was constituted in June 1920, the Weimar Reichstag. The members and their staffs therefore changed in the individual election periods. Tasks and structure On 14 October 1919, Chairman Carl Petersen presented to parliament the goals, a preliminary outline of material and an associated work plan as the initial result of the investigative committee's deliberations. The emphasis was on the questions that had been the subject of controversy in Germany since the fall of 1918: clarification of the events that led to the outbreak of war in July 1914 as a result of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary; clarification of all possibilities for peace talks and of the reasons which caused such possibilities to fail, or plans and decisions to that effect on the part of Germany or, if talks did take place, for what reasons such talks were unsuccessful; clarification of acts of war which were prohibited by international law or, if not prohibited by international law, were nevertheless disproportionately cruel or harsh; clarification of economic war measures in the occupied territories which were illegal under international law or whose implementation, without promising any particular military advantage, entailed a hardship unjustifiable for the population concerned and for their country. Interestingly, the issue of blame for Germany's defeat in the war, which was part of the original parliamentary resolution, did not appear in Petersen's proposal, although shortly after work began, the fourth subcommittee took over the issue, while the third handled all questions of international law. Four subcommittees, each with six to eight members, were formed to carry out the work. The chairmanship of the committee as a whole and of the subcommittees was assigned to the various parties in accordance with a distribution formula decided in the Reichstag's Council of Elders. The chairmanship of the full committee was held by the German Democratic Party (DDP). The first subcommittee was chaired by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the second by the DDP, SPD, ant the liberal German People's Party (DVP), the third by the Centre Party and the fourth primarily by the nationalist conservative German National People's Party (DNVP). Difficulties in the work of the subcommittees An office with four academically educated secretaries was established under the committee's Secretary General, Eugen Fischer-Baling. The secretaries, who had been civil servants trained under the Empire, gained considerable influence over the investigations they supervised. They selected literature