The Weimar Assembly had outlived its usefulness. A new General Election was held on June 6 to choose the first Reichstag under the new constitution. While the Center parties still had a majority, it was greatly reduced, both the Right and Left gaining. The moderates were drifting to the two extremes. The Nationalist vote increased by three millions and the Minority Socialist vote by two and a half millions. This made more unstable than ever the authority of the Government, especially as the Allies at the Spa conference in July insisted upon the reduction of the German army to the treaty figure of one hundred thousand by January 1, 1921. In vain did the Germans plead that an army of one hundred thousand would make impossible the maintenance of authority and the insistence upon strict fulfilment of the treaty obligations. The Government pointed out that the only way to secure the arrest and trial of the “war criminals”--lists of whom, well up in the thousands, contained the most prominent names in the army and navy--would be for the Entente Powers to occupy militarily the whole of Germany and to take over the running of the country. For no German Government would have the means to obey this behest. During the three weeks following the Spa Conference a tremendous effort was made to fulfil the disarmament clauses of the treaty, which it had been clearly shown at Spa had thus far been evaded. More than four thousand heavy guns and field-guns were destroyed, and a systematic effort was begun to disarm the civilian population. The deliveries of live stock to France and Belgium were made, and Germany began to attempt to meet the new schedule of coal deliveries, amounting to two million tons a month. The Supreme Court at Leipzig was entrusted with the trial of a few of the minor officers charged by the victors with violation of the laws of war. Some of these received prison sentences. The British representatives at the trials reported that they had been fairly conducted. The French, on the other hand, declared that the trials were a farce. Exasperated and despairing as they were over the failure to secure any modification of the Treaty of Versailles, the German people supported the Government in the efforts it made to comply with the orders of the Entente Powers. Food and raw materials the German people simply had to have to continue to exist. So a deaf ear was turned to the extreme Nationalists. The Germans were equally adverse to Bolshevism, whose horrors in Russia were described minutely in the press.