Alfred Schlieffen

Alfred Schlieffen (1833-1913), German military figure, Chief of the German General Staff (1891-1905), author of the Schlieffen Plan implemented by Germany in 1914 on the outbreak of World War I.

Born of a military-aristocratic family, Alfred von Schlieffen was educated for a career in law, but after a year's voluntary military service in 1854 he devoted himself to the army, being attached to the German General Staff from 1876. His experience as a staff officer of Prussia's lightning victories over the Austrians at Königgrätz in 1866 during the Seven Weeks' War, and over the French at Sedan in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, made him a lifelong exponent of the doctrine of the offensive, and especially of outflanking and encircling movements. Schlieffen's most notable predecessor in office, Helmuth Karl von Moltke, had drawn very different conclusions from the war of 1870-1871 which, after the defeat of the French army, had degenerated into a long drawn-out guerrilla war of attrition, and had concluded that any future war would be a mass war ( Volkskrieg) on such a titanic scale as would jeopardize the very existence of the German Second Empire—especially as any war would be a two-front war against France and Russia. All Moltke could recommend was to build up the German army in accordance with the deterrence principle, and to hope that if this failed, Germany might nevertheless manage to fight a tactically offensive but strategically defensive war, concentrating in the first instance in the east, to force her opponents to a negotiated peace. Schlieffen, by contrast, insisted that total victory was still possible: a lightning offensive in the west could annihilate the French army, after which Germany could deal with the slower-moving Russians. According to the Schlieffen Plan, worked out in stages between 1891 and 1905, the greatly strengthened right wing of the German army in the northern Rhineland would carry out a wide skirting movement through neutral Belgium and Holland before moving south to encircle the French near Paris. Six weeks were allowed for the defeat of the French, during which time (to the unconcealed dismay of Austria) a much-diminished German force would undertake no more than holding operations in the east. Although the Schlieffen Plan may have had a certain credibility at the time of its completion (when Russia was paralysed by the Russo-Japanese War) it appeared to be an increasingly risky gamble as both France and Russia built up their armies in succeeding years; not that Emperor William II or the civilian authorities ever expressed doubts about the wisdom, or indeed the necessity, of the gamble. Nor did Schlieffen: in his prolific writings from retirement, he continued to insist on the absolute need to “strengthen the Right”, even though he admitted that his plan was “an enterprise for which we are too weak”. When in 1914 the Schlieffen Plan was implemented with modifications (notably the omission of the invasion of Holland), it failed totally, and events both in the west—the First Battle of the Marne—and in the east ensured that Germany faced that very war of attrition that Schlieffen's predecessors had most feared.