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The Schlieffen Plan (German: Schlieffen-Plan, pronounced [ʃliːfən plaːn]) is a name given after the First World War to German war plans, due to the influence of Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen and his thinking on an invasion of France and Belgium, which began on 4 August 1914.
The German Schlieffen Plan is a notable example of the cult of the offensive. Supported by offensively-minded officers such as Alfred von Schlieffen and Helmuth von Moltke the Younger , it was executed in the first month of the war (with some historians maintaining it was nearly victorious, [ 6 ] though others claim the Plan never had any ...
Under Weltpolitik, despite a two-front war still being at the forefront of Germany's concerns as proven through the Schlieffen Plan, Wilhelm II was far more ambitious. Colonial policies officially became a matter of national prestige, promoted by pressure groups like the Pan-German League ; in the ongoing Scramble for Africa , Germany was a ...
The main war plan, the Schlieffen Plan, was drawn up by the Army headquarters. It called for a great infantry sweep through Belgium to encircle Paris and defeat France in a matter of weeks. Then the forces would be moved by rail to the Eastern Front, to defeat the Russians. The plan was not shared with the Navy, the Foreign Office, the ...
He has advanced the controversial thesis that the Schlieffen Plan as generally understood was a post-World War I fabrication. [1] [2] He first described his views about the Schlieffen Plan in a 1999 article in War in History, and further developed them in his 2002 book Inventing the Schlieffen Plan.
In 1953, Ritter found a copy of the "Great Memorandum" relating to German military planning written by General Alfred Graf von Schlieffen in 1905. The following year, Ritter published the "Great Memorandum" and his observations about the Schlieffen Plan as Der Schlieffen-Plan: Kritik Eines Mythos (The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth).
The Schlieffen Plan was the product of this mindset, and had left the General Staff confident that the war would be over (at least in the west) long before food shortages might otherwise have become an issue. However, once it became clear that the Schlieffen Plan had failed and that Germany would have to fight a long war on two fronts, factors ...
However, the German Schlieffen Plan required that German armed forces advance through Belgium (thus violating its neutrality) in order to outflank the French Army, concentrated in eastern France. The German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg , dismissed the treaty of 1839 as a "scrap of paper". [ 3 ]