John Wheeler-Bennett
Sir John Wheeler Wheeler-Bennett
Early life
This section needs additional citations for verification. (July 2022) |
Wheeler-Bennett was born in
In the early 1920s he worked as an aide to
Wheeler-Bennett and Pre-War Nazi Germany
This section needs additional citations for verification. (July 2022) |
Wheeler-Bennett lived in Germany between 1927 and 1934 and witnessed at first-hand the final years of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazi Germany. During his time in Berlin, he became an unofficial agent and advisor to the British government on international events. He also enjoyed some success as a horse-breeder.
In 1933, Wheeler-Bennett told the
Wheeler-Bennett abandoned this view after reading Mein Kampf, which caused him to recognize that Hitler had more radical goals.[3] He published a biography of Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg, and his book The Forgotten Peace was a study of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
In the years before the
After the war, Wheeler-Bennett was a critic of Appeasement, and ten years after the Munich Agreement he wrote a book condemning it.
Wartime and post-war career as a government official
This section needs additional citations for verification. (July 2022) |
In 1939, Wheeler-Bennett went to the United States to serve as a lecturer on international relations at the University of Virginia. He was strongly pro-American, and the South was always his favourite part of the United States.
From 1940 onward, Wheeler-Bennett helped to establish the British Information Service in New York City, an agency charged with trying to persuade the United States to enter the war on the Allied side and better present the British case to the US press.[4] He was a supporter of the German Resistance to Hitler and became friendly with Adam von Trott zu Solz.
In 1942, Wheeler-Bennett returned home to take up a position in the Political Warfare Department of the British government's
Views on the German Resistance
As a member of the Foreign Office's Political Intelligence Department, Wheeler-Bennett wrote on 25 July 1944 that:
It may now be said with some definiteness that we are better off with things as they are today than if the plot of 20 July had succeeded and Hitler had been assassinated... By the failure of the plot we have been spared the embarrassments, both at home and in the United States, which might have resulted from such a move, and, moreover, the present purge [by the
SS have done us an appreciable service in removing a selection of those who would undoubtedly have posed as 'good' Germans after the war... It is to our advantage therefore that the purge should continue, since the killing of Germans by Germans will save us from future embarrassment of many kinds."[5]
Wheeler-Bennett's views on Germany and the German Resistance caused unease to some of his wartime colleagues, and an internal paper of his of February 1944 was condemned by Professor Thomas Marshall, of the Foreign Office Research Department, as a "vitriolic little paper" and "hardly worthy of its distinguished author."[6]
Career after 1945
This section needs additional citations for verification. (July 2022) |
In 1945 Wheeler-Bennett married an American, Ruth Risher, and after the end of the Second World War they settled at
In 1946 the British government's
After the death of King George VI in 1952 Wheeler-Bennett was appointed as his official biographer, and his biography appeared in 1958. In History in Our Time, David Cannadine criticized the book as "courtly and obsequious", the history of "an icon rather than of an individual," and a "sanitised sarcophagus".
The Nemesis of Power
Wheeler-Bennett was best known for his The Nemesis of Power (1953), which documented the
After Seeckt's downfall in 1926, which had been engineered by Schleicher, the Reichswehr became increasingly engaged in political intrigues. In Wheeler-Bennett's view, Schleicher was the "Gravedigger of the Weimar Republic" who succeeded in undermining democracy but failed completely to build any sort of stable structure in its place. Thus, by a mixture of cunning, intrigue, and inept manoeuvres, Schleicher had inadvertently paved the way for Adolf Hitler.
In 1964 a revised edition of The Nemesis of Power appeared, in which Wheeler-Bennett continued his narrative up to the
He was also critical of Germany's largest right-wing party before the Nazi era, the German National People's Party, saying that their failure to accept the Weimar Republic was "more influenced by feelings of disloyalty to the Republic than of loyalty to the Kaiser," and ultimately led them to prop up Hitler.[8]
Final decades
An Anglican, Wheeler-Bennett enjoyed life in the English countryside. In 1958 he became founding chairman of the Ditchley Foundation, the Anglo-American conference group. From 1959 until his death he served as historical adviser to the Royal Archives. In 1972 he was elected to the British Academy.
