2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 181informed Bonnet of the creation of this committee and of Renvers’s
appointment as its secretary, Berber stated that like its predecessor, the
German Central Committee would coordinate all the ‘scientific works of
German institutions’ relative to the ISC.^330 As it was also intended to
serve as the IIIC’s correspondent in Germany for all questions concern-
ing the ISC, Berber asked Bonnet to send all documents relating to the
work of the ISC directly to the Central Committee’s address in Berlin.^331
In the following year, the German Central Committee for
International Relations Research was merged with the Institute
for Foreign Policy (Institut für Auswärtige Politik) to become the
German Institute for Foreign Policy Research (Deutsches Institut für
Aussenpolitische Forschung) of which Berber became the director.^332
While this was the role ascribed to Berber in the list of participants in
the 1937 session of the ISC, Berber’s presence in Paris was formally of
a ‘personal and private nature’ just as it had been at the ISC’s 1935 ses-
sion in London. As he himself explained it, the particular nature of his
presence at the Paris conference was a consequence of the ‘peculiar state
of things arising out of a peculiar and delicate situation’.^333 The pecu-
liar and delicate situation to which Berber referred was as follows: the
ISC’s relationship with the IIIC and thereby the LON meant that there
could be no official German presence at the conference. That said, there
is an important sense in which Berber’s claim that his presence at the
conference was of a private nature was a fiction. Bardo Fassbender points
(^330) League of Nations, International Institute of International Co-operation, The
International Studies Conference: Origins Functions Organisation, 44.
(^331) Ibid., 44, and Berber to Bonnet, 15 August 1936, AG-IICI- K-I-15.d, UA.
(^332) League of Nations, International Institute of International Co-operation, The
International Studies Conference: Origins Functions Organisation, 44. For the title of the
organisation resulting from the merger of the German Central Committee and Institut für
Auswärtige Politik, see Dorothea von Renvers to Henri Bonnet, 29 October 1937, AG
1-IICI- K-I-15.d, UA. See also Dorothea von Renvers to Leo Gross, 11 January 1939,
Echange des publications et des bibliographies du 1er avril 1937 jusqu’en 1940, AG
1-IICI-K-I-13.b, UA. The following letterhead appears on the stationery used by Renvers
in writing to Gross: Deutsches Institut für Aussenpolitische Forschung und Hamburger
Institut fürAuswärtige Politik.
(^333) International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw
Materials, Colonies, 621, and Berber to Gross, 14 April 1936. Conférence permanente
des études internationales: ‘Peaceful Change,’ mars-avril 1936 jusqu’au 1er juin, 1936. AG
1-IICI- K-I-15.c, UA.