Groupers in Stockbridge

Marchers in the parade carried the flags of 48 States and 18 nations, including Germany's swastika, adverse comment on which was parried with the statement that thus does the Oxford Group bring nations together.
TIME magazine, June 15, 1936

When Frank Buchman gave that World Telegram interview, August 26, 1936, Adolf Hitler had already been in power for three and a half years, and his vicious campaign against the Jews had been in full force for years by then, using discriminatory laws, jack-booted thugs, and Gestapo agents to get rid of the Jews, one way or another. Frank Buchman indicated that he knew about all of that, but he didn't consider it very important. Frank Buchman dismissed it all with a flippant "Anti-Semitism? Bad, naturally.   ...   But think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to the control of God..."

Reinhold Niebuhr, the eminent theologian who was the author of the Serenity Prayer, was outraged. He wrote:

      In this interview the social philosophy of the Oxford group, long implicit in its strategy, is made explicit, and revealed in all its childishness and viciousness. This philosophy has been implicit in Buchmanite strategy from the beginning.   ...
      In other words, a Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of the whole Oxford group enterprise from the very beginning. We may be grateful to the leader for revealing so clearly what has been slightly hidden. Now we can see how unbelievably naïve this movement is in its efforts to save the world. If it would content itself with preaching repentance to drunkards and adulterers one might be willing to respect it as a religious revival method which knows how to confront the sinner with God. But when it runs to Geneva, the seat of the League of Nations, or to Prince Starhemberg or Hitler, or to any seat of power, always with the idea that it is on the verge of saving the world by bringing the people who control the world under God-control, it is difficult to restrain the contempt which one feels for this dangerous childishness.
Christianity and Power Politics, Reinhold Niebuhr, in the chapter "Hitler and Buchman".

"God-Controlled Dictatorship"

When the followers of Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman wish to emphasize the fact that the Oxford Groups include all sorts of people, they often speak of their "former Communist" colleague, Scotsman James Watt. The Oxford Groups lay no claim to having a "former Fascist" in their midst, and German Buchmanite baronesses hedge when asked how the movement works in the case of German Jews. Last week, to a stray interviewer from the New York World-Telegram, brisk Dr. Buchman readily declared himself on Fascism, now No. 1 bugaboo to practically all U. S. churchmen.

"I thank heaven," exclaimed Grouper Buchman, "for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front-line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism. My barber in London told me Hitler saved all Europe from Communism. That's how he felt. Of course, I don't condone everything the Nazis do. Anti-Semitism? Bad, naturally. I suppose Hitler sees a Karl Marx in every Jew.

"But think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem. . . . Spain has taught us what godless Communism will bring. Human problems aren't economic. They're moral, and they can't be solved by immoral measures. They could be solved within a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy, and they could be solved through a God-controlled Fascist dictatorship."

First religious journal to plumb the implications of Dr. Buchman's plea was Zion's Herald, influential New England Methodist weekly which editorialized: "Just what would happen if Adolf Hitler, shorn of all his pagan power, were suddenly to become a St. Francis of Assisi? Would not such a conversion immediately mark the end of all bluster, swashbuckling, regimentation, coercion, intolerance, and persecution? Dictatorship would instantly fade away at the touch of Christ, whose whole method was teaching and persuasion.

"God-controlled Fascism! The terms are mutually exclusive. As well talk of a God-controlled hell! When God controls, Fascism is thereby ruled out."
TIME magazine, Monday, Sep. 07, 1936

In fact, Bill Wilson even praised dictatorships himself, and later bragged that Alcoholics Anonymous had "all of the advantages of the modern dictatorship".

"Then, too we have a dictatorship — and how! God constantly says to us, 'I trust you will find and do my will.' John Barleycorn, always at our elbow, says, 'If you don't conform, I'll kill you or drive you mad.' So we have all the advantages and more, of the modern dictatorship."
Bill Wilson, quoted by his secretary in Grateful To Have Been There, Nell Wing, page 22.

Therefore we [AA] have the full benefits of the murderous political dictatorships of today but none of their liabilities.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes Of Age, William G. Wilson, pages 105—106.

