S1E2: German Land Warfare Strategy at the Turn of the 20th Century

Talking Strategy

At the turn of the 20th century, Imperial Germany was a dominant force in thinking about military strategy with a focus on land warfare commensurate with its geography. Prussian strategists agreed with most of their French colleagues that war would involve mass armies, and that their strategy had to be offensive.

Three Prussian strategists of land warfare were particularly influential in shaping the thinking that guided the Imperial German Army’s conduct in the First World War: Colmar von der Goltz, Alfred von Schlieffen and Friedrich von Bernhardi. Controversial in different ways and rivals with one another, they nevertheless exerted a strong influence on the conduct of land warfare, and on thinking about harnessing society in total war in which anything was permitted (the primordial violence and hatred in Clausewitz’s terms).

In this episode of Talking Strategy, Professor Stig Förster from the University of Bern joins hosts Professor Beatrice Heuser and Paul O'Neill. Professor Förster discusses the controversies surrounding the German strategists, the horrors spawned by the ideas of von der Goltz and Bernhardi, and how war does not work to the timetable envisaged by von Schlieffen in his ‘Schlieffen Plan’, which set out how Imperial Germany would fight in the First World War.