On this day in 1913, German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen died in Berlin. He was the inspiration for the aggressive German military strategy that would soon be used in a modified form at the beginning of the Great War, known as World War I.
This is recalled by history.com.
The son of a Prussian general, Schlieffen entered the army in 1854 and participated in both the Seven Weeks' War with Austria in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Over the next few decades, Schlieffen rose through the ranks of the Grand General Staff, an elite corps of about 650 officers that served as the strategic arm of the Prussian army. In 1891, he became its chief.
In the years following the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the 1879 alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary, Schlieffen's predecessors, Alfred von Waldersee and Helmut von Moltke (known as Moltke the Elder - his nephew, also Helmut, would be Chief of the General Staff during the Great War) - had been working on developing a potential military strategy for a future two-front war against France and Russia. When Schlieffen took power, he continued these efforts, seeing such a war as increasingly likely. The planning proved to be prescient.
France and Russia—an unlikely combination, given the status of one as a progressive democracy and the other as a tyrannical monarchy—did indeed form their own alliance in 1894, largely in response to the German threat.
Schlieffen believed that Germany's geographical position put it at greater risk of invasion by either France or Russia.
In 1905, inspired by the performance of the Russian army in its ill-fated war with Japan, he drew up the Schlieffen Plan.
The field marshal noted that Russia was vast but had no railways. Any full mobilization of its forces would take several weeks, perhaps three or four months.
Schlieffen believed that Germany's best option was to deal with France first, attack through Belgium and the Netherlands, sweep across western France, and finally capture Paris, thus decisively ending France's status as a great power.
Meanwhile, the smaller German army would hold back Russia in the east - Schlieffen believed that Russia would not be able to mobilize its forces quickly enough to pose a major challenge.
This strategy, outlined in an unofficial memorandum that Schlieffen wrote in late 1905, near the end of his term as head of state, became known as the "Schlieffen Plan."
Less than two years after Schlieffen's death, the German army, under the command of his successor, Helmut von Moltke, - Jr., invaded Belgium on his way to France, violating that country's neutrality and effectively turning a minor conflict into a general European war and ultimately World War I.
Historians still debate the strengths and weaknesses of the "Schlieffen" Plan.