The work premiered on October 19, 1965 on stages in fourteen West and East German cities and at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London.

In 1966 the production was presented at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm which featured sets and costumes designed by Weiss's wife, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, and was directed by Ingmar Bergman.

[1] The Investigation was originally supposed to be part of a larger "World-Theater Project", which was to follow the structure of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.

Weiss's cantos depict the 'progress' of the victims from the ramp upon arrival at Auschwitz to the gas chambers and the ovens, revealing ever more horrendous moments in the perpetration of the Nazi genocide.

Weiss's seemingly minimalist intervention in the protocols shows the dramatist (and former painter and filmmaker) who only a year earlier had created the sensational and wildly theatrical play Marat/Sade at the height of his art.

In the cantos, the dramatist sets the statements of the anonymous witnesses against the named defendants and former SS concentration camp guards.

Peter Weiss (1916–1982) was born in Germany but in 1934 went with his family into exile and lived for all of his adult life in Sweden where he also became a citizen.

The international productions of The Investigation display a great conceptual diversity, ranging from a representational play to scene reading to concert performances of the oratorios.

After a twelve-year break, the play was brought back in 1979 in a provocative comedy-style production authorized by Weiss in the Moers Castle Theater directed by Thomas Schulte-Michels.

[6] The Democratic Republic of Congo-based theater group Urwintore, which is made up of survivors of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, have put on the play in several cities across Africa, Europe, and the United States.

[7] Cesear's Forum, Cleveland's small minimalist theatre at Kennedy's Down Under, Playhouse Square, Ohio, presented the play in October and November 2015 as part of the city's Violins of Hope season.

The continued relevance of Weiss' play, linked to the geopolitics of Syria and ISIS, was furthered on the closing weekend of the production by the November 2015 Paris attacks.