By whom or with what intention the first shots were fired is not known. The most radical of the revolutionaries, and especially the Liebknecht followers, saw in them the beginning of the dreaded "counter-revolution." The stables were at the time occupied by some of the marines who had been brought to Berlin two days earlier. These men, who were later to cause the new government so much trouble,[33] were in large part what is so aptly expressed by the slang term "roughnecks." Their leader was a degraded officer named Heinrich Dorrenbach.[34] Viewed in the light of their subsequent conduct it is impossible that they could have been won for any counter-revolutionary movement. The revolutionaries, however, who knew that they had been summoned by Prince Max's government, concluded that the shots had been fired by them. There were few casualties from the encounter. [33] It was these men who surrounded the imperial chancellery on December 24th, held the cabinet members there _incommunicado_ by severing the telephone wires, and compelled the government to grant their wage demands and to permit them to retain the royal stables as barracks. They also helped loot the palace. The government had to disarm them during the second "Bolshevik week" in Berlin early in March, when twenty-four of them were summarily executed. [34] Dorrenbach was afterward indicted in Brunswick for bribery and looting. The Majority Socialists' three delegates conferred again with Dittmann, Vogtherr and Ledebour, the Independents' representatives. They were unable to come to an agreement, and the Independents withdrew to confer with their party's executive committee. This committee debated the question for some hours with the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council.[35] Liebknecht, still nominally an Independent, for the _Spartacus Bund_ had not yet been formally organized as a separate party; Ledebour, Dittmann, and Barth, who was chairman of the council, took a leading part in the debate that ensued. It was finally decided to make the Independents' participation in the government conditional upon the granting of certain demands. First of all, the new government must be only a _provisorium_ for the conclusion of the armistice, and its existence was to be limited to three days. Before the expiration of that term the Soviet was to decide what course should then be taken. The republic must be a socialistic republic,[36] and all legislative, executive and judicial power must rest in the hands of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils, who were to be elected by "the laboring population _under the exclusion of all bourgeois elements_."[37]