After a little, Mme Laure, a small quietly dressed woman whose dynamism went unnoticed until she spoke, walked up to the front. Peter Petersen knew of her history and had been waiting with some compatriots ready, if she denounced Germany, to reply with stories of French 'atrocities' in the Black Forest. Instead Irène Laure said, 'I have so hated Germany that I wanted to see her erased from the map of Europe. But I have seen here that my hatred is wrong. I wish to ask the forgiveness of all the Germans present.'18

The effect on the Germans was electric. 'I was dumbfounded,' said Petersen later. 'For several nights it was impossible for me to sleep. All my past rose up in revolt against the courage of the woman. But we knew, my friends and I, that she had shown us the only way open to Germany if we wanted to join in the reconstruction of Europe.'19

The key moment, Mme Laure told me in 1982, was Buchman's question in the corridor. 'If at that moment he had pitied me or sympathised with me, I would have left. He gave me a challenge in love. It was the quality in him which arrested me - above all the tranquil look in his eyes. One felt his life corresponded exactly to his belief. He transmitted the feeling of certainty to you, that if you accepted change, you could have a part in the transformation of the world.'

'I was not interested in the Oxford Group as previously presented to me,' she explained. 'The ideology I saw at Caux involved giving mind, heart and body. Like Marxism in a way, but this was superior because the motive power was love.'*

(* On her return from Caux Irène Laure visited Léon Blum, who had been imprisoned in Dachau during the war. 'He told me that he had met Frank Buchman on a ship to America,' she recalls. 'He had a great respect for him.' Blum promised to help Mme Laure to free herself from her official responsibilities so that she could work fully with Moral Re-Armament.)

It was the same all-inclusive philosophy which appealed to the Germans, and while at Caux they distilled its essence into a booklet entitled Es Muss Alles Anders Werden (Everything Must be Different), which they determined to spread throughout Germany. But where would they get the paper in post-war Europe? A Swedish paper-maker in Caux provided enough for an edition of one and a half million copies, and the booklet was distributed in all four zones of Germany, including 450,000 in the Soviet zone. The Soviet police confiscated the stock of an Eisenach bookseller, mainly, it appears, because they read ideological significance into a picture of wolves coming, they thought, from the East; but the stocks were later restored to him. In Leipzig, too, it was removed from the bookstalls for a time, but returned. Lord Pakenham's estimate was: 'I applaud the spirit of co-operative Christianity that has produced the booklet. It shows the kind of spirit that Germany, and indeed all nations, require ... in these difficult times,'20 while General Clay wrote, 'I was pleased indeed to see representative Germans … return to Germany refreshed and invigorated in spirit. I was equally impressed with a pamphlet which is now being published in Germany by these German visitors to Caux which explains democracy in simple and moving terms.'21

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