RETURN TO GERMANY

They were remarkable words from an American of 72 and were authenticated for the audience of three thousand by the presence on the platform of Bladeck, Kurowski, Benedens, Stoffmehl and a dozen of their friends.* Few realised that the vision of Marxists pioneering a new thinking had first come to Buchman amid the orange groves of California before ever he returned to Europe after the war. Its immediate relevance was caught by the Essener Allgemeine Zeitung, which headed its stories of the day's demonstrations: 'Berlin a Wash-out' and 'Moral Re-Armament the final remedy'.22

(* Also on the platform were the Vice-Chancellor of Germany, Franz Blücher, and sons of Chancellor Adenauer and of Minister-President Arnold.)

The battle was not, however, won by headlines. Every week, every day, much personal work and sustained friendship were required. In the winter of 1951, for example, when Buchman was again in California, Bladeck's ex-colleagues went after him. They knew that he had a weakness for alcohol, and they managed one evening to get him drinking. They then sat him next to a particular woman on a bus on his way home and he publicly embraced her. At once, all over the Ruhr, the Party said, 'See what hypocrites these Caux men are.' They threatened to publicize the incident if Bladeck did not leave Moral Re-Armament. He was so bitterly ashamed that he wrote Buchman asking that none of his friends should call on him again. 'I have betrayed you,' he said.

Buchman cabled back: Man-like it is to fall in sin; Fiend-like it is to dwell therein; Christ-like it is from sin to rise.

'"The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin." The biggest sinner can become the greatest saint. I have faith in the new Max. Sincerely, Frank.'

'I had expected anything else, but not that,' Max told his friends later. 'I felt ashamed, but it gave me inner strength. I felt Frank's faith in my change, and also the challenge to me. I also felt in the sentence he sent me, "The Blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleans us from all sin", the deepest message of Christianity, and it came at the right time.'23

Up to that time Bladeck had experienced something of moral change. His thinking had become different and he had experienced on occasions the direction of a higher authority in his life. But he had resisted surrendering his will to God. He had thought he could alter his own life by himself; he began to discover that he needed Christ.

When the next works council elections came around Heinz Renner, now the West German Party Chairman, told an old comrade who had left the Party to work with MRA: 'We are determined to destroy Moral Re-Armament's power in the works councils and reduce it to a sect and nothing else.'24 In fact Bladeck and his friends in pits all across the Ruhr were returned with increased majorities. In 1951 Walther Ulbricht, the East German Party boss, took the West German Party to task at the Party Conference at Weimar for losses in the elections, especially in the Gelsenkirchen area. However, in 1953 the pattern was repeated even more dramatically in Nordstern, the pit of which miners used to say, 'When Stalin has a cold, we all sneeze.' Of the eight men listed by name in the Communist leaflets as MRA men seven were elected, and the Communist representation fell from eleven out of thirteen in 1951 to three out of twenty in 1953. That year the works council sent a birthday telegram not to Stalin but to Buchman.

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