Terence Zuber, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning, 1871–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Author: Terence Zuber is a military historian with 20 year’s experience as a US Army officer and a 2001 PhD from the University of Würzburg. He is the author of eight books mostly centering on German and Prussian war planning between 1857 and 1914.
Central Argument: There was never a Schlieffen plan, it was invented by the General Staff to explain away their failure to win the 1914 Marne campaign.
Synopsis: The Schlieffen Plan, he argues, was the postwar invention of German officers who wanted to avoid the blame for Germany’s defeat. The idea of a concrete plan that was created by Schlieffen and later messed with and botched by Moltke the younger was a post war effort by many members of the German military as a way to explain how Germany lost the Great War.
Schlieffen’s intentions were in fact both more sensible and less aggressive than the Schlieffen Plan as usually portrayed. Zuber’s argument persuasively demolishes the commonly accepted version of the Schlieffen Plan. To make his case, Zuber describes German war planning between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. He explores German grand strategy from 1880 to 1914 and the different plans and war games that each of the Chief of Staff did every year. Zuber concludes there at no time under either Schlieffen or the younger Moltke did the German army plan to swing the right wing to the west of Paris—the German left win was never weak, either. The war in the west was predicated on a French attack, not a German one and was to be concluded with the elimination of the French fortress line.
Schlieffen’s actual plan, according to Zuber, is much more modest. Schlieffen was concerned that his combined Austro-German forces would be vastly outnumbered by those of the Franco-Russian alliance. To compensate, Schlieffen envisioned a defensive war using railroad mobility to defeat each power in turn. The idea was to do so in the immediate vicinity of the border, rather than chasing a desperate invasion of France.
Historiography: He is pushing back on a great historiographical debate concerning the reality of the Schlieffen plan. Refuting by some, and embraced by others, he boils down the debate at his website: https://terencezuber.com/schlieffendebate.php
Criticism: His claim that the Schlieffen Plan itself never existed is more speculative and rests on a reading of evidence that is plausible but not conclusive. The documentary materials for this claim are necessarily scarce, since an allied bombing raid in the Second World War destroyed many of the relevant records.
Military historians interested in the outbreak of the First World War will need to read this book and decide for themselves. Others will want to follow the debate closely but may prefer to wait for a consensus to emerge.