On the Continuity of the German Military Strategic Planning in the First Half of the XX Century
The 100 th anniversary of the beginning of the World War I and the 70 th anniversary of the end of the World War II renewed interest of academic community in the origins, the substance and the outcomes of these horrific conflicts. Simultaneously long-dispelled myths of preemptive and defensive character of German military planning on the eve of the two wars have re-emerged. To argue away such assertions, the author compares military and strategic planning of Germany on the eve of both the First and the Second World Wars. The first section of the paper examines plans of the German Empire's military and political leaders in the late nineteenth - early twentieth centuries. The author shows that these plans had already comprehensively developed the mechanisms of resolving those strategic dilemmas which stemmed from the country's geopolitical position and which in turn determined the substance of military planning. The second section examines the lessons drawn by the German strategists from the defeat in the World War I. The author emphasizes that the German military commanders remained committed to the concept of blitzkrieg. However they made several major changes to the concept: they refined the concept of a total war and promoted the idea of accumulation of all military and political power in one hands. All these ideas laid the foundation for the Nazi Germany's military and strategic planning and stipulated its inherently aggressive expansionism. The third section of the paper focuses on development and contents of the German military plans on the eve of the World War II. The author shows that military and strategic planning of the Nazi Germany inherited all the drawbacks of the German Empire's planning, particularly, a concentration on military issues and a disregard of economic and political factors, which resulted in unduly risky and unrealistic military plans.