Джон Уилер-Беннет: Жизнь и деятельность британского историка

the British historian
English historian (1902–1975)

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.

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.

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.

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. In 1946 the British government's Foreign Office appointed Wheeler Bennett as the British editor in chief of Documents on German Foreign Policy. This publication was based on the captured archives of the German Foreign Office, which had fallen into British and American hands in April 1945, and was a tripartite project of British, American, and French historians. In 1947, in his capacity as editor in chief Wheeler Bennett convened a group called the Joint Consultative Committee. Its self defined task was to advise the British Foreign Office on all matters pertaining to captured German records. Wheeler Bennett himself was adamantly opposed to returning any captured records to Germany, and the committee complied with this policy. The project was reconstituted in 1959, after which the West Germans continued it on a quadripartite basis under the title Akten zur deutschen Auswaertigen Politik. 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".

Wheeler Bennett was best known for his The Nemesis of Power (1953), which documented the German Army's involvement in politics and reiterated Wheeler Bennet's hostile views on the German Resistance. His thesis was that under Seeckt's leadership during the Weimar period, the Reichswehr had formed a "State within the State" that largely preserved its autonomy from the politicians in Berlin, but did not, however, play an active role in day to day politics. 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 20 July Plot of 1944. He contended that under the leadership of Werner von Blomberg and Werner von Fritsch, the German Army had chosen to acquiesce to the Nazi regime as the kind of government best able to achieve what the Army wanted; namely a militarised society that would ensure in the next war that there would be no repeat of the "stab in the back" (an explanation of the collapse of Germany in November 1918 supported by Hitler and others). By agreeing to support the Nazi dictatorship, the Army had tolerated a regime that quietly and gradually dismantled the "State within the state". After Blomberg's and Fritsch's fall in 1938, the Army had increasingly become a tool of the Nazi regime rather than the independent actor that it had been before. Despite his hostility to the German generals, in the book Wheeler Bennett acknowledged the courage of Claus von Stauffenberg and others. Overall, he concluded that the conservative opposition within the Wehrmacht had done too little, too late, to overthrow the Nazis. 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.

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). Sir John Wheeler Bennett died of cancer in London on 9 December 1975, aged 73.

Wheeler Bennett was portrayed by Tristan Sturrock in season 2, episode 6 ("Vergangenheit") of the historical drama television series The Crown (2017).