A Papal Encyclical, a World Conference and an Arrest

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On 15 March 1937 there appeared the first English-language edition of a regular publication documenting in fresh detail the crisis in the German Churches. This was Kulturkampf: News Bulletin of the Religious Policy of the Third Reich. The source of this was an association, for a time called the League for the Defence of Christianity but shortly to be more widely known as the Kulturkampf Association. It was based at an address in Chancery Lane in central London. This publication was translated from an original edition produced – enigmatically – in France since a first edition in February 1936, by exiled members of the German Catholic Centre Party working under the aegis of the politician Karl Spieker. The London editor was Conrad Bonacina and the treasurer a Roman Catholic named Margrieta Beer. As Richard Bonney has shown, this new bulletin was the work of a conspicuous coalition. Influential names hovered in the background: Erwin Kraft, Bishop Bell, Norman Angell and Dorothy Buxton. The venture also marked a discreet, but notable, development in ecumenism: in due course Kraft could write to Bell that the association was led by a committee which was evenly divided between Protestants and Catholics.