Alfred Graf von Schlieffen (28 February 1833 - 4 January 1913) was a German field marshal and strategist who served as Chief of the Imperial German General Staff from 1891 to 1905. His name lived on in the 1905 Schlieffen Plan for the defeat of the French Third Republic and the Russian Empire. In his youth, he served under Helmuth von Moltke the Elder during the Franco-Prussian War. Within two years of Schlieffen's death, World War I began, and the German high command badly bungled the Plan he had left them.