Wheeler-Bennett was a follower of the Great Man school of history, and his writings usually explained historical events in terms of the leading personalities of the period. This view of history, together with his own conservative outlook, inclined him to make Winston Churchill a principal hero of his writings, as shown in his well-illustrated book The History Makers: Leaders And Statesmen of The 20th Century (1973).[9]
Sir John Wheeler-Bennett died of cancer in London on 9 December 1975, aged 73.
Cultural depictions
Wheeler-Bennett was portrayed by
Works
- Information on the Reduction of Armaments, with an introduction by Major-General Sir Neill L. Malcolm, 1925. online edition
- Information on the Renunciation of War, 1927–1928 with an introduction by Philip H. Kerr, 1928. online edition
- Disarmament And Security Since Locarno 1925–1931; Being The Political And Technical Background of the General Disarmament Conference, 1932, New York: Macmillan, 1932.
- The Wreck of Reparations, Being The Political Background of the Lausanne Agreement, 1932, 1933. online edition
- Documents On International Affairs: 1933 editor online
- The Pipe Dream Of Peace: The Story Of The Collapse Of Disarmament, William Morrow and Company, 1935. online edition
- Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan, London: Macmillan and Company, 1936. online free
- Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918, 1938. online free
- The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and Germany's Eastern Policy, Clarendon Press, 1939.
- The Defeat of the German Army, 1918, with Cyril Falls, Special Service Division: Army Service Forces, 1943.
- Munich: Prologue To Tragedy, 1948.
- The Nemesis Of Power: The German Army In Politics, 1918–1945, 1953, revised edition 1964. online free
- King George VI, His Life and Reign, St. Martin's Press, 1958. online free
- John Anderson, Viscount Waverley, St. Martin's Press, 1962. online edition
- A Wreath To Clio: Studies In British, American and German Affairs, St. Martin's Press, 1967. online edition
- Action This Day; Working With Churchill. Memoirs by Lord Norman Brook (And Others), edited with an introduction by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, London: Macmillan and Co., 1968.
- The Semblance Of Peace: The Political Settlement After The Second World War, with Anthony Nicholls, W.W. Norton and Company, 1972. excerpt
- The History Makers: Leaders And Statesmen of The 20th Century, edited by Lord Frank Pakenham Longford and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, chronologies and editorial assistance by Christine Nicholls, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973.
- Knaves, Fools And Heroes: In Europe Between The Wars, (Macmillan, 1974). online edition; autobiography vol 1
- Special Relationships: America In Peace And War, New York: Macmillan, 1975. autobiography
vol 2 online edition;
- Friends, Enemies, And Sovereigns, New York: Macmillan, 1976 online free; autobiography vol 3
Notes
- ^ Who's Who 1974, London : A. & C. Black, 1974, p. 3478
- ^ International Affairs, May 1933, pp 318–319
- OCLC 1042099346.
- ^ ONDB "Bennett, Sir John Wheeler Wheeler- (1902–1975), historian and expert on international affairs." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 25 Apr. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-31826.
- ^ British National Archives file FO 371/39062
- ^ British National Archives file FO 371/39137
- ISBN 978-0-521-88018-3
- ^ Wheeler-Bennett, John The Nemesis of Power, London: Macmillan, 1967 page 208.
- ^ Victoria Schofield, Witness to History: The Life of John Wheeler-Bennett (2012) pp 81, 147, 243, 268
References
- "Bennett, Sir John Wheeler Wheeler-" Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
- Bullock, Alan, "John Wheeler Wheeler-Bennett, 1902–1975 (Obituary)", Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1979), 799–833.
- Cull, Nicholas. Selling War: The British Propaganda Against American "Neutrality" In World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.