The obvious deficiencies in law enforcement were matters of concern for several parliaments during the Weimar period. In 1920 the state parliament of Bavaria set up its own investigative committee to look into the Feme murder of Reichswehr soldier Hans Dobner. In 1924 the state parliament in Prussia set up a "Political Murders" investigative committee, and two years later instituted a second. In November 1925 the journal Die Weltbühne published an unattributed article by Carl Mertens, a German officer and pacifist, about the Feme murders of more than twenty members of right-wing groups. In January 1926, at the request of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), an investigative committee of the Reichstag, under the name "Feme Organizations and Feme Murders", was set up to clarify the crimes and their political environment in parties, the Reichswehr and the judiciary. The project was hindered from the beginning by the right-wing majority in the parliament, the Bavarian judicial authorities' refusal to cooperate, and not least by the indecisiveness of the SPD itself.
