1 PEACEFUL CHANGE OR WAR? 45In this regard, he drew attention to the ‘great Peace Plan’ which the
German leader had offered Europe on March 31, 1936, insisting that
the German people desired nothing more than to see its realisation.
Germany’s ‘sincerity on this issue,’ Ribbentrop declared, was demon-
strated by Berber’s collection of documents: the collection showed how
consistently Germany had pursued peace and how it had been effectively
forced to reassert its rights because others had failed to fulfil their obli-
gations. Ribbentrop concluded the preface in stating that he wished for
Locarno: A Collection of Documents the ‘largest possible circulation both
at home and abroad’ and in regard to this wish, it may be worth noting
that although the English edition of Locarno: eine Dokumentensammlung
was released by a British publisher, it was made and printed in Germany
by the long-established printing firm J. J. Augustin which was based in
Glückstadt and Hamburg in Germany and which had an office in New
York.^144
tHe mAdrid conference: university teAcHing
The Federación de Asociaciones Españolas de Estudios Internacionales
(Federation of Spanish Associations for International Studies), which had
been admitted to direct membership of the ISC in 1933, had been keen
to host the meeting of the ISC in 1936 at its headquarters in Madrid.
However, a governmental crisis which saw the Spanish cabinet fall
on December 30, 1935, put the staging of the event into doubt. José
Martinez de Velasco, who had been foreign minister before the cabinet
fell and who would later fall victim to Spain’s civil war, was a personal
friend of the chair of the federation, namely, José Gascón y Marín (the
latter being a former minister of education), and a key supporter of its
(^144) Ibid., vi. In his introduction to Locarno: A Collection of Documents. Berber pointed
out that among the collection of documents that he had compiled there were a few French
documents for which there was no English text available and that these had been repro-
duced in the original French. He stated in this connection that ‘every Englishman who
is interested in foreign politics may be assumed to have a knowledge of French’ (ibid.,
xiv). The printing firm J. J. Augustin, ‘founded in 1632,...was one of the primary print-
ing plants for the German navy; it issued the only local newspaper and produced mail-
order catalogues and textbooks, including the books of papers of many prominent
American anthropologists for distribution in the United States.’ Donald Kuspit, Jimmy
Enrst, Louise Svendsen, Sandra Gair and Phyllis Braff, Jimmy Enrst (New York: Hudson
Press, 2000), 143.