John Wheeler-Bennett - Post-1945 Career

Post-1945 Career

In 1945, Wheeler-Bennett married an American woman named Ruth Risher and settled after the war at Garsington Manor, near Garsington, United Kingdom. Despite his lack of university education and his status as a self-proclaimed amateur historian, Wheeler-Bennett was hired to teach International Relations at St. Antony's College and at New College at Oxford University after World War II from 1946-1950.

In 1946, the British Foreign Office appointed him the British editor-in-chief of the edition Documents on German Foreign Policy. This publication was based on the captured archive of the German Foreign Office that had fallen into British and American hands in April 1945. The project was terminated in 1959 as a tripartite project of British, American and French historians. The West Germans continued the document edition on a quadripartite basis under the title Akten zur deutschen Auswaertigen Politik. Beginning in 1947, Wheeler-Bennett convened a group that called itself 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 West Germany and used the committee accordingly.

He was appointed as official biographer of King George VI, after the King's death in 1952, producing a biography which appeared in 1958. Historian David Cannadine in History In Our Time criticised Wheeler-Bennett's book as "courtly and obsequious," the history "of an icon rather than of an individual," and a "sanitised sarcophagus."