In the reaction after 1945 against the policy of appeasement, headed in Britain by those leading Tory historians, who had opposed that policy at the time, and in America by those leading members of the Democratic equivalents of the Whig school of history, who had in the main supported Roosevelt and had pressed in the period before Pearl Harbor for American support of Britain, a small group of British ambassadors became the target for obloquy and denunciation. This process was greatly aided, firstly by the publication of the first volume of Churchill's memoir/history of the second world war, The Gathering Storm, in 1948, and then by the early publication of Series III of the British Foreign Office Documents for the interwar years, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, which covered the years 1938–9. The three western allies engaged in the publication of the captured German diplomatic documents, Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945,had in the same way decided to begin that publication with Series D, the initial volumes of which began at varying dates in 1936–7, the series as a whole covering the period until 7 December 1941.

Behind these decisions by the British, American and French governments lay the advice of their official historians. This advice was determined by the desire to avoid a new War-Guilt controversy; much the same motive lay behind the decision to publish all the documents cited in evidence at the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg.