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.
The key elements of German effort were the War Guilt Section of the Foreign Ministry, the Kriegsschuldreferat, the Working Committee of German Associations (Arbeitsausschuss Deutscher Verbände), 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.
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".
The result was the 40 volumes of Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette 1922-27, which became the standard work of reference for the German view of World War I.
[2] The mission of the Centre became increasingly irrelevant as it was subsumed into the official position of the Nazi government after 1933, and especially after Hitler's revocation of Germany's signature on the Treaty of Versailles in 1937.