The ‘Schlieffen Plan’ and German War Guilt

Abstract

When Gerhard Ritter said that the ‘Schlieffen plan’ was the proximate cause of the First World War, his proofs were political, cultural, and moral, and he did not bother to hide his disdain for military history. For Ritter the ‘Schlieffen plan’ was not an operational military question, it was the apotheosis of German militarism, a disease in the German body politic that needed to be cured. Inventing the Schlieffen Plan (Oxford, 2002) took the diametrically opposite stance, being a purely military history of German war planning, which showed that the ‘Schlieffen plan’ was operationally absurd. In his defence of the charge of German war guilt, Robert Foley has to adopt Ritter’s standpoint and repudiate his own previously published work concerning German operational planning.