With two exceptions the sources in this volume have been selected from the collected papers of Bishop Bell and Archbishop Lang, both at Lambeth Palace Library in London. The complete Bell archive offers the historian a formidable series of no less than 368 volumes, many of them comprising material relating to German affairs during the National Socialist era. Meanwhile, the Lang Papers present four volumes of material concerning Germany in the same period, two of them catalogued when the series was first assembled, and two later discovered in the Council on Foreign Relations archive in the ecumenical affairs department at Lambeth Palace.

My selection of documents from this accumulation of letters, memoranda and reports has been guided by a number of broad principles, and it is important to present them to the reader. The purpose of this volume is to show how the leaders of the Church of England perceived and interpreted the crisis in the German protestant churches in the period 1933—9, and how they viewed that affair when visiting the country themselves, or meeting those who had done so. The business of selecting material has not always been a straightforward one, and even a confident editor must expect to regret later the omission of certain letters or episodes. First, I have left to one side documents describing the efforts made by the leaders of the Church of England to respond to the German church struggle by protesting through a number of channels or intervening directly in the dispute. To do this aspect of the story justice would require a much larger volume, and one which included a range of documents from a number of other archives, ecumenical and political. I have been fortified in this decision by the knowledge that Daphne Hampson's excellent doctoral thesis, ‘The British response to the German church struggle 1933-9’ (University of Oxford, 1973), offers a comprehensive account of these matters. Second, it is obvious that Bell was a leading light in the ecumenical world, and often he addressed German affairs not primarily as a bishop of the Church of England, but as a powerful force in the Life and Work movement. I have chosen not to include documents relating entirely to this aspect of his work, and, although such a detachment must raise proper suspicions, it still appears to me tenable and necessary.