were stabbed in the back?" Ludendorff's eyes lit up and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone. "Stabbed in the back?" he repeated. "Yes, that's it, exactly, we were stabbed in the back." When Hindenburg finished reading the statement, he walked out of the hearings despite being threatened with contempt. Heinemann called his appearance a high-profile inauguration of the stab-in-the-back myth. Referring to the DNVP committee chairman, Eugen Fischer-Baling commented that a worse error than the appointment of an opponent of the revolution as the first spokesman of the revolutionary quasi-tribunal could not be imagined. As a result of the Helfferich-led sessions, the committees stopped meeting in public and attracted less and less attention from the German people. Investigations and results It was to be expected that those in the Empire who had held responsibility would try to cover up and deny their mistakes. The committee therefore also tried to let their opponents from the imperial era have a say and to assess controversial statements on the basis of the files, often supported by expert opinions. While the published results of the inquiries were sometimes the result of dubious compromises among the committee's members, the investigations, expert opinions and disputes in the subcommittees brought important findings to light. There has not as yet been a comprehensive analysis of them. First subcommittee: outbreak of war The first subcommittee initially turned to the immediate background of the war but soon decided to include its wider background as well, focusing on the broad policy lines of the great powers from 1870 onward. The ambitious goal of presenting the "first authoritative work on the background of the war from the German side" could not, however, be met, in particular the question of whether Germany and the other Central Powers had forced the war on the Allies. Above all it was "the ongoing intervention of the Foreign Office" that delayed the committee's work so substantially. The Office prevented the publication of four reports by renowned experts, including the legal historian Hermann Kantorowicz. After a thorough examination of the files, Kantorowicz came to the conclusion that Germany had been complicit in the outbreak of the war. He noted that three-fourths of the documents cited in The German White Book, published by the government in 1914 to support its claims regarding what had started the war, had been falsified. Kantorowicz's expert opinion was