The Centre was part of an official campaign by the Weimar Republic and then the Third Reich to counter Allied charges of German war guilt, and suggest consequences. German Governments sought to organise materials from 1914 onwards to counter questions on origins of the war. The key elements of German effort were the War Guilt Section of the Foreign Ministry , the "Kriegsschuldreferat", the Working Committee of German Associations (), the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War ("Zentralstelle zur Erforschung der Kriegschuldfrage") and a Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry ("Untersuchungsausschuss"); they used sympathetic writers and translators, and watered down the more controversial memoirs. The "Kriegsschuldreferat" was established in the Foreign Ministry in December 1918/January 1919 under Bernhard von Bülow ("ardent nationalist and zealous bureaucrat"). Its primary task was to prepare the case before the Peace Conference against the Allied charge that Germany and Austria-Hungary were solely responsible for the war. Von Bülow instructed Hans Freytag, the later head of the "Kriegsschuldreferat", to lock up all documents "in case the entente should demand them" 'as they apparently had the right to do under article 230 of the Versailles Treaty', so "they could be got out of the way easily". Documents were divided into "defence" and "offence".