Bonhoeffer and his friends, who were working - fruitlessly as it proved - for a total break between the Church and Hitler, deprecated these and other attempts to reach Hitler. 'We have often - all too often - tried to make Hitler realise what is happening,' he wrote on 11 September 1934. 'Maybe we've not gone about it the right way, but then Barth won't go about it the right way either. Hitler must not and cannot hear. He is obdurate and it is he who must compel us to hear - it's that way round. The Oxford Group has been naive enough to try to convert Hitler - a ridiculous failure to understand what is going on - it is we who are to be converted, not Hitler.'18 Among Bonhoeffer and his friends the scene was set for the heroic rearguard action, a series of protests, draftings, unitings and splittings of factions which finally, in Bonhoeffer's case, led to active plotting, participation in the attempt on Hitler's life and a martyr's death.

Buchman, in spite of many disappointments, still felt it his task to aim straight at the man at the top because he alone could put evil laws into reverse and avoid war. So his speeches and broadcasts at this time were part drafted with Hitler in mind. Where Hitler demanded the 'leadership principle' and 'the dictatorship of the Party', Buchman called for 'God-control' and 'the dictatorship of the living Spirit of God'.

Many of his friends tried to dissuade him from his efforts on the basis that he was endangering the reputation of himself and his work. Among them was Professor Emil Brunner of Zurich, then probably the most influential theologian in the German-speaking world apart from Karl Barth. Brunner, who had frequently acknowledged his debt to Buchman and had seen in the Oxford Group a great hope for revitalising the churches world-wide,* wrote accusing Buchman of wanting to 'mediate in the German Church struggle' and deploring his contact with Hossenfelder.19 Buchman replied baldly from Germany, 'Your danger is that you are still the Professor thundering from the pulpit and want the theologically perfect. But the German Church crisis will never be solved that way. Just think of your sentence, "Unfortunately this hopeless fellow Hossenfelder has damaged the reputation of the Groups." It sounds to me like associating with "publicans and sinners".

(* Hamilton recalled that at a house-party in Bad Homburg in the early thirties Brunner described seeing a sandwich-board man advertising a restaurant but looking as if he had not eaten a good meal himself for weeks, and added, 'I have been that sandwich-board man. I was advertising a good meal, but I hadn't eaten the meal myself until I met the Oxford Group'.)

212