When I began my training at Wesley House Cambridge in 1972 the Principal was the Reverend Professor Gordon Rupp, the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History. To the students he brought alive the church situation in post-war Germany. Whilst most of us knew at least the outlines of the German ‘Church Struggle’ against Hitler we remained ignorant, as many are today, of what happened after May 1945. Gordon, a Methodist, had been asked by the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, to accompany him on his first post-war visit to Germany, in the early autumn of 1945. Part of the visit would be as members of a World Council of Churches sponsored delegation to a meeting of German Protestant church leaders to be held in Stuttgart. That was an important gesture of recognition. It was in sharp contrast to the way the German Protestant churches had been treated at the end of World War One; something of which Bell was aware. During seminars in Rupp's study he would reflect on that visit, often opening a drawer and taking out a typewritten piece of paper. It was his own copy of the Stuttgart Declaration, for he had been present, with Bell, at the occasion of the meeting that had produced it. I have often wondered what had become of that fragile piece of history as his papers do not seem to have survived. His reflections on the events and personalities of the German Protestant Church were though given substance in his Macintosh Lecture for 1974, delivered at the University of East Anglia. It was my privilege to accompany him to that lecture. Subsequently published as I Seek My Brethren, it has remained a moving insight into the situation in Germany in the autumn of 1945. It also introduced me, somewhat obliquely, to the work of the Religious Affairs staff of the British Element of the Control Commission, a main theme of this book. I hope that this book does a little to express my thanks to him.

As a member of the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department I served for some eleven years in Germany during the period 1977 to 1997. My final posting was as the Assistant Chaplain General responsible for the oversight of all British non-Catholic army chaplains in Germany.