William G. Wilson and Dr. Robert H. Smith began recruiting alcoholics for Dr. Frank Buchman's religious cult in Spring 1935 in Akron. They were not recruiting for a new "Alcoholics Anonymous" organization as was portrayed in the Hallmark made-for-TV movie "My Name is Bill W.", because no such organization existed in 1935 (or in 1936, or in 1937). Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob were recruiting for the pro-fascist Oxford Group, and they did not object to Dr. Frank Buchman's attendance at Nuremberg Nazi party rallies and praise of Adolf Hitler. They just kept right on recruiting, and insisted that Frank Buchman's radical religion was the answer to alcoholism.

After Frank Buchman's "I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler" interview, Bill Wilson remained in the Oxford Group in New York for another year and a half. He stayed in the Oxford Group until he was kicked out for refusing to follow orders to stop recruiting alcoholics.

Dr. Robert Smith remained in the Oxford Group for another three years before starting an independent unnamed Oxford Group meeting for alcoholics in Akron, Ohio — still the same religion, just minus the leader Frank Buchman, and then, finally, minus the name "Oxford Group".

Likewise, Clarence Snyder was another Oxford Group true believer who was not deterred by Frank Buchman's praise of Hitler. For years, Snyder brought a group of alcoholics from Cleveland to attend weekly Akron Oxford Group meetings. Then he too finally broke away from the Akron Oxford Group (in May 1939), and then he held independent Buchmanite group meetings just for alcoholics in Cleveland.

      Ah, now at last we are at our places. Right gangway, top tier on the right, rather high up, but with a clear view in front of us, and almost immediately behind the platform on which the Führer will appear and speak. At present there is nothing much doing on the platform. A number of brown- and black-shirts moving about, rearranging things, readjusting microphones. Of more interest at present are the guests arriving, among whom I note the leader of another kind of party, a religious party, Dr. Buchman. I note blonde Nordic prototype, Unity Mitford, admirer of the Führer, with her sister Diana, looking to my mind even more beautiful and Nordic, who will outdo her younger sister by actually marrying a führer, our English Leader, Oswald Mosley. There they come. One by one they take their places. So amused are we to see the English guests arriving to see Hitler and his show, as if it might be the Lord Mayor's, or the Richmond Horse, or the Chelsea Flower Show, instead of a display of armed might designed primarily to rehabilitate Germany in despite of England, that for the first few moments we do not take in the significance of the further spectacle beyond.
These Germans, John Heygate, pub. 1940, pages 179-180.

The Navy marching at the Reich's Party Day, Nuremberg, 1935. Adolf Hitler is the guy on the platform who is giving the straight-arm Sieg Heil! salute to the troops. (And, if I'm not mistaken, the woman in the white dress on the first tier, immediately above Hitler, is Leni Reifenstahl.)

John Heygate wrote that they were seated "Right gangway, top tier on the right, rather high up, but with a clear view in front of us, and almost immediately behind the platform on which the Führer will appear and speak." That probably would have put them underneath or near the left-handed wing of the eagle (left-handed from our viewpoint).

He had just married Marge Conzersowo, a nurse in a fashionable Berlin clinic who had seen through the science of medicine as practiced by the orthodox faculty.⁹ She interested Himmler in mesmerism, homœopathy, and herbal remedies. Himmler with his agricultural diploma particulary liked herbs.

---

[Footnote]
9. Evidence of Karl Gebhardt, in Bayle, Croix gammée ou caducée, p. 222. It was widely reported towards the year 1935 that she had converted Himmler to the Buchmanite movement.
"the SS, alibi of a nation, 1922-1945", by Gerald Reitlinger (1957, Viking Press), page 21n.

Heinrich Himmler joined Dr. Frank Buchman's cult religion?

"I know there are many people in Germany who feel sick at the very sight of this black (SS) uniform," said Himmler in 1936. "We understand this and we do not expect to be loved... All those who have Germany at heart, will and should respect us. All those who in some way or at some time have a bad conscience in respect to the Führer and the nation should fear us. For these people we have constructed an organization called the SD (SS security service) and in the same way ... the Gestapo (secret state police)..."

