her population shifted to other parts of the country. Churchill disapproved, but let the matter pass for the time being. In the end, less extreme counsels prevailed, but the fear of the 'Morgenthau mentality' remained to plague German relations with America for some years.

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