Elizabeth Wiskemann

Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann (born August 13, 1899 in Sidcup , Kent, † July 5, 1971 in London ) was a British historian and journalist .

Life

Wiskemann was born in the family of the businessman Heinrich Odomar Hugo Wiskemann, who had lived in England since the 1860s. She was educated at Notting Hill High School and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge . In 1921 she received the Master of Letters for a study on Napoleon III.

In 1930 she visited Berlin for the first time and was enthusiastic about the colorful life in the city at the end of the Weimar Republic . From then on she lived in this city for six months a year and worked as a journalist in addition to her lectureship in Cambridge . She was friends with British correspondents Frederick Voigt ( The Guardian ) and Norman Ebbutt ( The Times ). Through her German friends, she began to get involved politically and she became a committed opponent of the National Socialists . In July 1936 she was therefore arrested by the Gestapo and expelled from the German Reich . In 1937 she was commissioned by the Royal Institute of International Affairs to conduct a study of the ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland. She published the results in her first two books: Czechs and Germans (1938) and Undeclared War (1939).

Wiskemann spent the time of the Second World War in Switzerland . She was officially employed as the assistant to the press attaché of the British representative in Bern , and from 1941 she was also formally accredited as a vice press attaché. However, she mainly worked for the British state intelligence service Political Intelligence Department (PID) - her department was integrated into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in July 1940 and, due to ongoing friction within the British command structure, became an independent Political Warfare Executive one year later . Wiskemann made assessments of the situation in Hungary and Germany and the areas occupied by the Wehrmacht . To this end, she also used her contacts to opposition circles in Berlin, including Hans Bernd Gisevius . The former government councilor had belonged to the circles of the German military opposition since 1938 and was inaugurated in its first assassination plans in 1938. It was after the German invasion of Poland to the Ausland / Abwehr in the high command of the armed forces under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris confiscated and resided as an agent in Switzerland. Rudolf Rößler was one of Wiskemann's intelligence-relevant contacts in Switzerland . In addition, she had a regular exchange of information with the OSS President in Switzerland Allen Dulles . The German anti-fascist Harry Bergholz (1880–1955) was one of her employees in the intelligence service .

After the war, Wiskemann returned to England. At times she worked as a correspondent in Rome. In 1949 she published The Rome-Berlin Axis , a historical treatise on the relationship between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and German-Italian relations during the war.

During the 1950s and 1960s she worked as an academic teacher at various universities in Great Britain, including the University of Oxford , the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sussex .

In 1968 she published her memoir The Europe I Saw .

Fonts (selection)

• Experienced Europe. A political travelogue 1930–1945. Bern, Stuttgart 1969
• Czechs and Germans. (1938)
• Undeclared War. (1939)
• Italy. (1947)
• The Rome-Berlin Axis. (1949)
• Germany's Eastern Neighbors. (1956)
• A Great Swiss Newspaper: the Story of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung . (1959)
• The Europe of the Dictators. (1966)
• The Europe I Saw. (1968)
• Fascism in Italy. (1969)
• Italy Since 1945. (1971)
• Chapter Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe in CL Mowat, The New Cambridge Modern History , Volume 12, 1968

literature

• Peter Kamber: Secret Agent. Novel. BasisDruck, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86163-097-5 , review in: Die Weltwoche .
• Elizabeth Montagu: Honorouble Rebel. The memoirs of Elizabeth Montagu, later Elizabeth Varley. Montagu Ventures, Beaulieu 2003, ISBN 0-9523386-1-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Elizabeth Wiskemann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Elizabeth Wiskemann in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• To Elizabeth Wiskemann website for the novel by Peter Kamber