John Wheeler-Bennett - The Nemesis of Power

Wheeler-Bennett was best known for The Nemesis of Power which documented the German Army's involvement in politics and reiterated Wheeler-Bennet's hostile views on the German Resistance. Foreign Office files, now in the British National Archives, reveal that Wheeler-Bennett attempted to prevent access, by other historians, to papers which did not support the views he expressed in The Nemesis of Power.

His thesis was that under von Seeckt's leadership during the Weimar period, the Reichswehr formed a "State within the State" that largely preserved its autonomy from the politicians in Berlin, but that it did not, however, play an active role in day-to-day politics.

After von 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 inadvertently paved the way for Adolf Hitler.

In the revised 1964 edition of The Nemesis of Power, Wheeler-Bennett continued his story right up to the July 20 Plot of 1944. He contended that under the leadership of Werner von Blomberg and Werner von Fritsch, the German Army chose to acquiesce in the Nazi regime as the kind of government best able to achieve what the Army wanted; namely a militarized society that would ensure in the next war that there would be no repeat of the “stab in the back”.

By agreeing to support the Nazi dictatorship, the Army tolerated a regime that quietly and gradually dismantled the “State within the state”. After Blomberg's and Fritsch's fall in 1938, the Army increasingly became just a tool of the Nazi regime rather than the independent actor that it had been before. Despite his hostility to the German generals, Wheeler-Bennett in the book acknowledged the courage of men such as Claus von Stauffenberg. Overall, he concluded that the conservative opposition within the Wehrmacht had done too little, too late to overthrow the Nazis.