Introduction
If you know anything about the First World War, it's probably reduced to two words: "trench warfare". If there's a third word, it's probably "pointless". The image reinforced by six episodes of classic Blackadder, All Quiet on the Western Front, Goodbye to All That, and other popular depictions of the Great War has stayed with basically everybody, regardless of whether that was actually how the war happened or how it was viewed at the time. Just as the image of the fall of the Roman Empire is one of barbarians swarming at the gates and a descent into darkness across the European continent, of course - it's just the dichotomy between the academic understanding of history and the one that most people who can't be bothered to learn about it have, common to nearly every field.
Of course, enduring tropes aren't just the purview of the popular world; historians deal with them too. To return to the First World War, for the longest time, the prevailing view of the war was that Germany and Austria-Hungary started it in a "grab for world power" (Griff nach der Weltmacht). The Germans made this try for world domination on the basis of a Cunning Plan - whether people think it actually was a cunning plan or a Baldrician set-sail-for-fail endeavor differs widely - called the "Schlieffen Plan", uniquely German in its reliance on a bazillion moving parts to run with machine-like precision, and which Almost Won the War and avoided four years of pointless slaughter. At least, that's how the story goes.
It's been changing for a long time, though. Over the past ten years, the understanding of what the Schlieffen Plan was has changed dramatically. The consensus in the historiography is totally gone. This article is designed to keep CFC up with the times...at least, those denizens of CFC who can be bothered to read it.
I recognize that there's already a history article on the Schlieffen Plan here. Unfortunately, it's pretty bad, like the "Origins of the First World War" article is. This article is partly meant as a corrective for them.
The Original Narrative
Authoritative and popular histories of the First World War were coming out even before the Germans lost. After the war, everybody who fought in it had an agenda to push, and did so with the printed word in an avalanche of memoirs and histories that made Great War history nearly impossible to master even by the late twenties. By the 1930s, a sort of consensus finally emerged, styling the German war plan as the brainchild of its former Chief of the General Staff (1891-1905), Alfred von Schlieffen.
As the story goes, Schlieffen, who knew that in any future European war, Germany would be pitted against both Russia and France, decided that the way to win that war was to launch nearly all of Germany's armies on a massive flank march through neutral Belgium and the Netherlands, with no regard for international law. Thus they would avoid the rough terrain and French fortress system along the mutual Franco-German border, pop up in the rear of the French army (presumably busy marching into Germany), and annihilate it with ease. Having defeated the French, the Germans would then send their troops east to meet the Slavic Menace, freed of the worry of fighting a two-front war. Schlieffen is said to have believed in this concept so thoroughly that his dying words in 1913 were "keep the right wing strong".
Unfortunately for the Germans, Schlieffen's successor as Chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke "the Younger", was not nearly so bold or even as intelligent, and he messed with the holy cunning plan. He kept the bones of it - the attack through neutral Belgium - but removed most of the forces from the flank attack, making it diluted and weak. Instead, he placed many of them in East Prussia and Alsace-Lorraine, far from the "decisive" point. So when war actually came, the German right wing was far too weak to play the role it needed to play, and it was only on the strength of the plan's underlying awesomeness that the Germans conquered most of northern France before being turned back practically at the gates of Paris.
This story was particularly amenable to many interwar military theorists, whose ideas were paralleled by Schlieffen's supposed concept. Basil Liddell Hart, the noted British tank enthusiast, portrayed it as yet another example of his Holy Grail, the "indirect approach", the supposedly infallible method of decisively defeating an enemy. Liddell Hart's considerable powers of metaphor, applied to the Schlieffen concept, described the original plan as a "revolving door", whereby the French would push into Alsace-Lorraine with their armies and by the very strength of their push, they would bring Germany's flank armies even further into their rear areas. Never mind, of course, that soldiers do not march any faster based on some quantum entanglement connection to ones of another country moving quickly a hundred miles away, or that there was no actual textual evidence for this having played a role in Schlieffen's thought. In this way, Schlieffen's plan could be everything to everyone.
The definitive Schlieffen Plan description was developed by Gerhard Ritter after the Second World War. By this time, the historiography had totally changed. Where, before, men like Liddell Hart had wanted to use German examples to prove their own points about interwar military reform, Ritter was profoundly affected by the experience of Nazism and the intense sense of war guilt the Germans had, and wanted to prove something else entirely. After the Second World War, the historiographic concept of the Sonderweg, or "special path", was developed. Before the war, it had been used in a positive way by German exceptionalists - "these special factors unique to Germany and German history is why Germany is so awesome" - but afterwards, it took on a sinister overtone. Germany was uniquely placed to be dominated by the Nazis because its history had been special, yes - unnaturally special. According to the Sonderweg theory, Germany had never experienced democracy or any sanctification of individual rights, like the United Kingdom, France, and the United States did. Germany had a tradition of anti-Semitism, goes the narrative, that stretches back to Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies and even to the First Crusade. Germany was dominated by a militaristic system, an autocratic system, that doomed the Weimar republican experiment from its birth and spawned Hitler.
Ritter wanted to discuss militarism, and his studies on that led him to Schlieffen and Schlieffen's war plan. He had in his possession a memo, written by Schlieffen to Moltke on the occasion of Schlieffen's retirement, which he claimed was the blueprint for Germany's aggressive war. He also published maps with the plan, which have formed the basis for the understanding of the war plan for decades. Schlieffen's militarism precluded any discussion of whether invading Belgium and the Netherlands was morally or legally correct, and instead sent a million men headlong into infamy on the grounds of national interest and winning the war. His uniquely German sense of precision had timed the campaign so exactingly - down to the hour, as Ritter had it - and demanded that France be defeated in forty-two days, so as to turn on Russia before it could mobilize its own armies.
