496 J.-A. PEMBERTON
certainly informed the functioning of the ISC, this status neatly inter-
secting with the ISC’s posture of scientific impartiality. This helps explain
why the ISC, like Intellectual Cooperation, tolerated in is midst individu-
als representing states which scorned the Geneva system and trampled on
the principles which underpinned it. I say helps, because such toleration
was also a function of the hope entertained by some ISC members, that
the ISC could serve as an instrument of pacification, most especially in
relation to Hitler’s Germany. This hope explains Toynbee’s determined
efforts to renew collaboration between German scholars and the ISC fol-
lowing Germany’s withdrawal from the LON in 1933 and the liquida-
tion of the German unit of the ISC as a consequence of that withdrawal.
As a result of those efforts, Berber participated in the ISC’s 1935 study
meeting on collective security in 1935 and its study meetings on peaceful
change in 1936 and 1937. At the same time, the fact that Berber was
present at those study meetings and that he was in contact with the ISC,
whether in the form of Toynbee, its secretariat in Paris or its rapporteurs,
over a period of more than five years, would indicate that Berber and his
patron, namely, Ribbentrop, saw the ISC as a useful tool for the purpose
of promoting what they saw as German interests.^228
Unfortunately for those members of the ISC who entertained the
ambition of developing a theoretical or scientific framework for the
peaceful resolution of international problems, controversies such as
those it addressed at its study meetings on peaceful change could not
be resolved on the intellectual plane. This would seem to have been well
(^228) Vagts points out that Berber was ‘probably the last person to be employed by the
Reich in connection with international institutions’ and notes that ‘he slipped across
the border into Switzerland late in the war to become the German representative to the
International Red Cross.’ He adds that although Berber’s ‘role in Switzerland is subject
to various interpretations,...it is clear he was involved in last minute maneuvers of lead-
ing Nazis to try to soften their fall in exchange for better treatment of Hitler’s victims.’
Vagts, ‘International Law in the Third Reich,’ 675. Based on the reflections of historians of
the Hamburg Institute for Foreign Policy and an actual encounter with an elderly Berber
in Cambridge, MA in 1990, Vagts offers the following assessment of Berber: He was ‘an
almost picaresque character, skipping from post to post in a troubled time and doing what
the powers wanted, without taking them wholly seriously....He never plunged into the
anti-Semitism that shamed [Carl] Schmitt; nor did he betray old friends as Schmitt did.
Indeed, he seems to have indulged in various protective kindnesses along the way’ (ibid.,
685).