 At the same time, many one-sided works were produced by politicians and other participants, often trying to exculpate themselves.In Germany these tended to deflect blame, while in Allied countries they tended to blame Germany or Austria-Hungary.In 1961, the German historian Fritz Fischer published the controversial "Griff nach der Weltmacht", in which Fischer argued that the German government had an expansionist foreign policy, formulated in the aftermath of Social Democratic gains in the election of 1912 and had started a war of aggression in 1914.