The Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War (in German: Zentralstelle zur Erforschung der Kriegsursachen) was a think tank based in Berlin, funded by the German government, whose sole purpose was to disseminate the official government position that Germany was the victim of Allied aggression in 1914, and hence the alleged moral invalidity of the Versailles Treaty. Of the many provisions in the treaty, Article 231 required Germany to accept responsibility for the damages it caused during the war and, under the terms of articles 232–248, to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions and pay reparations to some of the victorious countries. Although neither the Entente powers at the time nor subsequent historical consensus attached the idea of war guilt to these articles, Germany viewed them as a humiliation and as being forced to accept full responsibility for causing the war. The Centre was founded in 1921 under a Swiss doctor, Ernst von Sauerbeck, and from 1923 headed by a former völkisch activist, Major Alfred von Wegerer. Background 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". On 7 May 1919, the Allies presented the proposed accord, and on 28 May 1919 Germany published Deutschland Schuldig?, a collection of documents