complied with this policy. 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. After the death of King George VI in 1952 Wheeler-Bennett was appointed as his official biographer, and his biography appeared in 1958. In History in Our Time, David Cannadine criticized the book as "courtly and obsequious", the history of "an icon rather than of an individual," and a "sanitised sarcophagus". The Nemesis of Power Wheeler-Bennett was best known for his The Nemesis of Power (1953), which documented the German Army's involvement in politics and reiterated Wheeler-Bennet's hostile views on the German Resistance. His thesis was that under Seeckt's leadership during the Weimar period, the Reichswehr had formed a "State within the State" that largely preserved its autonomy from the politicians in Berlin, but did not, however, play an active role in day-to-day politics. After 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 had inadvertently paved the way for Adolf Hitler. In 1964 a revised edition of The Nemesis of Power appeared, in which Wheeler-Bennett continued his narrative up to the 20 July Plot of 1944. 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). By agreeing to support the Nazi dictatorship, the Army had tolerated a regime that quietly and gradually dismantled the "State within the state". After Blomberg's and Fritsch's fall in 1938, the Army had increasingly become a tool of the Nazi regime rather than the independent actor that it had been before. Despite his hostility to the German generals, in the book Wheeler-Bennett acknowledged the courage of Claus von Stauffenberg and others. Overall, he concluded that the conservative opposition within the