In 1937 Margarethe Lachmund arrived in the United States to attend the Friends World Conference at Swarthmore, one of a delegation of German Friends who came to it out of the fourth year of a National Socialist Germany. They were struggling to find how they, a tiny minority of about 250 members, could live and bear any sort of Quaker witness in a situation so full of danger, so totally opposed to all that they believed. At the Conference Margarethe was profoundly impressed with the messages of Frederick Libby, Rufus Jones, and Henry Cadbury. She went home from Swarthmore to live out the searching insights gained there, summarized for her in the words of Kagawa: �Only if we live in such inward relation to God that the right sort of love for all people streams from us shall we have the courage and strength to witness for the truth.�
In 1961, sixteen years after the end of World War II, she was asked by Rudolf Weckerling, chaplain at a Berlin university, to contribute to a collection of 30 essays on peacemaking which he published as Durchkreutzer Hass (Cancelled Hate in English). Margarethe took the title of her contribution, �With Thine Adversary in the Way,� from the Sermon on the Mount. It is not really about agreeing with your adversary, but rather, shows how to reach out to him in a spirit of trust, while holding fast to truth and avoiding the traps of fear and hate. In this essay, appearing here in English for the first time, she writes simply of certain incidents in her life under the Hitler regime and during the following period of Russian occupation of East Germany, when she sought to live out this combination of love and truth.
