Sir John Wheeler Wheeler-Bennett GCVO CMG OBE FBA FRSL (13 October 1902 – 9 December 1975) was a conservative English historian of German and diplomatic history, and the official biographer of King George VI.
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.
[2]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 Second World War, Wheeler-Bennett befriended or was on speaking terms with a number of significant people in Europe.
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.
"[6] 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Wheeler-Bennett was portrayed by Tristan Sturrock in season 2, episode 6 ("Vergangenheit") of the historical drama television series The Crown (2017).