This view - that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of war - was maintained for the next two decades, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and was only finally refuted by the extensive researches made into the Wilhelmine archives at Potsdam by Professor Fritz Fischer, research which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Germany had been planning a major European war for years and saw the Sarajevo incident, and the subsequent reactions of Austria-Hungary and Serbia, as a chance to start it.