The Prussian general and military librarian Albert Buddecke was head of the library of the High General Staff in Berlin from 1909. At the outbreak of the war he served for two months as an officer on the Western Front, before returning to work for the Acting General Staff of the Army in Berlin from December 1914 until October 1918. Here, as departmental head, he led the Sorting Office for the Spoils of War and Library Material, which was founded in 1916 and whose tasks included to monitor the war collecting activities of the libraries and other cultural institutions, which had not been regulated up to that point. 

In 1917 Buddecke conducted a survey and recorded 217 war collections in Germany, which he listed in a brochure The War Collections. A Register of their Organisation and their Inventory.  This register prompted the idea of creating an association of the war collectors.