Later, Himmler would personally oversee and direct the holocaust, establishing death camps like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Treblinka where millions of Jews died in the gas chambers.

"The Führer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question," Himmler told Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss in the summer of 1941. "We, the SS, have to carry out this order... I have therefore chosen Auschwitz for this purpose."

"I shall speak to you here with an frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things which is easy to say. 'The Jewish race is to be exterminated,' says every party member. 'That's clear, it's part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we'll do it.'

And then they all come along, the eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. Of all those who talk like this, not one has watched, not one has stood up to it.

Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet — apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness — to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and never shall be written.

We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.   ...   Altogether, however, we can say that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it."

Heinrich Himmler inspecting the Dachau concentration camp, 1936.

Gen. John Sedgwick

During a lull in the battle, Brigadier General John Sedgwick insisted on standing at a high point, looking out at the Confederate lines. His assistant, Brevet Major-General Martin T. McMahon, begged him not to stand there, because of Confederate sharpshooters.

"...General, I beg of you not to go to that angle; every officer who has shown himself there has been hit, both yesterday and to-day."

Sedgwick answered, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance."

Zap!

And that was the end of General Sedgwick.

Peter Howard

Sir Oswald Mosley was such an enthusiastic fascist that he and his second wife, the famous beauty Diana Mitford, were married in Berlin under the approving eyes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.¹⁰⁷ Diana and Oswald Mosley were actually married in Joseph Goebbels' house, which was directly across the street from the Chancellory in Berlin. When it was time for the wedding, Hitler walked across the street from the Chancellory, followed by an aide who carried a bundle of roses and a gold-framed portrait of Hitler, Adolf's wedding gift to the couple.

      LONDON, Oct. 9 (AP). — Sir Oswald Mosley, who announced recently that Kid Lewis, former middleweight champion of England, would be a New party candidate in the general election for the House of Commons, has gathered other noted athletes on his ticket.
      R. O. Harding, who was captain of the Cambridge University rugby team and who heretofore has been a Liberal in politics, will run in Swansea, and Peter Howard, former captain of the English rugby team, is a candidate in Yardley. Sir Oswald is an amateur boxer of note.

It happened that one of the leaders of the so-called Oxford group came for a house-party — so they called their sessions — and it was natural that he should give special attention to a playboy whose heart was presumed to be in a vulnerable condition; everybody hoped that Lanny might be "changed," and do what the group called "sharing" — that is, reveal what it was that he had done to drive his wife away. But the provoking fellow only listened and then told the story about the sinner who came home from one of these house-parties so changed that his dog bit him.

      This new wave of religion had been started by an American named Buchman, and was now having some vogue in England. It had held sessions in Oxford and so had taken to calling itself the Oxford group, to the speechless indignation of academic circles in a staid university. But Buchman and his followers went blandly ahead to appropriate a historic name which carried great prestige. They followed a practice called God-guidance, listening to the inner voice and doing what it told them; as a rule the instructions appeared to be that they should go after the richest and most socially prominent persons in every country, and, having won their adherence, exploit their names for publicity purposes.

      The voice had recently sent their founder to enroll prominent Germans, and he had come home exclaiming: "Thank God for Adolf Hitler!" So now the Oxford and the Munich movements were rapidly assimilating, and noble ladies and gentlemen who met in one another's drawing rooms and told publicly about their sexual errors and how God had rearmed them morally — these same titled persons opened their arms to Herr Ribbentrop, the Nazi champagne salesman, and heard him tell how a God-guided Führer had come to bring peace to Europe and a new order to all mankind.

IV

      Lanny was interested to observe that Pasifal Dingle, his step-father, manifested little enthusiasm for these new spiritual exercises. Apparently God did not say the same things to a retired real-estate operator from Iowa as to the darlings of the smart world of London. Parsifal, like Lanny, listened politely, but when he was alone with his stepson he brought to memory an ancient injunction, that when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut the door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.

Wide is the Gate, Upton Sinclair, pages 513-514.

