In these next years hundreds of Communists left the Party. Scores of Marxists discovered, in their own words, 'a superior ideology', and many who had been without faith found one. These miners - 'men full of songs and dreams and poetry and a deep longing for a world in which brotherhood and peace would become realities in everyday life', as Hovelsen describes them - were to move out from the pit galleries to take their new discoveries to their fellow workers in the mills of Italy, the mines of Northern Sweden, the factories of the 'Red Belt' in Paris, the docks of London and Rotterdam, to Cyprus, India, Africa, Japan, Australia and America; and to challenge the policy-makers of Washington and the bankers of Wall Street to open their minds and hearts to the needs of the whole world. This was the new Germany of Buchman's dreams.

The battle for the Ruhr went on year by year, but it became increasingly clear that the Communist Party had lost. By July 1959 the Managing Director of the Nordstern mine, Fritz-Günter von Velsen, was able to say, 'Following the training and change of heart that many of us found in Moral Re-Armament, Communist influence has gone down and the power of the Party on a mass scale has been broken. In my own mine, where the men formerly elected 90 per cent Communist representatives, the atmosphere has so changed that people come from many countries to see what has happened.'25

Again, it must be stressed that by 1959 many factors besides Moral Re-Armament had been in operation, but Buchman's vision and the work of his teams were important enough for Adenauer to repeat then, as many times before, that for him the 'great success' of that work in the Ruhr was 'the test of MRA's effectiveness'.26

The changes in many of the hundreds of industrialists who went to Caux between 1947 and 1952 played a major part, as they revealed an alternative to class war and the Marxist view that no capitalist could rise above his material self-interest. Von Velsen was a case in point. A Prussian, with duelling scars on his face from his student encounters, he was a tough master. After a talk with Buchman at Caux he decided to take an objective look at his life. He remembered a young executive whom he disliked and whose removal he had engineered by going behind his back to head office. He apologised to this man, brought him back, and they became trusting colleagues. Von Velsen said to his secretary, 'If you see or hear me doing anything which offends the absolute standards of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, please tell me.' The change in him was a major factor in creating the new atmosphere at Nordstern.

368