SchlieffenPicture

Within the German military establishment of the late 19th and early
20th century General Alfred Von Schlieffen had occupied a central
position, perhaps the central position, in addressing how Germany
should face the issues raised by total warfare between nation states
by virtue of his role leading the German General Staff at the 20th
Century's turn. Von Schlieffen's quest for a battle of annihilation,
niederwerfungsstrategie, envisioned as a means for quickly destroying
the enemy army, arose from the conceptual framework previously
embraced by seventeenth and eighteenth century Prussian military
planners and then Moltke's General Staff in response to Germany's
central European position. For von Schlieffen Hannibal's battle of
Cannae was a key expression of the idea of a battle of annihilation - a
belief most of his peers shared in the German military establishment.

Schlieffen is best remembered however, for a general operational
framework he had created early in the 20th Century and addressing
how to aggressively fight the Western Allies in the event of war. This
framework has often times been erroneously explained as "The
Schlieffen Plan" followed by the Imperial German Army after the First
World War began. In reality the planning done by Schlieffen left much
of the decision making to those that followed him; as per German
tradition it was up to his subordinates to fill in the details and then
execute their plan as they best saw fit. Schlieffen's loose theoretical
framework for the German army's deployment for war thus met a key
component of Prussian/German war doctrine; it sought to rely on
officers who viewed war making as not a science with a clearly
defined methodology but an art that could not be condensed into an
all-encompassing list applicable to every situation.

Picture in Public Domain