There were obvious discrepancies between the plan laid out in the memo and the actual German campaign in 1914. Germany did not invade the Netherlands, unlike the memo's prescription. The number of troops employed in the plan bore no relation to the actual number of troops Germany had available for war at the time. The balance of forces between theaters and sections of front was all wrong, with far too many soldiers devoted to the push through Belgium compared to the actual case. To explain these issues, Ritter argued that Moltke "watered down" the plan, making it less bold, by not violating Dutch neutrality and employing more troops in Alsace-Lorraine. This fit with a general narrative of Moltke's incompetence and timidity that was ostensibly born out by the actual campaign in 1914.
Ritter's narrative became the definitive statement of the Schlieffen Plan, and furthermore had documentary evidence in Schlieffen's own hand to back it up. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was The Way to refer to Germany's war effort. Fritz Fischer, the Sonderweg historian who developed the concept of the First World War as Germany's Griff nach der Weltmacht, referred to the Schlieffen Plan as a blueprint for offensive war and the kind of bold - brash, as Fischer might describe it - stroke so common to bombastic Wilhelmine Imperial Germany in its ignorance of public opinion and its effect on international relations. Barbara Tuchman's famous popular history The Guns of August worked within the Sonderweg framework to create a compelling history based on the personalities of the men involved, or at least the usual interpretation of their personalities after the backbiting and catfighting of the interwar memoirs. Gordon Craig's magisterial Politics of the Prussian Army fit it into a single narrative that went back to the Great Elector and Friedrich II. There was, essentially, historiographical consensus: this was what Germany did.
The Slowly Changing Narrative
Consensus never means unanimity. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, historians were widely divergent on what the Schlieffen Plan actually meant. Trevor Dupuy, an American officer, military theorist, and creator of combat modeling software, argued in his own books that the Schlieffen Plan was an instance of brilliance even in its "watered down" form, as part of his overall attempt to prove that the German way of war, and specifically the Prussian-German system of a General Staff, was inherently superior to others. Dupuy believed that the failure of Moltke's revised Schlieffen Plan was due to contingency more than to any problem inherent in the plan itself, basing this off of his own experiences in the Second World War, when cunning plans never actually meant inevitable success.
In the 1980s, the US Army's refocus on German methods of making war and German military theory practically forced a reassessment of the Schlieffen Plan. Nobody actually discarded the idea of the plan itself, but increasingly the focus was on a Schlieffen "doctrine" that was perpetuated throughout the German military and was the focus of internal debate running up to and during the First World War. In some ways, this was more of the same from before; like Liddell Hart, the Americans were transposing their own struggles with military doctrine onto the Imperial German military. But it had more than a grain of truth to it. Even Dupuy, decades before, had talked about a Schlieffen doctrine that focused on speed and firepower as essential force multipliers to deal with the problem of Russian and French overwhelming numerical superiority. The Americans - and, increasingly, the British as well - also began to reassess the familiar personalities from Tuchman's Guns of August: Schlieffen the rigid militarist and Moltke the sickly shrinking incompetent were revised by a new generation of military biography that talked about instances of Moltke's decisiveness or emotional elements in Schlieffen's war planning. Stig Förster in particular changed the assessment of Moltke in 1995, among other things arguing that he did not foresee a quick war at all and understood many of the weaknesses of the plan he was using.
There were other pinpricks on Ritter's Schlieffen narrative, as well. Martin van Creveld's study of supply lines and logistics in particular was quite damning. According to van Creveld and others, an attack through Belgium simply could not have incorporated the numbers of troops Schlieffen envisioned in Ritter's memo, even in peacetime. And as van Creveld pointed out, during the war itself, sabotage by partisans wrecked French and Belgian infrastructure even further. For all those who criticized Moltke for not keeping the right wing strong, van Creveld argued that if Moltke had dispatched more men to the right flank, they would have just been an extra drain on already-overstretched supply lines, and the Germans might have run out of steam even before they reached the Marne.
Again, though, none of this implied an attack on the actual concept of Schlieffen's memo being indicative of the German war plan. Nobody even considered that it might not even be all that good of a guide as to how he was thinking - although Förster's works on Moltke came quite close, and raised some questions that were fairly unsettling. Ritter's memo was still the Holy Grail of German military planning studies.
The Zuber Narrative
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of archives on the other side of the Iron Curtain changed that, albeit slowly. Suddenly, loads of material at the Leipzig archives (formerly in East Germany) or in sections of the German archives that the Russians had brought back to the Voroshilov and Frunze Academies and which were returned in 1989-91. It took ten years for historians to even begin sifting through all of this new material. But it yielded startling results. Terence Zuber, an American officer-turned-history professor in Würzburg, Bavaria, ended up publishing an article titled, simply, "The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered" in the pages of the journal War in History in 1999. What he wrote pretty much turned all of the Schlieffen historiography on its head.
Zuber had access to more than just Ritter's memo and maps; he had the ability to look through General Staff war exercises going back to the 1870s, and the invaluable aid of an unpublished 1930s history by Wilhelm Dieckmann on the evolution of Schlieffen's thoughts on war planning. His thesis was that the focus on Schlieffen's right-wing (pun totally intended) war plan was totally misplaced. Zuber went so far as to refer to the concept as an "aberration". Instead, Schlieffen's ideas about how to deal with Germany's security dilemma of a two-front war changed frequently. According to Zuber, Schlieffen's overall plan was more of a reliance on the defensive-offensive; he would let the French come to his armies in Lorraine, crush them, and pursue them. The movement into Belgium? Merely a response to what Schlieffen believed the French and British would do anyway.
The Ritter memo and maps, as Zuber had it, were in fact relics of that omnipresent feature of army politics, a budget debate. Schlieffen wanted more troops and more money to hire them with, so he drew up the "war plan" employing a number of soldiers outlandishly higher than anything the Germans could employ in 1905 in order to demonstrate how kickass the German military could be if the Reichstag would but give it the cash necessary to implement Schlieffen's vision. Explaining it as an actual war plan, Zuber said, made no sense. The memo spent most of its pre-Ritter life in the house safe of Schlieffen's wife and daughter, which was mostly unlocked anyway. It seems incomprehensible that the blueprint for Germany's supposed aggressive war and grab for world power would be guarded by nothing more than two aging Prussian ladies for years, especially in the context of the Franco-German espionage war over war plans (which Zuber overviews in his book, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan.
