Peter H. Wyden

Peter H. Wyden (October 2, 1923 – June 27, 1998) was an American journalist and historian.

Early life Wyden was born Peter Weidenreich, in Berlin to a Jewish family. His mother, Helen (née Silberstein), was a concert singer, and his father, Erich Weidenreich, was a businessman. Franz Weidenreich, German anatomist and physical anthropologist, was one of his uncles.

Wyden attended the Goldschmidt School until he left Nazi Germany for the United States in 1937. After studying at City College of New York, His training at Camp Ritchie places him among the ranks of the Ritchie Boys, a group of Military Intelligence Officers who used their language skills to obtain intel in Europe. In 2021, Peter's son Ron Wyden, a U.S. Senator, was instrumental in creating a senate resolution recognizing the Ritchie Boys for their efforts.

Career After the war, Wyden began a career in journalism, during which he worked as a reporter for The Wichita Eagle, a feature writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Washington correspondent for Newsweek magazine, a contributing editor for The Saturday Evening Post in Chicago and San Francisco, articles editor for McCall's, and executive editor for Ladies' Home Journal. His last book, published in 1998, was about schizophrenia; it was based on his personal experience as his son Jeff suffered from the mental disorder. He died on June 27, 1998, in Danbury, Connecticut.

Books Suburbia's Coddled Kids. 1962. New Jersey: Doubleday & Company, Inc. The Overweight Society. 1965. New York: Pocket Books.

Bay of Pigs – The Untold Story. 1979. New York: Simon and Schuster. The Passionate War: The Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War. 1983. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1983 Day One: Before Hiroshima and After. 1985. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1984 Stella: One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler's Germany. Anchor Books, 1993. Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin. 1989. Simon and Schuster.