Elizabeth Wiskemann
[2] Her mother, Emily Burton, belonged to a prosperous family of local merchants, and her father, Heinrich Odomar Hugo Wiskemann, a businessman from Hesse-Cassel in Germany, had emigrated to England in order to avoid being conscripted into the Prussian army.
Supporting herself, Elizabeth Wiskemann briefly worked as a teacher in a girls' boarding school, before beginning her doctoral dissertation, winning a research scholarship from the Gilchrist Educational Trust.
instead of a Ph.D.[10] Wiskemann attributed this to Temperley's documented hostility towards female students, noting that other members of the examining committee were inclined to award the Ph.D. but could not oppose him.
[13] In the "Golden Twenties" as Germans called the years between 1924-1929, Germany was perceived in Britain as the home of "liberalism, modernism, and hedonism...avant-garde art and architecture...social deviance and sexual decadence".
[15] The American historian Colin Storer wrote it was no accident that Wiskemann chose to settle in Berlin, a city that was identified with modernity and was viewed as the home of the "New Woman", able to make a career for herself instead of waiting for the right man to marry.
[16] She socialised there with Phyllis Dobb, Arthur Koestler, Erich Mendelsohn, and George Grosz, recounting her experiences in her memoir, The Europe I Saw, as well as in letters to friends, including Julian Bell.
[16] During this time, she closely observed political developments, witnessing in particular the rise of Nazism, and her interest was enabled by a friendship with the journalist Frederick A. Voigt, who was reporting for the Guardian.
[1] In 1937, Wiskemann was commissioned by the historian Arnold Toynbee, to write an account of German minorities outside the Reich, particularly those living in Czechoslovakia, for a series of monographs published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
[11] Consequently, resigning from Cambridge, she traveled back to Czechoslovakia for research, and in 1938 she published Czechs and Germans: A Study of the Struggles in the Historic Provinces of Bohemia and Moravia.
[24] The diplomat Robert Hadow wrote to Toynbee on 16 May 1938 that publishing Wiskemann's book would be "a set-back to the very real effort...which is being made to bring M. Benes to a sense of the "realities" of the situation and so to direct him into negotiations with Henlein".
[1] It also received substantial attention in the press, as Lord Runciman, delegated to mediate in Czechoslovakia, was photographed by media sources reading the book as he left for Prague.
[1][27] Following the publication of this book, Wiskemann engaged in a lecture tour, visiting the United States of America, while continuing to publish on issues of central European politics.
[28] In New York, she accepted an invitation from Oxford University Press' office to write an account of German politics after the Munich conference, publishing Undeclared War in 1939.
The Foreign Office provided her with an assistant, Elizabeth Scott-Montagu, the daughter of Lord John Scott, to enable her to continue sending detailed and extensive reports.
[36] The information that she provided to the British Foreign Office included socio-economic conditions, public opinion and morale, details of labor camps and the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz, and mass killings and euthanasia programs in Romania and Poland.
[39] Historian Martin Gilbert described what happened next that led the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, to halt to the deportations: During her time as an intelligence officer, Wiskemann remained closely involved with German resistance members, passing on information about the Holocaust to British intelligence officials despite receiving instructions that she was not to report on the subject, receiving a letter in 1944 instructing her that they were "not interested at this stage in the war in German atrocities in the occupied territories or in the shootings of Jews in Poland and Hungary.
[42] In 1945, after Wiskemann retired from her work as an intelligence officer during World War II, she relocated to Italy to study political conditions there for her next research project.
[49] About Chamberlain three visits to Germany in September 1938 for summits with Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Bad Godesberg, and Munich, she wrote: "Hiter was insatiable and he asked for everything in the name of preserving a peace he despised".
[49] During the 1950s, she continued to publish, writing a history of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a memoir titled The Europe I Saw (1968), and directing a research project on the territorial dispute in Trieste for the Carnegie Foundation.
[53] Later, travelling in Europe after completing her D. Litt, she dated the poet Julian Bell, who was then living in Paris, but the affair did not survive her return to England.
[55] She was also romantically involved with Marchese Francesco Antinori, an Italian diplomat and official who had acted as a liaison between Hitler and Mussolini, and had provided information about them to British intelligence.
