In its first two years 120,000 people, mostly from the coal and steel industries, saw the play in the Ruhr. Buchman was only occasionally in Germany during those years, but he was in constant, often daily, touch with what was going on. Whereas before the war he would have been present throughout such campaigns, he now had to concentrate on thinking strategically about the work going on in many countries simultaneously. He tried to deploy to each area those best equipped by background and experience for it. To the Ruhr, for example, went a relay of British miners and of capitalists whose motives and practice had changed. Irène Laure and her husband Victor, a merchant seaman who had been a Marxist for forty-seven years, addressed two hundred meetings in Germany in eleven weeks, including ten of the eleven state parliaments. With them went two Frenchmen, one of whom had lost fifteen, the other twenty-two, relatives in Nazi concentration camps.

Much of the continuing work was done by two young Norwegians, one of the British wartime coal-miners and an upper-class Oxford graduate. Each at times lived with the miners in their homes. In all, Buchman sustained a team of over a hundred people, mostly under thirty years of age, in the Ruhr for several years - all working without pay, generally sixteen hours a day and living on food and in conditions far inferior to those obtainable in their own countries. Buchman's own contacts with German workers and industrialists were mainly during the long summer assemblies at Caux.

The battle for the Ruhr was, from the outset, a hot one. Not only Communists but many Socialists were suspicious. A Danish journalist with Buchman's travelling force wrote him, 'Very warm greetings from your friends Minister-Presidents Arnold and Maier, who quietly solved a ministerial crisis between them, as Maier said, "in the spirit of Caux".' She told how the SPD (Socialist Party) Executive had passed a resolution at this time warning their members against Moral Re-Armament. The Board Member who proposed it told us many members had protested against the resolution,' she continued, 'but he himself is at present an enemy ... He was a political emigrant since 1933, first in Prague and, during the war, in London. He said he got his strong antipathy against MRA from "political circles in London who hated the Oxford Group during the war"!'6

More and more Socialists sought the opinion of Dr Hans Böckler, the President of the new unified German Trades Union Federation. He had been convinced enough by the reports of those returning from Caux in 1947 to join Minister-President Arnold and others in sending Es Muss Alles Anders Werden to over a thousand leading people in North Rhine-Westphalia, with the request that they think out 'how and where you can use this weapon in trade union circles, with management and in town and country districts'. But as the controversy hotted up with the tour of The Forgotten Factor, he decided he must investigate the matter more closely.

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