Upton Sinclair went on to describe how a psychic medium called Madame Zyszynski was another favorite entertainment of those same Oxford Group members. Madame Zyszynski regularly channeled both an Indian chieftain named Tecumseh and a long-deceased Buddhist monk:

      Madame Zyszynski was at Bluegrass, and some of the guests had become interested in experiments with her; she, too, had acquired prestige, having been lent around to Zaharoff, Lady Caillard, and other wealthy persons. She remained quite unspoiled, having been brought up a servant and desiring nothing beyond that. She had been deeply touched by Parsifal's kindness, and was always happy to sit with him. Now he told Lanny about a series of revelations which he had been getting from the past month, supposed to come from a long-deceased inmate of the Buddhist monastery of Dodanduwa in Ceylon. Parsifal had never read or heard anything about Ceylon that he could recall, and had no idea why the Bhikkhu Sinanayeke should have put the finger upon him from the other world. Parsifal was taking steps to find out if there had ever been such a monastery, and if it was still in operation he meant to write and inquire as to the correctness of the details.

      Very curious, Lanny said.   ...   He listened to elaborate notes concerning the ritual and daily life of very dark-skinned Aryans who wore cotton robes of saffron color and bore long Tamil names; also to details of various Buddhist hells, in which sinners were burned in roaring fires, dashed about by fierce winds, pierced by javelins, and otherwise bothered according to the gravity of their offenses.   ...

      Every evening during Lanny's visit one of these séances was held and this strange fantasy continued; if the "Island Heritage" at Dodanduwa was not real it was certainly well-invented. The communications became direct; that is to say, Tecumseh was suppressed and the voice was that of the Bhikkhu, or mendicant monk. Lanny ventured to come in, and this caused no difficulty; the man of God talked with either of the Americans freely. When Lanny wanted to know if the monastery was still in existence, he said Yes, but now there were Germans, recent converts to Buddhism, who found it a pleasant place to live in but neglected their spiritual exercises.

      Lanny, ever suspicious, inquired: "Might it not be that they are working at something else?"

      The Bikkhu replied, "That might be; they do not tell me."

Wide is the Gate, Upton Sinclair, pages 514-516.

(Sometimes, though, Buchman dodged the issue without exactly denying it. He was quoted in India as saying that the newspaper reporter who circulated the pro-Hitler story was "the cleverest rascal in the world."¹⁰⁵)

But plenty of other Buchmanites since have haggled, quibbled, and minimized and denied the whole thing. They are split between:
1) stating that the quotes were almost correct but were completely misunderstood and misinterpreted, and
2) denying that Buchman ever said anything like that.

For example, Hans Stroh, a German Oxford Group follower, recalled,

In the summer of 1934, at the Oxford house-party, Buchman gathered all the Germans present together and told us that the greatest danger to the world was that materialism was undermining society. National Socialism had built a temporary wall against Communism, but that was not enough. The real problem was that people were not guided by God. People in Germany needed to change if they were to give inspiration to the world.
Garth Lean, On the Tail of a Comet: The Life of Frank Buchman, page 240.

(Ah, so Buchman's approval of the Nazis was only temporary! That explains everything.... NOT!)

And then Garth Lean used the Straw Man propaganda technique to attack a misquote that may have never happened:

      The legend of this interview which survives — and has been quoted again and again — is that Buchman said, 'I thank God for Hitler.' This phrase was not Buchman's nor printed in the article, nor, according to those present, did it represent the tenor of the interview.
Garth Lean, On the Tail of a Comet: The Life of Frank Buchman, page 240.

Actually, I have read every book, magazine article, and newspaper article about the Oxford Group that I've been able to get my hands on, and none of them misquoted Frank Buchman like that. They usually printed, "I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism." Besides the remark in Upton Sinclair's novel, the closest things I've seen are The Christian Century magazine, and Marcus Bach, both quoting other people as saying things like, "Thank Heaven for Hitler", or "I thank God for a man like Hitler":

Any dream of a "God-guided dictator" involves the reality of waking to the cry, "Thank heaven for Hitler!"
A God-Guided Dictator, The Christian Century, 53:1182-3, Sept. 9, 1936, page 1183.

