Was There a Schlieffen Plan?

Steven Cromack

In a 1999 journal article published in War in History, historian Terence Zuber dropped a bombshell on the academic community.  He argued that the Schlieffen Plan, or the German attack plan during World War I, was a post-war construction written by the generals to justify why the Germans lost the war.  He based his argument strictly on not only the primary sources that have been around since the War, but also new sources that became available with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Zuber’s individual pieces of evidence are circumstantial. Take all of it into consideration, however, and he makes a compelling case.  A few years later, he published a book on the topic with Oxford University Press (Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning, 1871-1914).

“The Schlieffen Plan” was the so-called German attack plan supposedly articulated by Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the German General Staff.  It was Germany’s roadmap to war—if all went according to “the Plan,” Germany would deliberately start World War I on their terms in 1916.  It called for rapid building of railroads across the country from West to East.  The attack would consist of the right wing invading Belgium and swing wide around Paris, striking the city from the West.  The left flank would remain stationary at Lorraine and hold off the likely French counterattack.  In the eyes of Schlieffen, France would surrender before they let anything happen to Paris.  Then, with France out of the war, the German army would utilize their new railroads, move its troops across the country to Eastern front, and knock out Russia.  As history “happened,” when entangling alliances ignited the so-called “powder keg,” and launched the War earlier than the Germans had hoped, the Schlieffen plan fell apart.  Schlieffen died, and his successor, Ludwig von Moltke not only inherited the Plan, but also altered it, or failed to understand it.  Von Moltke moved troops away from the West to bolster the Russian front.  “And the rest,” they say, “is history.”

Zuber challenged that history.  He wrote that there never was mention of a “Schlieffen Plan” before 1920.  Instead, he argued that when one historian wrote that Germany employed the wrong strategy, the generals and other members of the General staff, Kuhl, Ludendorff, Foerster and Groener, countered with the myth that Schlieffen had conveyed his master plan to Moltke, but that Moltke failed to understand it.  One should note that historians base their histories of the war on Ludendorff and others’ accounts.

According to Zuber, Schlieffen did have some contingency plans, although they remained in his possession until he died, and were not locked in the vault with the rest of the German war plans.  Zuber insisted that on its own, the Plan, or Denkschrift was a nightmare, poorly organized, and called for troop numbers that never existed.  Schlieffen’s war games, as evident in his writings and handwritten diagrams, did not resemble the master plan, or anything close to it.  Zuber based this argument on the newly discovered German staff memorandum, prepared by Major Wilhelm Dieckmann.  Dieckmann was a German officer whose task was to write a history of the war, and he therefore had access to many of Schlieffen’s notes, and war plans before Allied bombings during World War II destroyed them.  According to Zuber, Dieckmann’s manuscript revealed that Schlieffen’s “Plan” intended to keep the East strong and hold off the French by defeating their fortification line.  Schlieffen never envisioned swinging wide around the Paris and defeating the French army.  If this is true, then the Schlieffen Plan, as we know it, is wrong.

Zuber’s article and subsequent publications provoked a fifteen-year debate in War in History, especially between himself and historian Terence Holmes of Swansea University.  The debate over whether there was or whether there was not a Schlieffen Plan continues to this day.  The debate, however, has not reached high school history textbooks, or even undergraduate classes on European history.  It seems that historians are having trouble grappling with Zuber’s uncomfortable argument.  Why would they not?  He only insists that the academy has gotten World War I wrong for the last hundred years.  Such an assertion changes the interpretation and sequence of events.  Zuber writes that he seeks “establish German military history according to the standard of Leopold von Ranke: ‘as it actually was.’”  He, therefore, concluded his article, “There never was a ‘Schlieffen Plan.’”

For those interested in the heated debate in War in History thus far, here is the “Roundup” from Zuber’s website (http://www.terencezuber.com/):

T. Zuber, 'The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered' in: War in History, 1999; 3: pp. 262-
305.

T. Holmes, 'A Reluctant March on Paris', in: War in History, 2001; 2: pp. 208-32.

T. Zuber, 'Terence Holmes Reinvents the Schlieffen Plan' in: War in History 2001; 4,
pp. 468-76.

T. Holmes, 'The Real Thing' in: War in History, 2002, 1, pp. 111-20.

T. Zuber, 'Terence Holmes Reinvents the Schlieffen Plan - Again' in: War in History
2003; 1, pp. 92-101.

R. Foley, 'The Origins of the Schlieffen Plan' in: War in History, 2003; 2 pp. 222-32.

T. Holmes, 'Asking Schlieffen: A Further Reply to Terence Zuber' in: War in History
2003; 4, pp. 464-479.

T. Zuber, 'The Schlieffen Plan was an Orphan' in: War in History, 2004; 2 pp. 220-25.

R. Foley, ‘The Real Schlieffen Plan’ in: War in History, 2006; 1, pp. 91-115.

T. Zuber, ‘The ‘Schlieffen  Plan’ and German War Guilt’ in: War in History, 2007; 1,
pp. 96-108.

A. Mombauer, ‘Of War Plans and War Guilt: The Debate Surrounding the Schlieffen
Plan’ in: Journal of Strategic Studies XXVIII, 2005.

