RETURN TO GERMANY

On 6 October 1949 Freies Volk, the Communist paper in Düsseldorf, carried an article by Paul headed 'Unmoral Disarmament' which stated, 'The dangerous activities of the MRA apostles have up to now been underestimated by the district executives, yes, even by our Party provincial executive . . . MRA's work has created ideological uncertainty and confusion in some units of the Party, for example in the Meerbeck-Moers district, in the Rheinpreussen pit groups and in the Ford plant in Cologne.' The article outlined the case against Bladeck and his friends, and complained that when officials reasoned with them, they only kept trying to pass on this 'new ideology'. Finally, Paul stated, 'It is resolved that all comrades who seek contact with these men shall be expelled from the Party and unmasked as traitors to the workers' interests.'

Hugo Paul's article was part of a desperate attempt to maintain Communist influence in the forthcoming works council elections. On 31 October Bladeck wrote to Buchman describing the campaign and reporting the election results in the Rheinpreussen pits. 'My deepest thanks for everything,' he wrote. 'Our silver wedding went off well and we had the delightful surprise of a gift from Caux. Then came the battle with the Communist Party and at the time of the union elections in the mine there was the pamphlet distributed against us and against Generaldirektor Kost. It smeared us and MRA in the dirtiest way. So I put up a statement at the pithead which said why I went to Caux and what Caux was out for. The important thing is that, in spite of the bitter campaign against me, I got the biggest vote at the poll.

'In the other pits where Benedens, Burckhardt and Kurowski are union officials, they too increased their majorities and have all been re-elected officers of the union in spite of all the propaganda against them. The ideology of MRA has carried the day in the Rheinpreussen pits ... I am entrusted with many warm greetings from Generaldirektor Kost to you, dear fatherly friend. He told me that in his opinion this ideology is the most effective way of breaking through all the barriers which create national and international unhappiness today.'18

Similar developments were taking place around men in other parts of the Ruhr. In Alten-Essen, for example, the Communist chairman of the Hoesch pits began working with Moral Re-Armament after seeing The Forgotten Factor in 1948, which brought him into conflict with the town's Party chairman, Johann Holzhauser. In 1949, however, Holzhauser himself went to Caux and underwent the same change as Bladeck and Kurowski. Through him, change spread to a member of the provincial executive of the Party, Hermann Stoffmehl, who was Town Clerk of Alten-Essen. Stoffmehl announced that he now believed Moral Re-Armament was the uniting ideology needed by the world. If the Party would not accept it, he would not only leave the Party but take a third of the local membership with him.

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