Who were the German officers/generals who revealed the Schlieffen Plan to Joffre?

Hi
The French High Command received intelligence from the Germans about the Schlieffen Plan which turned out to be accurate, but they ignored it. Was it a policy of the French High Command to just ignore what defecting German officers had to say/what Germans had to tell them about their military plans as bluff. I have not found any reason for this stubbornness in sticking with their Plan XVII despite obvious errors in it. Why was their intelligence ignored? Do we know the names of these officers/generals. I have not been able to find them.
I look forward to your feedback.

I hadn’t heard about this specific intelligence breakdown but the usual answer is that it’s always easier to see which information is good after the battle occurs.

Before the battle, you have thousands of snippets of information, all pointing in different directions. Some indicate the enemy is about to attack, some say he’s holding in place, some say he’s going to retreat. A week later, after the battle’s been fought, it’s easy to shift through those thousands of pieces of information, throw out the ninety-nine percent that are now shown to be worthless, and see that you had a handful of clues which you could have pieced together and seen the battle plan. And plenty of people will point that out to you after the battle.

Thanks Little Nemo. Here is Barbara Tuchman "The Guns of August"on the subject.
"(p.41/42) “They (the French General Staff) did not credit the sweep through Flanders, although, in fact, they had been told about it in a dramatic manner by an officer of the German General Staff who in 1904 betrayed to them an early version of the Schlieffen Plan. In a series of three rendezvous with a French intelligence officer at Brussels, Paris and Nice, the German appeared with his head swathed in bandages, revealing only a gray mustache and a pair of piercing eyes…General Pendezac …believed the information “fitted perfectly with the present tendency the German strategy which teaches the necessity of wide envelopment” but many of his colleagues were doubtful.”

Unfortunately Tuchman does not give a name for the German officer.

Your own cite indicates the intelligence came in a decade before the Germans actually invaded. A lot can happen in 10 years. There are lots of legit reasons for the French High Command to believe that even if the 1904 defector was A) truthful and B) in possession of the actual facts, not just what the defector mistakenly thought were facts, that the situation had changed enough by 1914 that the Germans would not still be using that dumb, old, now-dusty plan. Especially not in light of the changes in French forces and dispositions that had happened since 1904.

I don’t have any info on the name of the German. But I can see a lot of reasons why his info was not highly regarded in 1914. The evidence is not nearly so damning as it seems to appear to you.

Late edit: ignore previous post. Read this better one. Sorry.

I don’t have any info on the name of the German.

But …

Your own cite indicates the intelligence came in a decade before the Germans actually invaded. A lot can happen in 10 years. There are lots of legit reasons for the French High Command to believe that even if the 1904 defector was honest the situation had changed enough by 1914 that the Germans would not still be using that dumb, old, now-dusty plan. Especially not in light of the changes in French forces and dispositions that had happened since 1904.

One of the hard things about evaluating leaked enemy info is that you know a lot about your own forces’ capabilities, dispositions, etc. You know very little of what the enemy knows of your situation. It’s difficult to evaluate the plausibility of the pieces of the enemies’ puzzle you may get because you don’t have a good model of what pieces of your puzzle he has.

E.g. “It make no sense for the enemy to attack from the north as this spy says they will; we’re strongest there. Why would they do that?”

Is this conundrum evidence that the spy is lying, or that he was lied to by his source, or that the enemy mistakenly believes your strength is in the south and he really is planning to attack from the north? Hard for you to know which. Riddles within riddles; enigmas within enigmas.
Bottom line: I can see a lot of reasons why his 1904 info was not highly regarded in 1914. IMO the evidence is not nearly so damning as it seems to appear to you.

And the other issue is counter-intelligence: what if the German plan was to come through the Ardennes and Alsace-Lorraine, so they planted this intelligence on the French so the French would defend in the north, weakening their defences farther south?

Should the French have believed this unknown German? Was he a defector or a German plant? And how could the French tell the difference?

Plus, ten years is a long time. Even if the French believed it was accurate information in 1904, what guarantee did they have that it was still accurate a decade later? Maybe the German planning had evolved. Or maybe the Germans found out about the leak and changed their plans.

Could the Agadir Crisis have had anything to do with overall attitudes to the Germans?
In the “Sleepwalkers” by Christopher Clark referring to the Moroccan Crisis(Agadir Crisis) and the November 1911 treaty between Germany and France writes:
“Perhaps the most important consequence of German policy oscillation during the crisis was a growing tendency in Paris to misread German actions as driven by a policy of bluff.”

Perhaps there is no connection between the Agadir Crisis and the French attitudes to Germans (even defectors). Perhaps there is.

The only name given for the German who sold the Schlieffen Plan to France’s Deuxième Bureau for 60,000 francs is give as “Le Vengeur”(The Avenger).
They had many reasons to discredit a lot of the intelligence that was coming in. A lot of it was purposely put out to misinform the French. But they must have had a lot of confidence in “Le Vengeur” to pay that much for his information. Joffre obviously had other ideas.

