Editing Schlieffen Plan (section)

===Interwar===

====''Der Weltkrieg''====

Work began on ''Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918: Militärischen Operationen zu Lande'' (The World War [from] 1914 to 1918: Military Operations on Land) in 1919 in the {{lang|de|Kriegsgeschichte der Großen Generalstabes}} (War History Section) of the Great General Staff. When the Staff was abolished by the [[Treaty of Versailles]], about eighty historians were transferred to the new {{lang|de|Reichsarchiv}} in [[Potsdam]]. As President of the {{lang|de|Reichsarchiv}}, General [[Hans von Haeften]] led the project, which was overseen from 1920 by a civilian historical commission. [[Theodor Jochim]], the first head of the {{lang|de|Reichsarchiv}} section for collecting documents, wrote that

{{quote|... the events of the war, strategy and tactics can only be considered from a neutral, purely objective perspective which weighs things dispassionately and is independent of any ideology.{{sfn|Strachan|2010|p=xv}}}}

The {{lang|de|Reichsarchiv}} historians produced ''Der Weltkrieg'', a narrative history (also known as the ''Weltkriegwerk'') in fourteen volumes published from 1925 to 1944, which became the only source written with free access to the German documentary records of the war.{{sfn|Humphries|Maker|2010|pp=xxvi–xxviii}}

From 1920, semi-official histories had been written by [[Hermann von Kuhl]], the 1st Army Chief of Staff in 1914, ''Der Deutsche Generalstab in Vorbereitung und Durchführung des Weltkrieges'' (The German General Staff in the Preparation and Conduct of the World War, 1920) and ''Der Marnefeldzug'' (The Marne Campaign) in 1921, by Lieutenant-Colonel [[Wolfgang Foerster]], the author of ''Graf Schlieffen und der Weltkrieg'' (Count Schlieffen and the World War, 1925), [[Wilhelm Groener]], head of {{lang|de|[[Oberste Heeresleitung]]}} (OHL, the wartime German General Staff) railway section in 1914, published ''Das Testament des Grafen Schlieffen: Operativ Studien über den Weltkrieg'' (The Testament of Count Schlieffen: Operational Studies of the World War) in 1929 and [[Gerhard Tappen]], head of the OHL operations section in 1914, published ''Bis zur Marne 1914: Beiträge zur Beurteilung der Kriegführen bis zum Abschluss der Marne-Schlacht'' (Until the Marne 1914: Contributions to the Assessment of the Conduct of the War up to the Conclusion of the Battle of the Marne) in 1920.{{sfn|Humphries|Maker|2013|pp=11–12}} The writers called the Schlieffen Memorandum of 1905–1906 an infallible blueprint and that all Moltke the Younger had to do to almost guarantee that the war in the west would be won in August 1914, was implement it. The writers blamed Moltke for altering the plan to increase the force of the left wing at the expense of the right, which caused the failure to defeat decisively the French armies.{{sfn|Zuber|2002|p=1}} By 1945, the official historians had also published two series of popular histories but in April, the {{lang|de|Reichskriegsschule}} building in Potsdam was bombed and nearly all of the war diaries, orders, plans, maps, situation reports and telegrams usually available to historians studying the wars of bureaucratic states, were destroyed.{{sfn|Humphries|Maker|2013|pp=2–3}}

====Hans Delbrück====
In his post-war writing, Delbrück held that the German General Staff had used the wrong war plan, rather than failed adequately to follow the right one. The Germans should have defended in the west and attacked in the east, following the plans drawn up by Moltke the Elder in the 1870s and 1880s. Belgian neutrality need not have been breached and a negotiated peace could have been achieved, since a decisive victory in the west was impossible and not worth the attempt. Like the {{lang|de|Strategiestreit}} before the war, this led to a long exchange between Delbrück and the official and semi-official historians of the former Great General Staff, who held that an offensive strategy in the east would have resulted in another 1812. The war could only have been won against Germany's most powerful enemies, France and Britain. The debate between the Delbrück and Schlieffen "schools" rumbled on through the 1920s and 1930s.{{sfn|Zuber|2002|pp=2–4}}