362 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Sciences and International Relations Section, would serve during the war
as an agent of the Special Operations Executive.^38
In the middle of July 1940, the IIIC’s remaining personnel returned
to Paris only to discover that the IIIC’s offices had been sealed by the
German authorities and that these offices were in the process of being ran-
sacked and looted by the German Army’s secret police. One of these person-
nel, a Hungarian named Étienne Lajti, went to the German authorities and
demanded that the premises be evacuated and reopened.^39 These demands
lead to the appointment by Ribbentrop of a ‘Reich Commissar for Intellectual
Cooperation’: Berber. On his arrival in Paris on August 24, Berber assured
certain of the IIIC’s personnel that he considered the IIIC to be a ‘precious
moral capital of which the preservation [is] in the interest of all.’ He added
that the only barrier to German collaboration with the institute was its link
with the League and that therefore this link should be broken.^40
What followed was a series of negotiations between Berber and rep-
resentatives of the Vichy government concerning the severance of the
IIIC’s ties with the LON, this being a condition of its reopening. These
negotiations resulted in an agreement that a reopened IIIC would come
under Franco-German direction, although it was well understood that the
German plan was that this proposed Franco-German collaboration would
be directed from Berlin: the Reich wished to ‘control an international
institution in order to make it a vector of its cultural influence (and of its
propaganda).’^41 Li Yu-ying (Li Shizeng) was a sometime Chinese delegate
to the LON who had been collaborating with the ICIC since 1932. He
had attended the conference on peaceful change in Paris in 1937 as an
invited observer and was one of two Chinese plenipotentiaries who signed
the Act of International Co-operation. In an editorial appearing in Free
World, Li stated that the Germans wanted to control the IIIC in order to
‘use it as a nazi propaganda instrument in South America’.^42
(^38) For Chalmers Wright’s experiences as an agent of the Special Operations Executive, see
Chalmers-Wright, Fergus Camille Yeatman (Oral History), Imperial War Museum (production
company), Laurie Milner (recorder), Chalmers-Wright, Fergus Camille Yeatman (interviewee/
speaker), no. 1, 1984–1985, Imperial War Museum, Sound Archive, Catalogue no. 8188.
(^39) Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 151.
(^40) Fritz Berber, 1940, quoted ibid., 152.
(^41) Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée, 152–54.
(^42) Li Lu [sic] Ying, ‘International Intellectual Cooperation,’ Free World 8, no. 4 (1944):
299–300. For Li Yu-ying’s activities in connection with the LON and its intellectual