Plans alone could not restore German heavy-gun production

Could Germany simply reuse its World War I heavy-gun plans before World War II?

No. Drawings survived, but lost infrastructure and institutional memory made the practical capability much harder to recover.

Historical research practice offers an analogy for tacit knowledge that rarely appears fully in formal instructions. A drawing can describe a gun, but it cannot capture every judgment used to machine, assemble, test, and improve it. Versailles removed physical infrastructure and interrupted the generations through which German heavy-gun and naval-architecture experience had been passed. Rebuilding factories therefore could not instantly recreate the people, routines, and institutional memory behind reliable weapons. Surviving plans are not the same as a surviving industrial capability.