Inventing the Schlieffen Plan

The existence of the Schlieffen plan has been one of the basic assumptions of twentieth-century military history. It was the perfect example of the evils of German militarism: aggressive, mechanical, disdainful of politics and of public morality. Terence Zuber challenges this orthodox view to present a radically different picture of German war planning between 1871 and 1914, and concludes that, in fact, there never really was a `Schlieffen plan'.