to them by National Socialism, and their nationalism had in general displayed from its beginning a particularly intense, combative quality". At the first meeting of German historians in 1949, Ritter delivered a speech: "We constantly run the risk not only of being condemned by the world as nationalists, but actually being misused as expert witnesses by all those circles and tendencies that, in their impatient and blind nationalism, have shut their ears to the teachings of the most recent past. Never was our political responsibility greater, not only to Germany, but also to Europe and the world. And yet never has our path been so dangerously narrow between Scylla and Charybdis as today". In 1953, Ritter found a copy of the "Great Memorandum" relating to German military planning written by General Alfred Graf von Schlieffen in 1905. The following year, Ritter published the "Great Memorandum" and his observations about the Schlieffen Plan as Der Schlieffen-Plan: Kritik Eines Mythos (The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth). Role in Fischer Controversy Break or continuity? In his last years, Ritter emerged as the leading critic of the left-wing historian Fritz Fischer, who claimed that there had been powerful lines of continuity between the German Empire and Nazi Germany and that it was Germany that had caused World War I. During the ferocious "Fischer Controversy", which engulfed the West German historical profession in the 1960s, Ritter was the best known of Fischer's critics. Ritter fiercely rejected Fischer's arguments that Germany had been primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914. The later volumes of Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk were taken up with the goal of rebutting Fischer's arguments. Ritter claimed that Germany had not started a war of aggression in 1914 but admitted that the situation of the German government had required a foreign policy, which contained the immediate risk of war. Against Fischer's thesis, Ritter maintained that the Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg had resisted the demands by General Ludendorff for wide-ranging annexations as a war aim. Ritter's points against Fischer As part of his critique of Fischer, Ritter contended that Germany's principal goal in 1914 was to maintain the Austria-Hungary as a great power; thus, German foreign policy was largely defensive although Fischer claimed that it was mostly aggressive. Ritter claimed that the significance that Fischer attached to the highly-bellicose advice about waging a "preventive war" in the Balkans offered in July