Based on the book “Catastrophe: 1914” the impression I get is most of the French High Command were pig-headed so its likely they just ignored the warnings because they were convinced their own war plans were so effective. When WW1 broke out as a matter of fact, France’s plan was to invade Germany south of Belgium, resulting in catastrophic losses in the hundreds of thousands in the first months of the war.

From my readings, it seems that the French did not discount the idea of a big right wing sweep into France by the Germans (i.e. the Schlieffen Plan).

In fact, military leaders welcomed the idea, as they thought a powerful German right wing gave them a good opportunity to break through a weakened line elsewhere.

The problem was they didn’t figure on Germany using its reserves in the front line, and thusfatally underestimated the strength of the right wing while overvaluing their chances against the center and left wing.

Thank you all. Very helpful.

Not only that, but the French were fatally entranced by the Napoleonic-era doctrine of Attaque à outrance, the value of elan in attack. That is, the French were fighting the last war, not the current one. The shift of the balance of power from attack to defence (due to barbed wire and machine guns) seems to have completely passed them by (like every other European army, they learned essentially nothing from the US Civil War).

The French attacks on the right were easily repulsed by numerically inferior forces, giving the Germans an unassailable local superiority on their right wing - even given the dilution of the Schlieffen Plan over the previous few years, and the diversion of two corps to the Eastern Front (where they were too late to help there too). It wasn’t until the German outran their supply lines, and diluted their own effort in advances in too many directions at once by too few troops, that the front was stabilised (and stayed there more or less for the next 4 years).

Ironically the French made the same nature of error in WWII - assuming the superiority of defence (viz the Maginot line) at exactly the time when armour and close support air power (aided by portable radio technology) changed the balanced of power back to the offensive again.

Not entirely. The French - along with all the other European armies - did recognise the increased power of defenders (though it was more down to bolt action rifles and quick firing artillery than machine guns). They may have ignored the ACW but they had all had observers at the Russo-Japanese war ten years before and seen the casualties that resulted from attacking prepared positions. The trouble was the lessons they drew and the doctrines they developed in response. The attaque à outrance was their logical - if misguided - answer based on Japanese success in attacking Russian positions. Concentrate maximum resources on the key point and go for it, accepting the inevitable casualties involved.

France had a particular liking for this doctrine as it appealed to notions of Napoleonic glory and the supposed élan and moral superiority of the French soldier but most other countries had similar social darwinist visions of their own superior valour triumphing over modern weapons. Probably the only country with a more realistic appreciation of the problem was Britain who had found to their cost the impossibility of advancing through the well directed rifle fire of the Boer commandos. Of course, British commanders were also influenced by the small size of the professional British army - in 1914 they did not have the numbers to expend in costly attacks. Once the Army had grown they were ready enough to believe the same mistaken message as all the others - numbers and courage will overcome despite the defender’s advantages.

I often see people mentioning that, but frankly at the time of WW1, the US civil war was 50 years ago, so the lessons of this war were fairly outdated. And anyway, European countries had been involved themselves in a number of wars during the second half of the 19th century (in the case of France, she fought the 1870 war with Germany for instance, and a war with Austria, and a war with Russia), so it’s not like they could be unaware of the evolution of warfare since Napoleon. The French commander in 1914, Joffre, had himself fought in the 1870 war.

And in any case, there was a much more recent example of “modern” war : the Russo-Japanese war, where the combatants faced on land issues pretty similar to what would happen during WW1. That, rather than US Civil War should/would have been the reference for a modern war fought between advanced nations.

ETA : I should read the whole thread before responding. I didn’t see MarcusF post, where he makes the same point. Ooops.

Plus, the two major wars in Europe at about the same time as the US Civil War were quick: the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 was all of seven weeks, while the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was nine months in total, with the major military operations over with the Battle of Sedan about six weeks after the French declaration of war (although after the Second Empire fell, the new Third Republic continued some military operations until the final cease-fire in May, 1871).

So with these two examples of quick European wars at about the same time as the US Civil War, it’s not so obvious that the Europeans fifty years later should have focused solely on the US Civil War as a precedent. (And the US Civil War was also a war of movement - there were a lot of battles in a number of locations, with no stable front line equivalent to what developed in WWI.)

I didn’t mean to imply they should have solely focused on it, nor that the later wars had nothing to offer either.

There were lessons to be learned from the US Civil War about trench warfare, the looming superiority of defense due to increased man-carried firepower, the gradual nature of a victory won by industrial and manpower superiority, and warfare in a world of massed armies. But there was an attitude of “those colonials have nothing to teach we sophisticated Europeans”.

I usually hear that the USA and CSA were stupid to not learn about the wars in Europe.

“There’s not a cannon factory in the whole South.”
-Rhett Butler.