:Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning, 1871–1914.

Abstract

Terence Zuber introduces significant new evidence where documentation has been chronically thin in the debate about military strategy and the origins of World War I. He concludes that the German general staff never adopted the scheme, which historians have habitually called the “Schlieffen Plan,” for a reckless war of aggression. Instead he reconstructs, in far greater detail than previous scholars, the real contingency plans for mobilization that the general staff revised from year to year between the end of the Franco‐Prussian War and 1914. The original texts remained secret until their destruction, along with the majority of the imperial military archives, in World War II. Zuber has deduced much of their substance by meticulously collating references from peripheral sources. Analyzing fragments from German military archives and from the protagonists' voluminous official and private publications in the interwar years, he retraces exercises conducted before 1914 and recriminations exchanged after defeat. Although most of these highly technical accounts of case studies, war games, staff rides, and operations are at best ambiguous about the actual war plans, Zuber's expertise as a former career officer in the U.S. Army is a particular asset in piecing together persuasive evidence from them.