Zuber also made the point that the idea of the Schlieffen Plan totally misrepresented Germany's method of war planning. For example, the "Elder" Moltke, veteran of the Wars of Unification and Chief of the General Staff into the 1880s, had developed plans based on a movement into Belgium; so had Alfred von Waldersee, who came between the elder Moltke and Schlieffen. The idea was not entirely new. Plus, Schlieffen's war plans weren't just structured around One War that Germany would fight in every circumstance; he had several, at minimum two, at any given time.
So where did this whole idea, that Schlieffen's amazing and brilliant blueprint for war was this deliberately unworkable political polemic, come from? Zuber argued that it was the brainchild of officers in the German military who wanted to justify their political careers in the Weimar Republic. As men who had led the army that failed in World War I, they would be under fire from the democratic society that had formed in 1918-20. So to shift the blame for the failure in the war off of their shoulders, they claimed that Germany had a perfect, brilliant plan that could have won the war, if not for that fool Moltke messing it up and changing the plan. Moltke was conveniently dead, of course, so the accusations went unchallenged. Other men, like Hermann von Kuhl, former chief of staff of the right flank First Army, wanted to exonerate themselves from potential charges of wrongdoing. As Zuber had it, Kuhl's First Army and its antics during August and September 1914 were the real causes of Germany's failure to win the war, because Kuhl and his formal commander, Alexander von Kluck, violated orders and went too far, too fast, transforming their army's role as a flank guard into one as the decisive element of the German war plan. Kluck and Kuhl dicking around turned potential German victory into defeat, according to Zuber.
Zuber's final conclusion was that there never was, in fact, a Schlieffen Plan, that the thing held up as a plan was a myth and that actual German war planning thought bore little relationship to it.
The Post-Zuber Narrative
That was in 1999. Since Zuber's first article was published, basically all (good) works on the First World War have had to take his conclusions into account. There's simply no going back to the old Schlieffen Plan narrative of Ritter, Craig, Fischer, Tuchman and the rest. But that does not mean that Zuber was right about everything, of course. What Zuber did was destroy the historiographical consensus; nothing has emerged to replace it.
Part of the reason there is no new consensus is that there are significant problems with Zuber's take on the plan, as well. Terence Holmes and Robert Foley have been most useful in highlighting many of these. (The manner in which they have done it, namely in a series of articles in War in History that look like almost a catfight between Holmes and Zuber, has always struck me as hilarious.) For instance, Zuber did a close reading of the maps used in Ritter's book, and accurately criticized them as being frankly silly. But he never did a close reading of the memo itself, and instead fixated on a few phrases and key concepts that are not necessarily indicative of the broad sweep of Schlieffen's and Moltke's military thought.
Furthermore, the charge of "inventing the Schlieffen Plan" is almost certainly false. According to Zuber, Wilhelm Groener, the man who played a huge part in the creation of the Weimar Republic by assisting the SPD with the Army, played the key role in creating an ersatz war plan that would later be embellished by Ritter and others. But Groener didn't have any particular malicious intent in his books, and didn't need one. He was complaining about Moltke's management of the campaign as early as September 1914, and making references to a Schlieffen style of doing things entirely different from a Moltkean one. A recent biographical analysis of Groener has concluded that this formula was entirely in line with what Groener actually believed Schlieffen thought, not a total fabrication. (It was entwined with Groener's own semi-mystical belief in the offensive and such, and militarily suspect, but not a total fabrication. Groener himself was an unreliable witness, but he was not a liar, a differentiation Zuber also has apparent difficulty making with Kuhl.)
So if Zuber doesn't really have the right answer, then what do we actually know?
For one thing, we know that his overall discussion of the way Germany created and employed war plans is true. A war plan, for the German General Staff, was not a plan of campaign. The Germans were intelligent enough to understand that war is variable, mutable, and above all else involves a helluva lot of what Clausewitz called "friction". Planning out an entire campaign in advance, especially with expected troop positions down to the day, would have seemed ridiculous to Schlieffen and Moltke both. What these German war plans actually were were Aufmärsche, a word that can get kind of sticky in translation but which more or less means "deployments" or "troop concentrations" (yes, those don't mean the same thing, but it's kind of difficult to describe). They were blueprints for getting the army to its jump-off point, ready to go to war, not for the plan of campaign itself. Now, those blueprints would necessarily have to incorporate a broad idea of how the General Staff wanted to conduct a campaign, in order for them to know what troops should go where. But the general idea of "defensive-offensive" or "flank march through Belgium" is a far cry from the regimented, day-by-day schedule that Ritter portrayed.
As for the memo itself, Holmes and Foley have argued that it was a sketch of the conduct of a campaign, but one that really isn't applicable to World War I. According to them, it would make no sense for Schlieffen to draw up a memo that long, complete with maps, for a budget battle that Moltke needed no help fighting. They saw it as a statement of a potential war against France in 1905, ignoring Russia, which would be inactive due to the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution. The numbers discrepancy was explained by the formation of new units on the declaration of war, with Schlieffen repeatedly stated was his intent in other media. But such a sketch of the conduct of the war was, indeed, not a war plan, much less the official German military plan of campaign against France for 1905. It was a Denkschrift, a position paper, and of only limited use in illuminating the German military's actual conduct of war in 1914.