Out of the failure of the tragicomic Munich appeasement, Buchman's words bounced back. What did he mean when he said, "I thank God for a man like Hitler"? Secessions from the group reached landslide proportions. Was he a Nazi sympathizer?
They Have Found A Faith, by Marcus Bach, pages 154-155.

What's the big difference between "I thank God for a man like Hitler", "I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler", and "I thank Heaven for Adolf Hitler"? Talk about quibbling and nit-picking...

Besides, it doesn't matter how much other people may have misquoted Frank Buchman later on. That doesn't change what Buchman actually did say, now does it? So Garth Lean was also trying to use the propaganda technique of Divert Attention Away from the Point by complaining about how other people had misquoted Frank Buchman later on... (As Marjorie Harrison said, "Groupers become extraordinarily evasive people.")

But the funniest minimization and denial has to be this one in Garth Lean's biography of Frank Buchman, On the Tail of a Comet:

      Also, on 7 March 1940, Buchman's secretary noted in his diary that Buchman said to a group of friends, 'Hitler fooled me. I thought it would be a bulwark against Communism.'
Garth Lean, On the Tail of a Comet: The Life of Frank Buchman, pages 240-241.

But Frank, how could Hitler fool you? Weren't you talking to God all day long, getting His Guidance on everything from what to spend on postage, to how much to pay for hotel rooms, to which ship to sail on? Didn't God bother to warn you about Adolf Hitler? What good is God's Guidance if all He talks about is postage stamps?

Q. Sometimes even now you hear that Dr. Buchman was soft on Nazism. Is it true?

A. It is a lie. One sentence quoted out of context which he allegedly uttered nearly 30 years ago is used against us all: "I thank God for a man like Adolf Hitler who has raised a front-line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism." I was not there in 1936. I have no idea whether Dr. Buchman spoke as reported. He never met Hitler. And certainly I find it strange that on a day when he was interviewed by 50 reporters, only one so reported him.
Moral Re-Armament: What Is It?, Basil Entwistle and John McCook Roots, pub. 1967, page 89.

Peter Howard managed to slip several lies into just that one short paragraph:

1. First off, Peter Howard emphatically declared that "it is a lie", while he also admitted that he wasn't there and he had no idea of what was actually said.

2. The pro-Nazi accusations against Frank Buchman were not based on just one sentence, or just one newspaper interview. They were based on many things which went on for many years, everything from:
   • that interview,
   • to his faithful attendance at Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies year after year,
   • to his refusal to criticize Hitler for breaking treaties and invading Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland,
   • to Buchman's claims that the difficulties with Hitler were really all the fault of the British and the American people for being so selfish and materialistic,
   • to his praise of the Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler as a "wonderful lad",
   • to his hobnobbing around Berlin and Nuremberg with Heinrich Himmler, year after year,
   • to his praise of dictatorships and his often-repeated declarations that he wanted to get everybody in the world under the control of a "Spiritual dictatorship" and "the true dictatorship of the living God" and a Christian fascist dictatorship,
   • to Frank Buchman's inherently fascistic attitudes, which were clearly recognized by contemporaries like George Orwell and Reinhold Niebuhr (the author of the Serenity Prayer).

   Peter Howard must have known about all of those things by 1964 — he couldn't very well not have known about them — but he apparently assumed that other people did not know all of the facts, and that he could fool them with lies. (— While Peter Howard was also hiding his own fascist background...)
   

3. Secondly, there were not any 50 reporters present at that interview. The author William Birnie clearly described the setting of that exclusive interview: It was in Frank Buchman's office in Samuel Shoemaker's church — "his book-lined office in the annexe of Calvary Church, Fourth Ave and 21st St." — where Frank Buchman, William Birnie, and 8 or 9 of Buchman's followers were present, lounging around in chairs or sitting on the floor. That was it. No other reporters were present. That is why 49 other reporters didn't report what Frank Buchman said there. Peter Howard must have read that interview at least a few times over the years, so he had to know that too, so he was lying again.

4. That famous quote, "I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism," was not taken out of context, like Peter Howard said it was. It means exactly the same thing, no matter whether that sentence is read alone or as part of the whole interview.

