28 J.-A. PEMBERTON
would ‘move the others to go with her.’^92 Toynbee himself would take
action on Britain’s behalf, albeit in a non-official capacity, during a visit
to Germany in February 1936. A pretext for Toynbee’s visit to Germany
was an invitation issued to him to give a lecture on the topic of peace-
ful change at the Institut für Auswärtige Politik (Institute for Foreign
Policy) in Hamburg. This institute had been founded on February
1921 under the directorship of Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a
research professor in foreign and international law at the University of
Hamburg. As a research institute devoted to the study of international
affairs, the Institut für Auswärtige Politik was comparable in nature to
the RIIA and the CFR and had developed a respectable reputation. As
with RIIA and CFR, its origins lay with the Paris Peace Conference in
1919: the creation of a Hamburg-based foreign policy institute was orig-
inally proposed on May 27, 1919, by the authors of a document entitled
the Memorandum of War Responsibility, Mendelssohn Bartholdy being
among them.^93
After 1933, Mendelssohn Bartholdy was compelled to resign his posi-
tion as director and subsequently went into exile in Great Britain where
he acquired a fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1935, the inter-
national legal expert Fritz (Friedrich) Berber was appointed acting direc-
tor of the now nazified institute in Hamburg.^94 It is noteworthy that
the ‘confiscated libraries and files’ of this institute passed to the Büro
Ribbentrop or Dienststelle Ribbentrop, a ‘quasiofficial apparatus’ that
provided Joahcim von Ribbentrop with foreign policy advice thereby
rendering him ‘relatively independent of technical advice from the for-
eign office.’^95
In addition to his Hamburg role, Berber was a member of staff, the
only remaining ‘pre-National Socialist member of the staff ’ according
(^92) Toynbee, ‘Peaceful Change or War? The Next Stage in the International Crisis,’ 56.
(^93) Toynbee, Acquaintances, 277, and Muriel K. Grindrod, ‘The Institut für Auswärtige
Politik, Poststrasse 19, Hamburg,’ International Affairs 1, no. 22 (1931): 223–29, 223.
The Hamburg Institute for Foreign Policy was also referred in English as the Hamburg
Institute of International Affairs.
(^94) For Berber’s appointment to the Institut für Auswärtige Politik, see Katharina Rietzler,
‘Counter-Imperial Orientalism: Friedrich Berber and the Politics of International Law in
Germany and India, 1920s–1960s,’ Journal of Global History 11, no. 1 (1916): 113–34,
- See also Toynbee, Acquaintances, 277.
(^95) Paul Seabury, The Wilhelmstrasse: A Study of German Diplomats Under the Nazi
Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 52–3.