Editing Blitzkrieg (section)

===''Schwerpunkt''===
''Schwerpunktprinzip'' was a [[heuristic]] device (conceptual tool or thinking formula) that was used in the German Army from the nineteenth century to make decisions from tactics to strategy about priority. ''Schwerpunkt'' has been translated as ''center of gravity'', ''crucial'', ''focal point'' and ''point of main effort''. None of those forms is sufficient to describe the universal importance of the term and the concept of ''Schwerpunktprinzip''. Every unit in the army, from the company to the supreme command, decided on a ''Schwerpunkt'' by ''schwerpunktbildung'', as did the support services, which meant that commanders always knew what was the most important and why. The German army was trained to support the ''Schwerpunkt'' even when risks had to be taken elsewhere to support the point of main effort and to attack with overwhelming firepower.{{sfn|Sheldon|2017|pp=vi, 17}} ''Schwerpunktbildung'' allowed the German Army to achieve superiority at the ''Schwerpunkt'', whether attacking or defending, to turn local success at the ''Schwerpunkt'' into the progressive disorganisation of the opposing force and to create more opportunities to exploit that advantage even if the Germans were numerically and [[strategy|strategically]] inferior in general. In the 1930s, Guderian summarized that as ''Klotzen, nicht kleckern!'' (roughly "splash, don't spill"){{sfn|Frieser|2005|pp=89–90, 156–157}}{{sfn|Alexander|2002|p=227}}