272 J.-A. PEMBERTON
[I]t has been the Führer’s exceedingly successful foreign policy that even-
tually caused the German science of international law to discover and real-
ize its task as a political science that is in touch with reality and responsible
to the present. Instead of dead formulae and abstract notions, a political
science of international law [Völkerrechtspolitik] is coming to the fore as a
scholarly observation of concrete political international law. International
law is treated in dynamic perspective of constant change, of a fight of new
ideas against old forms. This political science of international law has been
given the task of discovering and unmasking the political, historical and
ideological background to the West European and Anglo-Saxon interna-
tional law, of supplying German foreign policy with weapons of interna-
tional law [völkerrechtliche Waffen] to assist in its fight for the freedom
and greatness of the German people, and of finding new forms and new
vessels for new political thoughts and creation. But what is more, this sci-
ence must work out a system of a true international legal order which is no
longer a result of adding more or less random and formal rules...but an
order of a community of free and equal peoples based on justice and set in
the living stream of history.^107It was also in 1939 that Berber produced a two volume collection of
documents entitled Das Diktat von Versailles: Entstehung, Inhalt, Zerfall,
eine Darstellung in Dokumenten (The Diktat of Versailles: Origin,
Content, Collapse, A Presentation in Documents). Numbering one thou-
sand and six hundred seventy-two pages and published under the aus-
pices of the German Institute for Foreign Policy Research, the book
was intended to conclusively demonstrate that the Treaty of Versailles
had no basis in law or justice. To the contrary, its thrust was to demon-
strate that Versailles was an act of ‘malevolence’ on the part of the vic-
torious powers and as such it had ‘not brought peace or security to
Europe.’^108
Ribbentrop, who had become German foreign minister in February
1938, once more supplied Berber with a foreword, declaring therein that
whoever read the collection of documents that Berber had assembled,
could ‘only concur’ in Berber’s assessment of the Versailles treaty. Noting
that the book traced the history of the treaty from its ‘beginnings to the
present, from its self-dissolution to its final overthrow by Nationalism
(^107) Fritz Berber, 1939, quoted ibid., 501.
(^108) Llewellyn Pfankuchen, review of Das Diktat von Versailles, ed., Fritz Berber, Journal
of International Law 33, no. 44 (1939): 793–94, 793.