   And curiously enough, when this issue came up on another occasion, when the writer Geoffrey Williamson was investigating Frank Buchman and Moral Re-Armament, the official response of the Buchmanites was to declare that Frank Buchman was not fully quoted, and then they simply reproduced part of Frank Buchman's remarks just as they were quoted and printed in the newspaper, and declared, "This is what Frank Buchman really said":

         "I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism. My barber in London told me Hitler saved all of Europe from Communism. That's how he felt. Of course, I don't condone everything the Nazis do. Anti-Semitism? Bad, naturally. I suppose Hitler sees a Karl Marx in every Jew.
         "But think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to the control of God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man God could control a nation overnight and solve every bewildering problem."
   "Inside Buchmanism; An Independent Inquiry Into The Oxford Group Movement and Moral Re-Armament", Geoffrey Williamson, 1954, page 156.

   Geoffrey Williamson published his book in 1954, so, by 1964, Peter Howard had had plenty of time to review both it and the official Moral Re-Armament party line.

5. Peter Howard claimed that Frank Buchman never met Adolf Hitler, but other Buchmanites declared that Frank Buchman had an invitation to meet with Adolf Hitler (so he should also get an invitation to meet with President Roosevelt). And then of course there is the question of them meeting at Putzi Hanfstaengl's house.

Then, continuing in that interview, Peter Howard tried another propaganda trick: He quoted Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George saying flattering things about Adolf Hitler in 1935. Then Howard asked, "Does anyone dare suggest that Churchill or Lloyd George were soft on Nazism?"

      Now let me read you what other people said about Hitler 30 years ago: "Hitler may go down in history as the man who restored honor to the great Germanic nation and led it back, serene and strong, to the European family circle." That was Winston Churchill in 1935.
      Here is Lloyd George: "Hitler is the George Washington of his country."
      Does anyone dare suggest that Churchill or Lloyd George were soft on Nazism?
Moral Re-Armament: What Is It?, Basil Entwistle and John McCook Roots, pub. 1967, pages 89-90.

Ah, but there were several big problems with Peter Howard's argument there:

1. Peter Howard was lying again. He quoted Winston Churchill out of context and butchered the quote and reassembled the pieces of the sentences to deceive the listeners. What Winston Churchill actually said was:

   One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.
   ...
   We cannot tell whether Hitler will be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war in which civilisation will irretrievably succumb, or whether he will go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation.
   Winston Churchill, "Hitler and His Choice", The Strand Magazine (November 1935)

   Winston Churchill was not endorsing Adolf Hitler. Churchill was saying that, at that time, he didn't know how Hitler would be written into the history books.

2. Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George were politicians, the kind of people whose job routinely requires them to make flattering remarks about other people whom they may actually disdain, while carrying out duties like negotiating with foreign leaders for peace. That's politics, and that's diplomacy.

         Frank Buchman was a clergyman who was a little more obligated to always speak the truth. (He was supposed to be practicing "Absolute Honesty".)

3. Winston Churchill was not the British Prime Minister in 1935, Neville Chamberlain was. Churchill was a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, leading the wing of the Conservative Party that opposed the Munich Agreement which Chamberlain famously declared to mean "peace in our time".

   Chamberlain would eventually be totally discredited for his policy of attempting to get peace by appeasing Hitler. He was replaced by Winston Churchill on May 10, 1940. (Incidentally, Neville Chamberlain was a member of Frank Buchman's Oxford Group. Frank Buchman was telling Chamberlain that Hitler was okay, and could be trusted.) )

   Frank Buchman had to bow to no political boss but God when he praised Hitler.
   

4. Former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Adolf Hitler pose for a photograph on the Obersalzburg during George's second visit with the German Chancellor. German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop is visible in the rear between the two leaders. (June 7, 1936)

   In September 1936, the former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George visited Adolf Hitler in an attempt to persuade him to stop taking military action in Europe. Although David Lloyd George agreed that Germany had been badly treated after the First World War, he was opposed to the British government's policy of appeasement.

   David Lloyd George was one of the British diplomats who created the terrible conditions of the Versailles Treaty. The staggering reparations that Germany had to pay, and the redistribution of territory — that was the vindictive work of David Lloyd George.