T. Zuber, ‘Everybody Knows There Was a ‘Schlieffen Plan”: A Reply to Annika
Mombauer’ in War in History, 2008; 1. pp. 92-101.

G. Gross, ‘There Was a Schlieffen Plan: New Sources on the History of German War
Planning’ in: War in History, 2008; 4, pp. 389-431.

T. Zuber, ‘There Never was a “Schlieffen Plan” (in preparation)

T. Holmes, ‘All Present and Correct: The Verifiable Army of the Schlieffen Plan’, in:
War in History, 2009, 16 (1) 98-115.

T. Zuber, ‘The Schlieffen Plan’s “Ghost Divisions” March Again:  A Reply to Terence
Holmes’ (in preparation)

The Guns Will Be Silent

Philip White

This past week we had a date anomaly – the day, week and month all mirroring each other. But for a small, and ever-dwindling, group of men, the past seven days were significant for a reason far more profound than calendar alignment. They gathered at sites across Europe and America commemorate the moment when, on the 11th hour of the 11th day in the 11th month of 1918, the roaring guns of World War I finally fell silent.

It soon became known as the “Great War,” yet that is ill-fitting in all respects save one – the great sacrifices made by soldiers and their families on both sides. More than 8.5 million died (and a further 21 million were wounded), and their number has been dubbed “The Lost Generation,” to signify the enormous loss of life and potential on the fields of Flanders and beyond.

After the war, the leaders of the Western Allies idealistically hoped for permanent peace, though the League of Nations that was set up to foster togetherness and prevent future hostility quickly proved to be a paper tiger. Nonetheless, the sentiment of “never again” was on most lips among the “victors.” Meanwhile, the defeated Germans smarted, not just at their losses of men and material, but also at the overly-punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which punished the “Fatherland” by imposing harsh sanctions on an already ravaged economy, and confiscated territories far and wide. It was the resulting frustration and the promise of restoring national pride that enabled Hitler to take power so swiftly and terribly in the mid to late 1930s. Even with his rise, the majority outside of Germany still hoped for peace, not seeing that no number of Munich Agreements could slake the Fuhrer’s lust for revenge and land.

Though it is easy with hindsight to slam those who, like British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, signed such treaties and they must certainly be held accountable for inaction and, in some cases, capitulation, it is just as easy to forget how horrendous the trench-based battles of World War I were, and the impact they had on the collective psyches of both the victors and the vanquished.

Trench foot, rat bites, and typhoid were rampant, as the soldiers literally rotted in their water-logged holes, to say nothing of the mustard gas. There was no sanitation, no clean facilities to treat the wounded, no place to bury the dead. Then, when they were sent over the top, the weak, despairing bunch were greeted by machine gun fire that toppled their ranks like contorted dominoes and, if they advanced to the enemy lines, were ensnared as if they were game in barbed wire, or run through by enemy bayonets. Those who did not capture their foes’ positions yet could not make it back to their own trenches were sometimes so stunned by the clamor, the fear and the firework flashes of barking muzzles that they wandered around in “No Man’s Land” until captured, finished off or, for a lucky few, retrieved by their comrades. Some opposing trenches gained or lost a total of mere inches over the course of the war.

And so, can we blame Chamberlain and his ilk for wanting to never repeat such brutality? Even Winston Churchill, his most outspoken critic and the man whose vision highlighted his predecessor’s short-sighted foreign policy, could not condemn Chamberlain, saying at his funeral, “It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? . . . They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace.”

60 years after Chamberlain’s doomed attempt to save Europe from repeating the carnage of The Great War, I journeyed to Belgium for what was, I soon realized, one of the most moving experiences of my life. Along with 20 A-Level history classmates and our two teachers, we toured some of the pivotal World War I battlefield sites and watched the surviving veterans gather at the Menin Gate, tears streaming down their wrinkled faces as they hunched over in wheelchairs or leaned against stout sticks. They lit candles to commemorate their fallen brethren’s sacrifice.