Holmes' analysis of the Denkschrift stated that it was tailored to the specific potential military situation of that year. According to Holmes, Schlieffen believed that the French would not launch an offensive into Germany without the aid of Russia, and since Russia was not going to be coming in 1905-6, the Germans would have to attack France. Hence the Belgium solution: in order to outflank France's fortress lines, Schlieffen proposed to use Belgium as a corridor to funnel troops around the progressive defensive positions the French Army intended to adopt in the event of war, even around Paris itself. And Holmes reemphasized the 1980s strand of thought in American military circles, that of the Schlieffen "doctrine" focusing on speed and firepower, to indicate that although Schlieffen never created a single war plan for use by his successor, his ideas continued to inform the German army and its conduct of war into 1914.
But Holmes' analysis can only tell us so much about what the Germans were actually planning in 1914. While Schlieffen's Denkschrift might not have been structured around a counterattack, as Zuber had it, that does not mean that the 1914 Aufmarsch and Moltke's planning was not. That particular debate is still wide-open, and is being fought out in the pages of books today. Zuber's argument, that Moltke planned on counterattacking against the French, clashes with one by Foley, who saw Moltke as hoping to counterattack but knowing that a counterattack against the French fortress system would be pointless without the flank movement in Belgium, which would have to take some kind of priority. It's certainly a very long way from set in stone.
And as for what implications the new formulation of Imperial German military thought has on other fields, well, that multiplies difficulties even further. What does it mean for European diplomacy if Germany's war plan was not always predicated on a war with both Russia and France, or an offensive against France? The Sonderweg and the Griff nach der Weltmacht have been generally disproven, for various reasons (which I might go into in another history article). But that does not mean there is a dominant interpretation to replace them. So the state of historiography on the period today: many voices, but no chorus.
Sources:
Chickering, Roger - Imperial Germany and the First World War: Chickering is very useful in general, and fills most gaps that Herwig leaves (see below), but is handicapped by not being witness to the reassessment of Schlieffen historiography since 1999. I think there's another edition planned for it, though. Should be standard-use.
Craig, Gordon - The Politics of the Prussian Army 1640-1945: Frustrating Sonderweg nonsense, but unavoidable for the specialist because it is literally the best work of its kind as far as facts go.
Dupuy, Trevor - A Genius For War: The German Army and General Staff 1807-1945: Useful chiefly as a guide to earlier interpretations of what was going on in 1914; the book is kind of outdated otherwise. Contains a surprisingly accurate analysis of war planning and the Schlieffen "doctrine" for its time.
Fischer, Fritz - War of Illusions: German Politics 1911-1914: The statement of the Griff nach der Weltmacht. Also, it's very long and it's translated from the German (unless, obviously, you are reading it in German). Don't read it unless you have a particular interest in the subject.
Herwig, Holger - The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1918: Kind of a last-gasp as far as the Schlieffen Plan itself goes; it was pretty much the last important work of synthesis to come out before Zuber published Reassessed in 1999, and so is useful on many of the points that don't actually have to do with war planning.
Liddell Hart, Basil - History of the First World War: Not particularly useful for a modern scholar; I ended up looking at it purely for historiographical purposes. Contains a great deal of Liddell Hart's tired military theory and the impossible-to-avoid indirect approach.
Paret, Peter, Gordon Craig, and Felix Gilbert (eds.) - Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age: My guide to the American reassessment of German military thought in the 1980s. Generally very useful, and not totally dated yet, although handicapped somewhat by an overly paradigmatic view of things and an obvious target audience of American soldiers and government workers. Contains a lulzy article by Condi Rice in her pre-Bush Administration days, as well.
Ritter, Gerhard - The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth: Seminal, important, and wrong. Utterly useless and even harmful to a nonspecialist. It's best to avoid this unless you have a particular interest in discussing the Sonderweg.
Stoneman, Mark - "Wilhelm Groener, Officering, and the Schlieffen Plan" (dissertation): Supplied the brief segment on Groener, but also contains one of the best recent analyses of Schlieffen Plan historiography. I'm pretty heavily indebted to this work as a bibliographic mine if nothing else (and there is plenty "else"). The part I didn't discuss in this article talks about the poor understanding of the German nobility and the army and the false dichotomy between the aristocracy and competent warfighting.
Strachan, Hew - The First World War Part I: To Arms: The first volume of a projected three-volume series on the Great War, and easily the best discussion of 1914 anywhere, in so many different veins. Strachan is exhaustive, and discusses the diplomatic angles, military ones, economic ones, and colossal segments on "Willingly to War" and the mood of 1914 are cultural and psychological as well. Happily, Strachan is very even-handed, and very up on recent literature. Despite having missed most of the Zuber-Holmes debate due to time if nothing else (the book was published in 2001) it contains possibly the best synthesis of the two positions and is wisely cautious of fully endorsing Zuber. Frankly, there's nothing better, and it should be everybody's first stop for anything on the Great War. Aaaand I'll stop fellating him now.
Tuchman, Barbara - The Guns of August: Fun read. Too bad a lot of it's just wrong. It's pretty much irreversibly tainted by the historiography of the time and its analysis of many of the characters it discusses is just old and superseded. One might also complain about the obvious anti-German bias (part and parcel of the period's historiography, of course). There's little to recommend it anymore, but due to sheer fame it keeps getting pushed by professors and high school teachers, unfortunately.
Zuber, Terence - Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning 1871-1914: Useful, albeit something of a restatement of what he said in several articles in War in History and other journals. Gets bogged down in minutiae all too often, somewhat muddling his point, but fantastic for reference if you are a specialist with interest in that minutiae.
If you know anything about the First World War, it's probably reduced to two words: "trench warfare". If there's a third word, it's probably "pointless". The image reinforced by six episodes of classic Blackadder, All Quiet on the Western Front, Goodbye to All That, and other popular depictions of the Great War has stayed with basically everybody, regardless of whether that was actually how the war happened or how it was viewed at the time. Just as the image of the fall of the Roman Empire is one of barbarians swarming at the gates and a descent into darkness across the European continent, of course - it's just the dichotomy between the academic understanding of history and the one that most people who can't be bothered to learn about it have, common to nearly every field.
