RECONCILIATION FROM CAUX

General Clay was equally responsive, and arranged an occasion in Stuttgart where Twitchell and his colleagues could meet political leaders of the states in the American Zone. Clay gave them no hint of what was in store for them, and the invitation to Caux as guests, with their wives and children, was completely unexpected. Most of them had not been out of Germany since 1933, and many had been in prison. 'Their bewilderment gradually brightened into surprise and appreciation, as they glimpsed the chance of visiting a free country with good food and friends ready to receive them,' says Twitchell,5 noting that the Minister of Labour of North Rhine-Westphalia had been making do with 'two narrow slices of stale bread for breakfast and a few potatoes and decaying cabbage for lunch'. One of Buchman's Swiss colleagues, who did much of the pioneering work in Germany, told Buchman that, according to the Minister of Education in Hesse, infant mortality had risen to 20%, 10% of the youth had TB, 52% had one pair of shoes, while 11% had none, 23 % had no bed of their own and output per working man had gone back to half the pre-war standard.6

In the event, 150 Germans were to attend Caux that year, and nearly 4,000 more between 1948 and 1951.*

(* Dr Gabriele Müller-List, a German historian, gives the numbers as 150 in 1947, 414 in 1948, 1,364 in 1949, 1,111 in 1950 and 941 in 1951, ('Eine neue Moral für Deutschland? Die Bewegung für Moralische Aufrustung und ihre Bedeutung beim Wiederaufbau 1947-52'. In Das Parlament, 31 October 1981.) David J. Price, whose London University MA Dissertation is perhaps the most thorough academic study of the subject in English, states that 'most of the Minister-Presidents and leaders in industry and education' attended during these years. (The Moral Re-Armament Movement and Post-War European Reconstruction, p. 29.)

Their arrival at Caux made an indelible impression on those first Germans. One of them, Peter Petersen, who had been indoctrinated at a special Nazi school from the age of twelve and had emerged from the army cynical and bitter, described his reactions: 'We were met by a French chorus with a German song ….. We were already past masters at defending ourselves when we were attacked. But here the doors were wide open for us and we were completely disarmed.'7 'On one point especially the German guests agreed,' wrote the Berlin daily Tagespiegel. 'Nowhere in the world at the present time would Germans find such a warm welcome awaiting us as at Caux.'8

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