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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.
By 1904, he had rapidly risen in rank to become a member of the Army's Great General Staff, where he oversaw the development of the Schlieffen Plan. Despite being removed from the Great General Staff for meddling in politics, Ludendorff restored his standing in the army through his success as a commander in World War I.
The Denkschrift was not a campaign plan, as Schlieffen had retired on 31 December 1905 and the 96 divisions needed to carry out this one-front war plan did not exist (in 1914 the German army had 79, of which 68 were deployed in the west). Rather, it was a demonstration of what Germany might accomplish if universal conscription was introduced.
This was one of the seeds of the mass destruction of the First World War, as military planning was not subject to political control. Thus, the Schlieffen Plan was adopted without political input, even though it required the violation of the neutrality of Belgium, which the Germans had guaranteed by treaty.
Schlieffen's successor at the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, maintained the basic plan that Schlieffen put forward in 1905 of quickly knocking out France in the west before turning to focus on Russia, thereby avoiding a two-front war. This strategy was fully adopted by the German government in 1913.
When World War I began, Germany invaded neutral Belgium and Luxembourg as part of the Schlieffen Plan, in an attempt to capture Paris quickly by catching the French off guard through an invasion via neutral countries.
At the outbreak of the war, the German Army, with seven field armies in the west and one in the east, executed a modified version of the Schlieffen Plan, bypassing French defenses along the common border by moving quickly through neutral Belgium, and then turning southwards to attack France and attempt to encircle the French Army and trap it on ...
The Germans assumed that Russia had decided upon war and that its mobilisation put Germany in danger, especially since because German war plans, the so-called Schlieffen Plan, relied upon Germany to mobilise speedily enough to defeat France first by attacking largely through neutral Belgium before it turned to defeat the slower-moving Russians.