Of course, enduring tropes aren't just the purview of the popular world; historians deal with them too. To return to the First World War, for the longest time, the prevailing view of the war was that Germany and Austria-Hungary started it in a "grab for world power" (Griff nach der Weltmacht). The Germans made this try for world domination on the basis of a Cunning Plan - whether people think it actually was a cunning plan or a Baldrician set-sail-for-fail endeavor differs widely - called the "Schlieffen Plan", uniquely German in its reliance on a bazillion moving parts to run with machine-like precision, and which Almost Won the War and avoided four years of pointless slaughter. At least, that's how the story goes.
It's been changing for a long time, though. Over the past ten years, the understanding of what the Schlieffen Plan was has changed dramatically. The consensus in the historiography is totally gone. This article is designed to keep CFC up with the times...at least, those denizens of CFC who can be bothered to read it.
I recognize that there's already a history article on the Schlieffen Plan here. Unfortunately, it's pretty bad, like the "Origins of the First World War" article is. This article is partly meant as a corrective for them.
The Original Narrative
Authoritative and popular histories of the First World War were coming out even before the Germans lost. After the war, everybody who fought in it had an agenda to push, and did so with the printed word in an avalanche of memoirs and histories that made Great War history nearly impossible to master even by the late twenties. By the 1930s, a sort of consensus finally emerged, styling the German war plan as the brainchild of its former Chief of the General Staff (1891-1905), Alfred von Schlieffen.
As the story goes, Schlieffen, who knew that in any future European war, Germany would be pitted against both Russia and France, decided that the way to win that war was to launch nearly all of Germany's armies on a massive flank march through neutral Belgium and the Netherlands, with no regard for international law. Thus they would avoid the rough terrain and French fortress system along the mutual Franco-German border, pop up in the rear of the French army (presumably busy marching into Germany), and annihilate it with ease. Having defeated the French, the Germans would then send their troops east to meet the Slavic Menace, freed of the worry of fighting a two-front war. Schlieffen is said to have believed in this concept so thoroughly that his dying words in 1913 were "keep the right wing strong".
Unfortunately for the Germans, Schlieffen's successor as Chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke "the Younger", was not nearly so bold or even as intelligent, and he messed with the holy cunning plan. He kept the bones of it - the attack through neutral Belgium - but removed most of the forces from the flank attack, making it diluted and weak. Instead, he placed many of them in East Prussia and Alsace-Lorraine, far from the "decisive" point. So when war actually came, the German right wing was far too weak to play the role it needed to play, and it was only on the strength of the plan's underlying awesomeness that the Germans conquered most of northern France before being turned back practically at the gates of Paris.
This story was particularly amenable to many interwar military theorists, whose ideas were paralleled by Schlieffen's supposed concept. Basil Liddell Hart, the noted British tank enthusiast, portrayed it as yet another example of his Holy Grail, the "indirect approach", the supposedly infallible method of decisively defeating an enemy. Liddell Hart's considerable powers of metaphor, applied to the Schlieffen concept, described the original plan as a "revolving door", whereby the French would push into Alsace-Lorraine with their armies and by the very strength of their push, they would bring Germany's flank armies even further into their rear areas. Never mind, of course, that soldiers do not march any faster based on some quantum entanglement connection to ones of another country moving quickly a hundred miles away, or that there was no actual textual evidence for this having played a role in Schlieffen's thought. In this way, Schlieffen's plan could be everything to everyone.
The definitive Schlieffen Plan description was developed by Gerhard Ritter after the Second World War. By this time, the historiography had totally changed. Where, before, men like Liddell Hart had wanted to use German examples to prove their own points about interwar military reform, Ritter was profoundly affected by the experience of Nazism and the intense sense of war guilt the Germans had, and wanted to prove something else entirely. After the Second World War, the historiographic concept of the Sonderweg, or "special path", was developed. Before the war, it had been used in a positive way by German exceptionalists - "these special factors unique to Germany and German history is why Germany is so awesome" - but afterwards, it took on a sinister overtone. Germany was uniquely placed to be dominated by the Nazis because its history had been special, yes - unnaturally special. According to the Sonderweg theory, Germany had never experienced democracy or any sanctification of individual rights, like the United Kingdom, France, and the United States did. Germany had a tradition of anti-Semitism, goes the narrative, that stretches back to Martin Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies and even to the First Crusade. Germany was dominated by a militaristic system, an autocratic system, that doomed the Weimar republican experiment from its birth and spawned Hitler.
Ritter wanted to discuss militarism, and his studies on that led him to Schlieffen and Schlieffen's war plan. He had in his possession a memo, written by Schlieffen to Moltke on the occasion of Schlieffen's retirement, which he claimed was the blueprint for Germany's aggressive war. He also published maps with the plan, which have formed the basis for the understanding of the war plan for decades. Schlieffen's militarism precluded any discussion of whether invading Belgium and the Netherlands was morally or legally correct, and instead sent a million men headlong into infamy on the grounds of national interest and winning the war. His uniquely German sense of precision had timed the campaign so exactingly - down to the hour, as Ritter had it - and demanded that France be defeated in forty-two days, so as to turn on Russia before it could mobilize its own armies.
Spoiler Depiction of the Ostensible Schlieffen Plan, pace Gerhard Ritter :
There were obvious discrepancies between the plan laid out in the memo and the actual German campaign in 1914. Germany did not invade the Netherlands, unlike the memo's prescription. The number of troops employed in the plan bore no relation to the actual number of troops Germany had available for war at the time. The balance of forces between theaters and sections of front was all wrong, with far too many soldiers devoted to the push through Belgium compared to the actual case. To explain these issues, Ritter argued that Moltke "watered down" the plan, making it less bold, by not violating Dutch neutrality and employing more troops in Alsace-Lorraine. This fit with a general narrative of Moltke's incompetence and timidity that was ostensibly born out by the actual campaign in 1914.
