RETURN TO GERMANY

When Böckler was forced by a stroke to retire some years later, Buchman visited him in his home in the outskirts of Cologne and found him depressed and fretful at his disability. Buchman told him of his own months of inactivity and how he had learnt not to worry, and to go at a slower pace. Böckler shook his head. 'But you have all your friends around you who carry on your work, so you can take the time to come and see me. Our people are not so friendly.'

The intensive work of the Moral Re-Armament team in the Ruhr seems to have contributed to a severe set-back to Communist plans there. Already in January 1948, under Protocol M, the Communists had decided that their expected take-over of the Ruhr would be won not in Parliament but in the factories and at the pithead. The exclusion of the Russians from the International Authority for the area, set up the following December, had confirmed them in this strategy. They concentrated on the election for the works councils in each mine, and, before the arrival of The Forgotten Factor, were said to hold 72 per cent of the works councils seats in the coal and steel industries. The British authorities recognised the situation. 'Much the most serious aspect - more than the possibility of sabotage - is the Communist penetration of works councils and trades unions,' concludes a minute based on a top secret Foreign Office report at the time.10By 1950, however, the percentage of Communist representation had declined from 72 per cent to 25 per cent and, according to Hubert Stein, an executive member of the German miners' union, this decline was 'to a great extent due to Moral Re-Armament'.11 The Minister of Economics for North Rhine-Westphalia, Artur Sträter, said at a public meeting in the Parliament building, 'We are battling with great difficulties in coal production. It is no exaggeration to say that through this ideology of Caux a great bottleneck has been broken.'12

Exactly how much the improved industrial relations and decline of Communist influence in the Ruhr should be attributed to Moral Re-Armament is impossible to assess accurately. Other obvious influences were the improving material position of the workers in the wake of both the Marshall Plan and the currency reform, the introduction of new technology, the news of conditions in the East brought back by prisoners of war and millions of refugees, and the progress of other political parties as they rebuilt their party machines. But it is hard to ignore the factor which both Stein and Sträter emphasise.

Many of the workers were interested not so much by The Forgotten Factor as by the meetings which took place, in those early years, in miners' halls, at union meetings and in beer halls where long, and sometimes fierce, discussions developed between workers and the MRA visitors. These visitors were not presenting any particular political or economic point of view. They gave evidence of an experience which, they believed, could free individuals from personal difficulties and unite homes, trade unions and industries to rebuild the country. An occasion at Moers was typical.

362