   David Lloyd George certainly was effusive in his praise of Hitler during and after that September 1936 visit to Germany:

   Hitler is the George Washington of Germany, the man who made his country independent of all its oppressors ... He is a born leader, a magnetic, dynamic personality with a common aim, a resolute will and a fearless heart ... Regarding his popularity, especially among the youth, there cannot be the slightest doubt.
   Look to Germany — The Heart of Europe, Stanley McClatchie, 1937.

   But David Lloyd George also said,

   Wars are precipitated by motives which the statesmen responsible for them dare not publicly avow. A public discussion would drag these motives in their nudity into the open, where they would die of exposure to the withering contempt of humanity.
   

5. Winston Churchill made his remark — a hopeful suggestion, actually a question, not a statement of fact — "...whether he [Hitler] will go down in history as the man who..." — in 1935, and Frank Buchman made his remark in late 1936, after everybody had had another whole year to watch Hitler in action, and see what he was really doing.

   By late 1936, Hitler had banned all opposition political parties, really viciously cracked down hard on the Jews, repudiated treaties, and seized the Rhineland. By the end of 1936, there was little doubt of the direction in which Hitler was going:

• January 30, 1933 — Hitler becomes Chancellor
• March 20, 1933 — The Nazis establish their first concentration camp: Dachau.
• April 7, 1933 — The Nazis' first anti-Semitic decree removes all Jews from the civil service.

  ---

• January, 1934 — Hitler forced all Jewish newspaper editors out of their jobs.
• June 30, 1934 — The Night of the Long Knives. Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhardt Heydrich carried out a two-day campaign of mass murder that eliminated all opposition to Hitler in Germany, and even eliminated all potential opposition to Hitler from within the Nazi Party. Even Hitler's former allies, like Ernst Roehm, were killed because they might have been popular enough to compete with Hitler for leadership of the Nazi party. Approximately 1000 people were murdered — some of them for nothing more than simply knowing sordid details of Hitler's past (like Hitler's former landlord in Vienna in the 1920's, and the landlord's daughter, who knew what Hitler had done to survive in those days, like perhaps homosexual prostitution). That purge left Hitler the undisputed dictator of Germany.

  ---

• March 16, 1935 — Hitler repudiates the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty and Germany begins to rearm openly.
• May 21, 1935 — Nazis ban Jews from serving in the military.
• June 18, 1935 — Britain signs Naval Agreement with Germany, a sign that the Western powers will try to tame Hitler by accommodation ("appeasement").
• June 26, 1935 — Nazis pass law allowing forced abortions on women to prevent them from passing on hereditary diseases.
• Aug 6, 1935 — Nazis force Jewish performers/artists to join Jewish Cultural Unions.
• September 6, 1935 — Street sales of Jewish newspapers is prohibited in Germany. Jewish owners of newspapers were forced to sell their businesses to non-Jews.
• September 15, 1935 — Frank Buchman attends the Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg, where Hitler officially proclaims the antisemitic "Nuremberg Laws." These repressive laws are designed to isolate the Jewish people legally, politically, socially and biologically. One law restricts German citizenship to those of "German or related blood," thus stripping the Jews of their few remaining rights as German citizens. Another prohibits marriage and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans, making it a crime punishable by imprisonment.
• September 15, 1935 — Law on Reich Citizenship
• September 15, 1935 — Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour
• September 27, 1935 — Waldemar Gurian, a German Catholic writer in exile, writes that the Nuremberg ordinances are "only a stage on the way toward the complete physical destruction of the Jews."
• November 14, 1935 — First Supplementary Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law.
  Jews denied voting rights and forbidden to hold public office. Discharge of all Jewish civil-service employees, including World War I front-line veterans. Definition of "Jew" written. First decree pertaining to the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor" issued: Prohibition against the marriage of Jews to non-Jews. Sexual relations between Jews and Aryans becomes a crime. Work possibilities for Jews narrowed to just a few professions. Jewish children prohibited from using the same playgrounds and locker rooms as other children.
  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/holocaust/timeprint.html
• November 20, 1935 — The Church of England unanimously condemns Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany.
• November 26, 1935 — The Nazi racial office rules that the prohibition of racially mixed marriages incorporated in the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor," applies equally to Gypsies.
• 1935 — Between 1935 and 1937, 75 Polish Jews are killed and more than 500 injured in widespread attacks. Many are attacked in the streets and their homes and schools broken up and looted.

