Inventing the Schlieffen plan

Abstract

This chapter traces development of the Schlieffen plan myth. The Schlieffen plan was manufactured in 1920 by the General Staff historical section and senior officers such as Hermann von Kuhl and Wilhelm Groener (the ‘Schlieffen school’) to explain why the German army failed to win the Marne Campaign in 1914: they said that the Schlieffen plan was practically infallible, but the younger Moltke failed to understand the concept of the plan and ‘watered it down’, reinforcing the left wing at the expense of the decisive right wing. Therefore, the Germans were defeated on the Marne. In order to protect their assertion that the Schlieffen plan was the real war plan, the ‘Schlieffen school’ refused to discuss the details of Schlieffen's war planning from 1891 to 1905 and the German army historical section treated his war plans and war games as classified documents. In April 1945 the German army archive was destroyed in a British bombing raid. In the early 1950s Gerhard Ritter found the original text of the Schlieffen's 1906 Schlieffen Plan Denkschrift (position paper) in the US National Archives, where the US Army had stored it. Ritter used this discovery to turn the General Staff's argument on its head: he said that the Schlieffen plan was the apotheosis of German militarism and the proximate cause of the Great War.