Historiography of the Schlieffen Plan

Just how much of a 'Plan' was it?

Summary for GCSE

In the 1920s, after Germany lost World War I, German generals blamed their defeat on General Moltke’s 4th September decision to abandon the Schlieffen Plan and turn south, which led to the German advance being halted at the Battle of the Marne. They thought that sticking to the original plan would have led to victory.

In 1956, German scholar Gerhard Ritter found a copy of Schlieffen's original 1905 proposal. He said the plan was too risky, didn’t allocate enough resources and made wrong assumptions about Belgium. Other historians agreed; American military historian Dennis Showalter concluded that the Plan was a "military myth requiring everything to go impossibly right".

In 2002, Terence Zuber, a former US Army officer, argued that the Schlieffen Plan was not a blueprint for war at all, but a hastily-written and untested pitch for funding to increase the army size rather than an actual strategy. Zuber’s views caused much debate, and it is generally accepted that the Schlieffen Plan was indeed a war plan which the German government and High Command believed guaranteed victory … though in reality it was “deeply flawed and reckless” and played a part in starting the war (and in Germany losing it).

In 2022, American historian Michael Neiberg highlighted that the Schlieffen Plan was overly ambitious, demanded too much from German soldiers, failed to provide enough supplies, and drew Britain and France into the conflict, turning a Balkan crisis into a world war. He concluded that Germany went to war with “the wrong war plan, written for the wrong enemy”.

The Schlieffen School, Gerhard Ritter, Terence Zuber, Michael Neiberg

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge - though both are very difficult:

The Wikipedia article has a detailed historiography

YouTube

The Schlieffen Plan debate - again, very difficult

The Schlieffen School

In the 1920s, after Germany had lost the war, the German Generals looked for someone to blame, and out of this grew the theories of the ‘Schlieffen School’.

The Schlieffen Plan, they said, had imagined a huge hammer blow to encircle Paris, using seven-eighths of the German army, which it hoped would take France out of the war quickly (allowing Germany to transport its army back across Germany to fight Russia). It is a powerful image, and few books do not include a map showing the Plan. This Plan, it was stated, had taken nine years to devise (1897-1906). The German General Wilhelm Groener, who became German Minister of the Interior, claimed in 1929 that it was not just a ‘basic concept’ but “an operations plan that had been worked out in all of its particulars”.

The blame for Germany’s defeat therefore, they said, lay with Chief of German General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, who had downgraded the Plan in 1911, and on 4 September 1914 ordered the First Army to stop its march west … an order which allowed the French to confront and stop the German offensive at the Battle of the Marne (5-10 September).

Even at the time, the Prussian War Minister Falkenhayn raged: “Our General Staff has completely lost its head. Schlieffen’s notes have come to an end, and so have the wits of Moltke”, and in 1920 German Chief of Staff General Hermann von Kuhl wrote:

“A decision in France in 1914 could have been achieved and Count Schlieffen’s campaign plan inevitably would have led to victory if [Moltke] had kept to and consequently executed it.”

So, since the military controlled access to Schlieffen's Memorandum, which therefore did not become generally available during the interwar period, and since the Reichsarchiv was destroyed during the Second World War that was what was believed until after the Second World War.

Gerhard Ritter

In 1956, the German scholar Gerhard Ritter found a copy of the Schlieffen Plan in East Germany and read the actual Memorandum. Writing soon after the Second World War, Ritter was quick to see the Schlieffen Plan as a blind surrender of German politicians to militarism – of Staastskunst (state-skill) to Kriegshandwerk (war-craft) – which confirmed Germany’s guilt for the First World War.

And it was not even a good plan! It allocated insufficient forces to the task, and mis-assessed the situation in Belgium … it was, he said: “an over-daring, gamble whose success depended on many lucky accidents."

Other historians have found other shortcomings with the Plan.

In 1980 the Israeli historian Martin van Creveld, analysing Schlieffen's preparations, concluded that he had behaved "like an ostrich" when it came to supplying the troops, making utterly inadequate provision for the supply of food or ammunition.

Other criticisms included that his plan involved getting too many men through too small a corridor of advance. Far from being a six-week strategy, the famous map shows only that the Army should have reached the Somme by the 31st day … it shows the march round Paris, but makes no mention of how long it would take. And the Germans KNEW all along that the Entente had 311 infantry battalions more than the German Army; and that the Russians had 25 infantry divisions ready to attack Germany from the east!

In 1991, therefore, the American military historian Dennis Showalter concluded that the Schlieffen Plan was “a military myth requiring everything to go impossibly right to have a real chance of succeeding”.

Terence Zuber

In 2002, the former US Army officer Terence Zuber claimed that the Schlieffen Plan was a ‘myth’ and not a blueprint for war at all.

Schlieffen’s 1905 Memorandum, he claimed, was not a prescriptive plan of attack, but a rambling, repetitive document, which was written in a rush, ignored Russia altogether, was never tested in ANY of Schlieffen’s (numerous) war games, and was so unimportant that for years it was kept in a desk drawer in his daughter’s house.

The Plan, he found:

required 24 more divisions that the German Army possessed;
stated that a war on two fronts was unwinnable, and that such a war should be a defensive war – the Plan was for a situation where France was the only enemy;
envisaged a situation such as Moltke found himself in in September 1914, and advised what Moltke did.

… and he dismissed the Memorandum as simply a plea to convince the government to increase the size of the German Army:

“The soldiers of the 'Schlieffen School' – Groener, Kuhl, et al. – maintained that there was a Schlieffen plan, and had the younger Moltke only followed it, the Germans would have beaten the French in a manner of weeks. I say that they invented the Schlieffen plan in order to protect the reputation of the General Staff and certain officers in it – in particular, Kuhl himself.”

Zuber’s ideas caused so much controversy that in 2004 a conference was called to debate them. A range of historians lined up to take issue with various aspects of his theory, but the general consensus is that – whilst “to refer to the Schlieffen Plan as a myth falls short of historical reality” – we need to reassess its role, both in causing the War, and in the initial phase of the War.

And it is clear that – whilst the German government and High Command might have BELIEVED that the Schlieffen Plan guaranteed victory – in reality it was “deeply flawed and reckless” and guaranteed no such thing.

Michael Neiberg

Thus Michael Neiberg comments:

“The ambition of the Schlieffen Plan is breathtaking. It demanded superhuman efforts from German soldiers, few of whom were in the hardened physical shape they would need to make long forced marches against active opposition. To increase the number of men in the field armies, the Germans planned for extensive use of reserve troops, whose training and physical fitness were both considerably inferior to those of first-line troops. German logistical preparations, moreover, were wholly inadequate to the task of keeping hundreds of thousands of men supplied. Most importantly, the Schlieffen Plan, by drawing the British and French empires into a conflict that did not involve their core interests, converted a Balkan crisis into a world war.”

And he concludes (2022):

“Germany thus went to war in 1914 with the wrong war plan, written for the wrong enemy, in support of a weak ally.”