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• January 1936 — The German government begins a series of trials of members of the religious orders accused of violating the foreign currency laws. Press coverage is hostile to the accused in almost all cases.
• January 4, 1936 — Ambassador Bergen in Rome writes to German foreign minister von Neurath that the Pope is protesting the violations of the Concordat by the Hitler government, and has several times threatened to bring his complaints into the open. It has taken the moderation of Secretary of State Pacelli to prevent a rupture of relations.
• January 11, 1936 — An attempt is made on the life of Romanian Chief Rabbi Jacob Isaac Niemirower.
• January 25, 1936 — The Catholic Agency of Poland officially condemns antisemitic acts.
• February 10, 1936 — The German Gestapo is placed above the law.
• March 7, 1936 — Hitler repudiates the demilitarization clauses of the Versailles Treaty and the Locarno Treaties (1925), and German troops march into the demilitarized Rhineland, and reclaim the Saar region.
• March 9, 1936 — Three Jews are murdered at Przytyk in Poland, and a few days later, five more are killed in the village of Stawy.
• March 22, 1936 — Sir Oswald Mosley makes an antisemitic speech that almost causes a riot in London's Albert Hall.
• March 1936 — SS Deathshead division is established.
  The SS — Shutzstaffeln, or "Protection Squad,", originally set up in 1925 to provide personal protection to Nazi leadership — creates the Deaths Head division to guard concentration camps.
• May 1936 — The German government steps up its drive against the religious orders, instituting a number of trials for sexual perversity. The proceedings are given detailed and lurid coverage by the German press. Catholic monasteries are described as breeding places of filth and vice.
• May 23, 1936 — Catholic bishops in Holland demand a ban on the Dutch Nazi party.
• June 2, 1936 — One hundred nineteen Nazis are indicted in Warsaw for conspiring to overthrow the Polish government.
• June 17, 1936 — Heinrich Himmler is appointed chief of the German Police, both uniformed and civilian.
• June 21 1936 — The Bavarian government publicly reads the order dismissing all Catholic nuns teaching in the public schools.
• July 9, 1936 — Goebbels orders a halt to anti-Jewish propaganda until after the Berlin Olympics.
• July 12, 1936 — Sachsenhausen concentration camp is opened.
• July 26, 1936 — Father Charles Coughlin, the fascist American "Father of hate radio", in an address to 5,000 American farmers, claims that the Roosevelt administration is a tool of the Rothschild banking dynasty.
• August 1, 1936 — The Olympic Games begin in Berlin. Frank Buchman attends as a personal guest of Heinrich Himmler.
  
  1.       Hitler and the top Nazis sought to gain legitimacy through favorable public opinion from foreign visitors and thus temporarily refrained from actions against Jews. Signs barring Jews were removed until the event was over.
     
  2.       During the 1933 Olympic Session in Vienna that approved the choice of Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, the Germans had promised not to exclude German Jews from the national team. Hitler didn't bother to keep that promise.
     
  3.       The great American athlete, Jesse Owens (who happened to be black), won four gold medals (100m, 200m, long jump and 4x100m relay). During the Games, he broke 11 Olympic records and defeated the German Lutz Lang in a very close long jump final. Lang was Germany's athletic superstar of the time — a brilliant long jumper, and a tall blond-haired, blue-eyed man who fitted easily into the Nazi image of Aryan racial superiority. Lutz Lang was the first to congratulate Jesse Owens when the long jump final was over. Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, refused to put the gold medal around Owens' neck. Hitler complained that it was unfair to allow Blacks to compete in the Olympics — "They aren't human. It is like making a man race against a horse." Hitler stomped out of the Olympics in anger.
• August 1936 — Nazis set up an Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortions (by healthy women).
• August 24, 1936 — Adolf Hitler introduces a compulsory two-year period of military conscription.
• August 26, 1936 — Frank Buchman happily declares, "I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler..."