The honeymoon period following the Yalta Conference of the great powers in February 1945 had lasted less than two months. Already on 2 April the US Secretary of State was advising of a 'serious deterioration' in relations with the Soviet Union. At the Potsdam Conference, the division of Germany into four zones was confirmed and the Soviet desire to gain control of Germany's industrial might became ever clearer.

James Forrestal, US Secretary of the Navy, noted in his diary for 14 May, that the Communists had one great advantage, a clear-cut philosophy 'amounting almost to a religion in which they believe is the only solution to the government of men'. 'There is no use fooling ourselves about the depth or the extent of the problem, he added. 'I have no answers, but we had better try to get an answer.'2

This diagnosis echoed Buchman's two years earlier at Mackinac. Since that time he and his colleagues had been making a conscious effort to express their beliefs in terms of 'an ideology for democracy' which could give moral and spiritual content to the freedom of the so-called free world. They had seen it applied in various situations in war-time America and since then in the British coalfields. Now Buchman felt that the crucial test was whether this philosophy would be adequate to meet the needs of post-war Germany. The vacuum in Germany after the collapse of the Nazi ideology and his own failure to counteract that ideology before the war made him the more eager.

Preparations for getting significant numbers of Germans to Caux had been going forward ever since Buchman's remark on arrival there the previous year. In the same week in which General Marshall, now Secretary of State, made his proposals for the economic rehabilitation of Europe3, Senator Alexander Smith had arranged for his son-in-law, Kenaston Twitchell, to see him. This interview, in which Twitchell and his colleagues outlined Buchman's plan to bring the future leadership of Germany to Caux, led to a further interview with Robert Patterson, the Secretary of War. Patterson promised to remove the many obstacles to Germans who wanted to travel abroad and sent his visitors on to see General Lucius Clay, Commander in the American zone of Germany, and his political adviser, Robert Murphy. In London, meanwhile, Lord Pakenham, Minister in charge of the British Zone, also gave his blessing. 'Along with food,' he said, 'the kind of work you are doing is the only thing which will do any good in Germany now.'4 A list of fifty-five Germans in the British Zone began to be screened, and Pakenham subsequently telephoned General Sir Brian Robertson, Commander of the British Zone, to ask him to give Moral Re-Armament every facility.

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