Extra curriculum

The Schlieffen Plan (German: Schlieffen-Plan, pronounced [ʃliːfən plaːn]) was the name given after World War I to the thinking behind the German invasion of France and Belgium on 4 August 1914. Field MarshalAlfred von Schlieffen, the Chief of the Imperial Army German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, devised a deployment plan for a war-winning offensive, in a one-front war against the French Third Republicfrom 1905–06. After the war, the German official historians of the Reichsarchiv and other writers, described the plan as a blueprint for victory. German historians claimed that the plan had been ruined by Generaloberst (Colonel-General) Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, the Commander-in-Chief of the German army after Schlieffen retired in 1906, who was dismissed after the First Battle of the Marne (5–12 September 1914).
Post-war writing by senior German officers like Hermann von Kuhl, Gerhard Tappen, Wilhelm Groener and the Reichsarchiv historians led by the former Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant-Colonel) Wolfgang Förster, managed to establish a commonly accepted narrative, that it was Moltke (the Younger)'s failure to follow the blueprint, rather than German strategic miscalculation that condemned the belligerents to four years of attrition warfare, instead of the quick, decisive conflict it should have been. In 1956, Gerhard Ritter published Der Schlieffenplan: Kritik eines Mythos (The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth), which began a period of revision, when the details of the supposed Schlieffen Plan were subjected to scrutiny and contextualisation. The view that the plan had been a blueprint was rejected, because this was contrary to the tradition of Prussian war planning established by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, which treated military operations as inherently unpredictable. Mobilisation and deployment plans could be drawn up but campaign plans were pointless; rather than attempting to dictate to subordinate commanders, the commander gave the intent of the operation and subordinates had discretion in achieving it through Auftragstaktik (mission-type tactics).
In writings from the 1970s, Martin van Creveld, John Keegan, Hew Strachan and others studied the practical aspects of an invasion of France through Belgium and Luxembourg. They judged that the physical constraints of German, Belgian and French railways and the Belgian and northern French road networks, made it impossible to move enough troops far enough and fast enough for them to fight a decisive battle if the French retreated from the frontier. Most of the pre-1914 planning of the German General Staff was secret and the documents were destroyed when the deployment plans were superseded every April. The bombing of Potsdam in April 1945 destroyed the Prussian army archive and only incomplete records and other documents survived the bombing. Some records became available after the fall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), making an outline of German war-planning possible for the first time, proving much of the post-1918 writing wrong.
In the 2000s, RH61/v.96 was discovered in the trove inherited from the GDR, a document that was used in a 1930s study of pre-war German General Staff war planning. Inferences that Schlieffen's war-planning was solely offensive, were found to have been made by extrapolating his writings and speeches on tactics into grand strategy. From a 1999 article in War in History and in Inventing the Schlieffen Plan (2002) to The Real German War Plan, 1906–1914 (2011) Terence Zuber has engaged in a debate with Terence Holmes, Annika Mombauer, Robert Foley, Gerhard Gross, Holger Herwig and others with his proposition that the Schlieffen Plan was a myth concocted in the 1920s, by partial writers, intent on exculpating themselves and proving that German war planning did not cause the First World War, a view supported by Hew Strachan.