From 1920 his visits to Germany became almost annual. After one visit in 1923 he wrote, 'I come from the throes of a distrait world. I have sat with poor and rich, privileged and underprivileged. Some who were rich and privileged two years ago have scarcely enough to eat. My physician, who was one of the foremost in Germany, had a pound of sausage for a family of five the week I was there. In some families half the family spend a day in bed, while the others get enough to eat, and they go to bed next day while the others satisfy their hunger.'3

Buchman began holding house-parties of a more public nature from the mid-1920s. Loudon Hamilton recalled one in Potsdam in 1924, and after another there in 1927 Buchman wrote to Mrs Tjader, 'We have had a woman at the house-party who had to borrow clothes to come, a cigar maker and the wife of a former ADC to the ex-Kaiser.'4 In the autumn of 1928 a young German theologian, Ferdinand Laun, who was doing research on a Rockefeller scholarship at Oxford, met Buchman's work there. He gave up his academic career and devoted his full time between 1932 and the outbreak of World War II to establishing the Gruppenbewegung (Group Movement) in Germany.5 Local groups sprang up all over the country, house-parties became frequent and a number of Germans went to Oxford or Switzerland for training or travelled with Buchman in other countries.

By the late 1920s Germany was slipping increasingly into demoralisation and chaos. Mountainous inflation, unemployment which reached six million, and recurrent regional revolts kept the possibility of a revolution or civil war alive into the early thirties.

Hitler, meanwhile, gathered strength. He promised the people 'order, work and bread'. At first he did not present his ideas as a crude ideology of blood and race, but as a set of beliefs which would restore the German nation and which did not conflict with Christianity. In 1928 Hitler excluded from his party a man who too obviously wanted to replace Christianity by 'a German faith' and publicly declared, 'Our movement is effective Christianity. We shall not tolerate in our ranks anyone who hurts Christian ideas.'6 He reiterated this pledge on becoming Chancellor.7

Powerful groups were therefore prepared in those early years to wait and see how events developed, meanwhile giving Hitler their tacit or explicit support. The Catholic Bishops wrote in their pastoral letter of 10 June 1933: 'Precisely because authority occupies a quite special place in the Catholic Church, Catholics will not find it difficult to appreciate the new powerful movement of authority in the new German state and to subordinate themselves to it.'8 Karl Barth, who raised his voice at an early stage against Hitler, wrote after the war, 'In the first period of its power National Socialism had the character of a political experiment like others... It was right and proper for the time being to give the political experiment of National Socialism a trial.'9

206