Sir John Wheeler Wheeler-Bennett (13 October 1902 – 9 December 1975) was a conservative English historian of German and diplomatic history, and the official biographer of King George VI. He was well known in his lifetime, and his interpretation of the role of the German Army influenced a number of British historians.
Early life
Wheeler-Bennett was born in Kent, the son of the prosperous importer John Wheeler-Bennett and his Canadian-born wife, Christine ( McNutt). He was educated at Wellington House school in Westgate on Sea and then at Malvern College and did not regard his youth as a happy one. His health was poor; he did not attend university or join the military.
In the early 1920s he worked as an aide to Major-General Sir Neill Malcolm in the Middle East and Berlin, then from 1923 to 1924 was in the publicity department of the League of Nations in Geneva. After that, he was appointed as director of the information department of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and was editor of its Bulletin of International News between 1924 and 1932.
Wheeler-Bennett and Pre-War Nazi Germany
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 Royal Institute of International Affairs:
Wheeler-Bennett abandoned this view after reading Mein Kampf, which caused him to recognize that Hitler had more radical goals. 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 Second World War, Wheeler-Bennett befriended or was on speaking terms with a number of significant people in Europe. He had contact with Heinrich Brüning, Basil Liddell Hart, Franz von Papen, Lord Tweedsmuir, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, Leon Trotsky, Hans von Seeckt, Max Hoffmann, Lewis Bernstein Namier, Benito Mussolini, Robert Bruce Lockhart, Karl Radek, Sir Robert Vansittart, Kurt von Schleicher, Isaiah Berlin, Tomáš Masaryk, Engelbert Dollfuss, the former Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adam von Trott zu Solz, Louis Barthou, Lord Lothian, Winston Churchill, and Edvard Beneš.
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
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. 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 Foreign Office in London. He was promoted to Assistant Director General of the Political Intelligence Department, later serving in the Political Adviser's Department in SHAEF in 1944–1945. In 1945–1946, he assisted the British prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials.
Views on the German Resistance
As a member of the Foreign Office's Political Intelligence Department, Wheeler-Bennett wrote on 25 July 1944 that:
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."
Career after 1945
In 1945 Wheeler-Bennett married an American, Ruth Risher, and after the end of the Second World War they settled at Garsington Manor, near Oxford. Despite his lack of a university education and his non-academic status as a historian, Wheeler-Bennett was appointed to teach International Relations at St Antony's College and also taught at New College, Oxford, from 1946 to 1950.