Ritter's narrative became the definitive statement of the Schlieffen Plan, and furthermore had documentary evidence in Schlieffen's own hand to back it up. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was The Way to refer to Germany's war effort. Fritz Fischer, the Sonderweg historian who developed the concept of the First World War as Germany's Griff nach der Weltmacht, referred to the Schlieffen Plan as a blueprint for offensive war and the kind of bold - brash, as Fischer might describe it - stroke so common to bombastic Wilhelmine Imperial Germany in its ignorance of public opinion and its effect on international relations. Barbara Tuchman's famous popular history The Guns of August worked within the Sonderweg framework to create a compelling history based on the personalities of the men involved, or at least the usual interpretation of their personalities after the backbiting and catfighting of the interwar memoirs. Gordon Craig's magisterial Politics of the Prussian Army fit it into a single narrative that went back to the Great Elector and Friedrich II. There was, essentially, historiographical consensus: this was what Germany did.
The Slowly Changing Narrative
Consensus never means unanimity. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, historians were widely divergent on what the Schlieffen Plan actually meant. Trevor Dupuy, an American officer, military theorist, and creator of combat modeling software, argued in his own books that the Schlieffen Plan was an instance of brilliance even in its "watered down" form, as part of his overall attempt to prove that the German way of war, and specifically the Prussian-German system of a General Staff, was inherently superior to others. Dupuy believed that the failure of Moltke's revised Schlieffen Plan was due to contingency more than to any problem inherent in the plan itself, basing this off of his own experiences in the Second World War, when cunning plans never actually meant inevitable success.
In the 1980s, the US Army's refocus on German methods of making war and German military theory practically forced a reassessment of the Schlieffen Plan. Nobody actually discarded the idea of the plan itself, but increasingly the focus was on a Schlieffen "doctrine" that was perpetuated throughout the German military and was the focus of internal debate running up to and during the First World War. In some ways, this was more of the same from before; like Liddell Hart, the Americans were transposing their own struggles with military doctrine onto the Imperial German military. But it had more than a grain of truth to it. Even Dupuy, decades before, had talked about a Schlieffen doctrine that focused on speed and firepower as essential force multipliers to deal with the problem of Russian and French overwhelming numerical superiority. The Americans - and, increasingly, the British as well - also began to reassess the familiar personalities from Tuchman's Guns of August: Schlieffen the rigid militarist and Moltke the sickly shrinking incompetent were revised by a new generation of military biography that talked about instances of Moltke's decisiveness or emotional elements in Schlieffen's war planning. Stig Förster in particular changed the assessment of Moltke in 1995, among other things arguing that he did not foresee a quick war at all and understood many of the weaknesses of the plan he was using.
There were other pinpricks on Ritter's Schlieffen narrative, as well. Martin van Creveld's study of supply lines and logistics in particular was quite damning. According to van Creveld and others, an attack through Belgium simply could not have incorporated the numbers of troops Schlieffen envisioned in Ritter's memo, even in peacetime. And as van Creveld pointed out, during the war itself, sabotage by partisans wrecked French and Belgian infrastructure even further. For all those who criticized Moltke for not keeping the right wing strong, van Creveld argued that if Moltke had dispatched more men to the right flank, they would have just been an extra drain on already-overstretched supply lines, and the Germans might have run out of steam even before they reached the Marne.
Again, though, none of this implied an attack on the actual concept of Schlieffen's memo being indicative of the German war plan. Nobody even considered that it might not even be all that good of a guide as to how he was thinking - although Förster's works on Moltke came quite close, and raised some questions that were fairly unsettling. Ritter's memo was still the Holy Grail of German military planning studies.
The Zuber Narrative
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of archives on the other side of the Iron Curtain changed that, albeit slowly. Suddenly, loads of material at the Leipzig archives (formerly in East Germany) or in sections of the German archives that the Russians had brought back to the Voroshilov and Frunze Academies and which were returned in 1989-91. It took ten years for historians to even begin sifting through all of this new material. But it yielded startling results. Terence Zuber, an American officer-turned-history professor in Würzburg, Bavaria, ended up publishing an article titled, simply, "The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered" in the pages of the journal War in History in 1999. What he wrote pretty much turned all of the Schlieffen historiography on its head.
Zuber had access to more than just Ritter's memo and maps; he had the ability to look through General Staff war exercises going back to the 1870s, and the invaluable aid of an unpublished 1930s history by Wilhelm Dieckmann on the evolution of Schlieffen's thoughts on war planning. His thesis was that the focus on Schlieffen's right-wing (pun totally intended) war plan was totally misplaced. Zuber went so far as to refer to the concept as an "aberration". Instead, Schlieffen's ideas about how to deal with Germany's security dilemma of a two-front war changed frequently. According to Zuber, Schlieffen's overall plan was more of a reliance on the defensive-offensive; he would let the French come to his armies in Lorraine, crush them, and pursue them. The movement into Belgium? Merely a response to what Schlieffen believed the French and British would do anyway.
The Ritter memo and maps, as Zuber had it, were in fact relics of that omnipresent feature of army politics, a budget debate. Schlieffen wanted more troops and more money to hire them with, so he drew up the "war plan" employing a number of soldiers outlandishly higher than anything the Germans could employ in 1905 in order to demonstrate how kickass the German military could be if the Reichstag would but give it the cash necessary to implement Schlieffen's vision. Explaining it as an actual war plan, Zuber said, made no sense. The memo spent most of its pre-Ritter life in the house safe of Schlieffen's wife and daughter, which was mostly unlocked anyway. It seems incomprehensible that the blueprint for Germany's supposed aggressive war and grab for world power would be guarded by nothing more than two aging Prussian ladies for years, especially in the context of the Franco-German espionage war over war plans (which Zuber overviews in his book, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan.
