Great plan of deployment to the east
(Big) Eastern deployment plan was the name of a strategic war deployment plan developed by Helmuth Moltke "the Elder" in the 19th century, which was definitely abandoned in 1913 in favor of the much more offensive Schlieffen Plan .
This plan provided that in the event of a Russian invasion of the Balkans, the German armed forces should be evenly distributed between the Eastern and Western fronts; purely defensive behavior would have been ordered in the West, with France demanding a declaration of neutrality . In the east one would have tried to defeat the tsarist empire militarily.
In April 1913 the Eastern Deployment Plan was overruled by the General Staff under its boss Helmuth Moltke "the Younger" in favor of the Schlieffen Plan, which was geared towards preventive war and which provided an attack on France first and before an enemy operation.
On August 1, 1914, shortly before the outbreak of war, Kaiser Wilhelm II , as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, who was primarily responsible for German warfare , tried to avoid a two- front war and for a few hours demanded that Chief of Staff Moltke improvise a deployment to the east, which As the protagonist of the Schlieffen Plan, he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The deployment of an army of millions, he argued, could not be improvised, for over a year they had only worked on the Schlieffen Plan.
However, it quickly emerged that the information on which Wilhelm's decision was based was based on a misunderstanding by the German ambassador in London. He had reported that London was ready to remain neutral if Germany respected French neutrality in return. But this was a misinterpretation, which caused the emperor to withdraw his order. The more offensive Schlieffen plan was subsequently carried out as planned with the attack on neutral Belgium and then France.
See also
literature
- A. Gasser: Prussian military spirit and war unleashed 1914 , Basel / Frankfurt M. 1985. Gasser used for this. Section The cashing of the Great Ostaufmarsch-Plan primarily secondary literature by Fritz Fischer , Imanuel Geiss , Gerhard Ritter and the book Helmuth von Moltke - memories, letters, documents 1877-1916 , 1922 ed. from his widow
- A. Mombauer: The July Crisis - Europe's Path to World War I , Munich 2014
- G. Hirschfeld et al .: Encyclopedia of the First World War , Zurich 2003