Struggling against Inferiority: German Army Policy, 1890-1914

This thesis by Gavin J. Wiens offers us some insights about the diplomatic and geographic circumstances confronting Germany before the First World War and the maintenance of a large standing army. In 1890 the Prussian Minister of War, Julius von Verdy du Vernois, introduced a long-term program of army expansion intended to increase the number of active formations and provide all able-bodied German males with military training. Whereas considerable political and social obstacles, together with the inauguration of a naval construction program in 1898 precluded its completion, the possibility of a two-front war thereafter ensured that the "realization of compulsory military service" remained the fundamental objective of the General Staff. Not even the return of budgetary preference to the army following the second Moroccan crisis in 1911 and the subsequent approval of substantial army bills in 1912-13 diminished the intense pressure for a large-scale increase in the peacetime-strength and the implementation of the core principles of the "Verdy Plan."