Zuber also made the point that the idea of the Schlieffen Plan totally misrepresented Germany's method of war planning. For example, the "Elder" Moltke, veteran of the Wars of Unification and Chief of the General Staff into the 1880s, had developed plans based on a movement into Belgium; so had Alfred von Waldersee, who came between the elder Moltke and Schlieffen. The idea was not entirely new. Plus, Schlieffen's war plans weren't just structured around One War that Germany would fight in every circumstance; he had several, at minimum two, at any given time.
So where did this whole idea, that Schlieffen's amazing and brilliant blueprint for war was this deliberately unworkable political polemic, come from? Zuber argued that it was the brainchild of officers in the German military who wanted to justify their political careers in the Weimar Republic. As men who had led the army that failed in World War I, they would be under fire from the democratic society that had formed in 1918-20. So to shift the blame for the failure in the war off of their shoulders, they claimed that Germany had a perfect, brilliant plan that could have won the war, if not for that fool Moltke messing it up and changing the plan. Moltke was conveniently dead, of course, so the accusations went unchallenged. Other men, like Hermann von Kuhl, former chief of staff of the right flank First Army, wanted to exonerate themselves from potential charges of wrongdoing. As Zuber had it, Kuhl's First Army and its antics during August and September 1914 were the real causes of Germany's failure to win the war, because Kuhl and his formal commander, Alexander von Kluck, violated orders and went too far, too fast, transforming their army's role as a flank guard into one as the decisive element of the German war plan. Kluck and Kuhl dicking around turned potential German victory into defeat, according to Zuber.
Zuber's final conclusion was that there never was, in fact, a Schlieffen Plan, that the thing held up as a plan was a myth and that actual German war planning thought bore little relationship to it.
The Post-Zuber Narrative
That was in 1999. Since Zuber's first article was published, basically all (good) works on the First World War have had to take his conclusions into account. There's simply no going back to the old Schlieffen Plan narrative of Ritter, Craig, Fischer, Tuchman and the rest. But that does not mean that Zuber was right about everything, of course. What Zuber did was destroy the historiographical consensus; nothing has emerged to replace it.
Part of the reason there is no new consensus is that there are significant problems with Zuber's take on the plan, as well. Terence Holmes and Robert Foley have been most useful in highlighting many of these. (The manner in which they have done it, namely in a series of articles in War in History that look like almost a catfight between Holmes and Zuber, has always struck me as hilarious.) For instance, Zuber did a close reading of the maps used in Ritter's book, and accurately criticized them as being frankly silly. But he never did a close reading of the memo itself, and instead fixated on a few phrases and key concepts that are not necessarily indicative of the broad sweep of Schlieffen's and Moltke's military thought.
Furthermore, the charge of "inventing the Schlieffen Plan" is almost certainly false. According to Zuber, Wilhelm Groener, the man who played a huge part in the creation of the Weimar Republic by assisting the SPD with the Army, played the key role in creating an ersatz war plan that would later be embellished by Ritter and others. But Groener didn't have any particular malicious intent in his books, and didn't need one. He was complaining about Moltke's management of the campaign as early as September 1914, and making references to a Schlieffen style of doing things entirely different from a Moltkean one. A recent biographical analysis of Groener has concluded that this formula was entirely in line with what Groener actually believed Schlieffen thought, not a total fabrication. (It was entwined with Groener's own semi-mystical belief in the offensive and such, and militarily suspect, but not a total fabrication. Groener himself was an unreliable witness, but he was not a liar, a differentiation Zuber also has apparent difficulty making with Kuhl.)
So if Zuber doesn't really have the right answer, then what do we actually know?
For one thing, we know that his overall discussion of the way Germany created and employed war plans is true. A war plan, for the German General Staff, was not a plan of campaign. The Germans were intelligent enough to understand that war is variable, mutable, and above all else involves a helluva lot of what Clausewitz called "friction". Planning out an entire campaign in advance, especially with expected troop positions down to the day, would have seemed ridiculous to Schlieffen and Moltke both. What these German war plans actually were were Aufmärsche, a word that can get kind of sticky in translation but which more or less means "deployments" or "troop concentrations" (yes, those don't mean the same thing, but it's kind of difficult to describe). They were blueprints for getting the army to its jump-off point, ready to go to war, not for the plan of campaign itself. Now, those blueprints would necessarily have to incorporate a broad idea of how the General Staff wanted to conduct a campaign, in order for them to know what troops should go where. But the general idea of "defensive-offensive" or "flank march through Belgium" is a far cry from the regimented, day-by-day schedule that Ritter portrayed.
As for the memo itself, Holmes and Foley have argued that it was a sketch of the conduct of a campaign, but one that really isn't applicable to World War I. According to them, it would make no sense for Schlieffen to draw up a memo that long, complete with maps, for a budget battle that Moltke needed no help fighting. They saw it as a statement of a potential war against France in 1905, ignoring Russia, which would be inactive due to the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution. The numbers discrepancy was explained by the formation of new units on the declaration of war, with Schlieffen repeatedly stated was his intent in other media. But such a sketch of the conduct of the war was, indeed, not a war plan, much less the official German military plan of campaign against France for 1905. It was a Denkschrift, a position paper, and of only limited use in illuminating the German military's actual conduct of war in 1914.
Holmes' analysis of the Denkschrift stated that it was tailored to the specific potential military situation of that year. According to Holmes, Schlieffen believed that the French would not launch an offensive into Germany without the aid of Russia, and since Russia was not going to be coming in 1905-6, the Germans would have to attack France. Hence the Belgium solution: in order to outflank France's fortress lines, Schlieffen proposed to use Belgium as a corridor to funnel troops around the progressive defensive positions the French Army intended to adopt in the event of war, even around Paris itself. And Holmes reemphasized the 1980s strand of thought in American military circles, that of the Schlieffen "doctrine" focusing on speed and firepower, to indicate that although Schlieffen never created a single war plan for use by his successor, his ideas continued to inform the German army and its conduct of war into 1914.