Though going into the claustrophobic trenches was terrifying and viewing the seemingly infinite list of names at the Allied cemeteries depressing, I was most affected by a little country graveyard on the top of a Belgian hill. There, rows of white Portland stone headstones stood in neat rows on newly-trimmed, almost impossibly green grass, arrayed in a manner far more dignified than the inglorious ends of the lives they commemorated. My father owns a monumental mason’s business in England, so I am used to seeing well-kept cemeteries with finely-worded inscriptions on stone. But the sadness and, in some cases, disbelief of the families who had lost their boys on foreign fields was so starkly recorded that it was almost too much to take. And boys most were—19, 17, some even 16 years old—from a cluster of English villages. Communities’ entire young male populations finished. Dead. Never coming back. We learned from our instructors that some 14- and 15-year-olds had even faked birth certificates so they could go to the front with their pals. Knowing I would not have been so brave, I left with tears burning hot on my cheeks. No, I could not cry the same way that those old men in Ypres wept, for what do I know of war, of seeing my closest friends cut down like they are nothing? Yet, as I scribbled some heartfelt lines in my notebook later, I knew that any illusions I had of war being glorious were forever gone.

Kaboom! The Legacy of World War I

Randall Stephens

The past is never dead. It's not even disarmed.

Among the many legacies of World War I: the unexploded bombs that still litter Europe. (This

is also a major inheritance of the Second World War. See the DW clip embedded here.) The Christian Science Monitor's Randy Dotinga discusses the problem in a brief review of Adam Hochschild 's new book, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin, 2011). "I had my own encounter with an unexploded shell in 2006," says Dotinga, "during a tour of World War I battlefields and cemeteries in the region of Belgium known as Flanders. We dropped by an archaeological site in a field next to a gas station and found volunteers who'd just uncovered an unexploded German shell. You can see it in the accompanying photo. The date on the shell, which was about 20 inches long, is 1916. Holding the shell – carefully – was probably harmless. Banging it with a hammer, however, would have been a very bad idea."

In the June issue of Historically Speaking, Sean McMeekin–who teaches diplomatic history in the department of international relations of Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey–considers the enormous impact of the Great War and the ongoing scholarly discussion/debate surrounding it. I excerpt a portion of that essay here.

Sean McMeekin, "Jihad-cum-Zionism-Leninism: Overthrowing the World, German-Style"

It is often said that the First World War marks a watershed in modern history. From the mobilization of armies of unfathomable size—more than 60 million men put on uniforms between 1914 and 1918—to the no less mind-boggling human cost of the conflict, both at the front and beyond it (estimated military and civilian deaths were nearly equal, at some 8 million each), the war of 1914 broke all historical precedent in the scale of its devastation. Ruling houses that had endured for centuries—the Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman—shook, tottered, and fell, unleashing yet more misery as these precariously assembled multiethnic empires were wracked by internecine warfare. As the war of 1914 spread beyond Europe into the Balkans and Middle East, racial and religious score-settling and reprisals led inevitably to large-scale ethnic cleansing, with millions of civilians uprooted from their ancestral homes, which most would never see again. Even the victorious Western powers, France and Britain, suffered a collapse in cultural confidence that arguably has never been repaired. After centuries of progress had brought the West to a position of unparalleled domination of global affairs, it took only four years for the whole glittering edifice of European civilization to fall apart.

If 1914–18 marked an epitaph for Old Europe, we may usefully ask: Was it murder or suicide? Popular historians have usually leaned toward the latter verdict, viewing the catastrophe of 1914 as a tragedy of miscalculation, the idea being that no European statesmen were truly guilty of intending the war, at least not the horrendous global war of attrition that it turned into.1 Since the Fritz Fischer debate of the 1960s professional historians have generally favored the former explanation, explaining the war’s outbreak in terms of German and/or Austrian premeditation, coming down with a verdict of, if not outright homicide, then at least civilizational manslaughter. The German decision for war in 1914, Holger Herwig writes in a recent scholarly collection on the conflict, was not quite Fischer’s aggressive and deliberate “bid for world power” but rather “a nervous, indeed panicked ‘leap into the dark’ to secure the Reich’s position of semihegemony on the Continent.” In the new “consensus” interpretation, Berlin still bears primary responsibility, no longer for premeditated imperial aggression in the sense implied by the Versailles Treaty and by Fischer, but for an impulsive preemptive strike to ward off incipient strategic decline, with further mitigation in that the Germans received a strong assist in unleashing the dogs of war from their equally panic-stricken (and equally pessimistic) Austrian allies.

This sort of moderate academic consensus is usually welcomed. Now that so few historians have a real personal or patriotic stake in the controversy (as many Germans with memories of both world wars still did in the 1960s), scholars working in the field today are spared the bitter acrimony of the Fritz Fischer years. Even on the level of practical politics, with the centennial approaching, there is now a sense of “goodbye to all that”—literally, as the last German reparations payment was finally processed in 2010!>>>