But Holmes' analysis can only tell us so much about what the Germans were actually planning in 1914. While Schlieffen's Denkschrift might not have been structured around a counterattack, as Zuber had it, that does not mean that the 1914 Aufmarsch and Moltke's planning was not. That particular debate is still wide-open, and is being fought out in the pages of books today. Zuber's argument, that Moltke planned on counterattacking against the French, clashes with one by Foley, who saw Moltke as hoping to counterattack but knowing that a counterattack against the French fortress system would be pointless without the flank movement in Belgium, which would have to take some kind of priority. It's certainly a very long way from set in stone.
And as for what implications the new formulation of Imperial German military thought has on other fields, well, that multiplies difficulties even further. What does it mean for European diplomacy if Germany's war plan was not always predicated on a war with both Russia and France, or an offensive against France? The Sonderweg and the Griff nach der Weltmacht have been generally disproven, for various reasons (which I might go into in another history article). But that does not mean there is a dominant interpretation to replace them. So the state of historiography on the period today: many voices, but no chorus.
Sources:
Chickering, Roger - Imperial Germany and the First World War: Chickering is very useful in general, and fills most gaps that Herwig leaves (see below), but is handicapped by not being witness to the reassessment of Schlieffen historiography since 1999. I think there's another edition planned for it, though. Should be standard-use.
Craig, Gordon - The Politics of the Prussian Army 1640-1945: Frustrating Sonderweg nonsense, but unavoidable for the specialist because it is literally the best work of its kind as far as facts go.
Dupuy, Trevor - A Genius For War: The German Army and General Staff 1807-1945: Useful chiefly as a guide to earlier interpretations of what was going on in 1914; the book is kind of outdated otherwise. Contains a surprisingly accurate analysis of war planning and the Schlieffen "doctrine" for its time.
Fischer, Fritz - War of Illusions: German Politics 1911-1914: The statement of the Griff nach der Weltmacht. Also, it's very long and it's translated from the German (unless, obviously, you are reading it in German). Don't read it unless you have a particular interest in the subject.
Herwig, Holger - The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1918: Kind of a last-gasp as far as the Schlieffen Plan itself goes; it was pretty much the last important work of synthesis to come out before Zuber published Reassessed in 1999, and so is useful on many of the points that don't actually have to do with war planning.
Liddell Hart, Basil - History of the First World War: Not particularly useful for a modern scholar; I ended up looking at it purely for historiographical purposes. Contains a great deal of Liddell Hart's tired military theory and the impossible-to-avoid indirect approach.
Paret, Peter, Gordon Craig, and Felix Gilbert (eds.) - Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age: My guide to the American reassessment of German military thought in the 1980s. Generally very useful, and not totally dated yet, although handicapped somewhat by an overly paradigmatic view of things and an obvious target audience of American soldiers and government workers. Contains a lulzy article by Condi Rice in her pre-Bush Administration days, as well.
Ritter, Gerhard - The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth: Seminal, important, and wrong. Utterly useless and even harmful to a nonspecialist. It's best to avoid this unless you have a particular interest in discussing the Sonderweg.
Stoneman, Mark - "Wilhelm Groener, Officering, and the Schlieffen Plan" (dissertation): Supplied the brief segment on Groener, but also contains one of the best recent analyses of Schlieffen Plan historiography. I'm pretty heavily indebted to this work as a bibliographic mine if nothing else (and there is plenty "else"). The part I didn't discuss in this article talks about the poor understanding of the German nobility and the army and the false dichotomy between the aristocracy and competent warfighting.
Strachan, Hew - The First World War Part I: To Arms: The first volume of a projected three-volume series on the Great War, and easily the best discussion of 1914 anywhere, in so many different veins. Strachan is exhaustive, and discusses the diplomatic angles, military ones, economic ones, and colossal segments on "Willingly to War" and the mood of 1914 are cultural and psychological as well. Happily, Strachan is very even-handed, and very up on recent literature. Despite having missed most of the Zuber-Holmes debate due to time if nothing else (the book was published in 2001) it contains possibly the best synthesis of the two positions and is wisely cautious of fully endorsing Zuber. Frankly, there's nothing better, and it should be everybody's first stop for anything on the Great War. Aaaand I'll stop fellating him now.
Tuchman, Barbara - The Guns of August: Fun read. Too bad a lot of it's just wrong. It's pretty much irreversibly tainted by the historiography of the time and its analysis of many of the characters it discusses is just old and superseded. One might also complain about the obvious anti-German bias (part and parcel of the period's historiography, of course). There's little to recommend it anymore, but due to sheer fame it keeps getting pushed by professors and high school teachers, unfortunately.
Zuber, Terence - Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning 1871-1914: Useful, albeit something of a restatement of what he said in several articles in War in History and other journals. Gets bogged down in minutiae all too often, somewhat muddling his point, but fantastic for reference if you are a specialist with interest in that minutiae.
While one could make the point that technically, the Saxons and Bavarians had independent armies from the Prussian one, in reality they were fit into the same force structure, reliant on the same budget, and took orders from the same "demigods" on the General Staff that everybody else did. One might describe an alternative Bavarian officer ethos - it'd be a bit of a stretch - but certainly not a Saxon one. The Stoneman dissertation I mentioned talks about this in significant detail, since it's so concerned with Groener's personal outlook as a non-Prussian, non-aristocratic dude in the highest ranks of the Prussian-German military.
It's not unreasonable that the historiography hasn't been updated everywhere else. After all, Zuber's first article was only published eleven years ago. And for something so integral to the old framework of German militarism, imperialism, and bloody-mindedness as the Schlieffen Plan, plenty of history teachers have made the conscious choice not to talk about it even if they do know about the updated version, because it messes with the grand narrative without supplying a fresh one to replace it.
