Johannes Steel (born Herbert Stahl, 1908–1988) is best known for his 1934 book The Second World War. The son of a German-Dutch landowner, Steel grew up in Elberfeld on the border of the two countries. He studied in Heidelberg, Oxford, Geneva, and Berlin, and then worked as a journalist. He fled to the France and then Britain when the Nazis took power and later emigrated to the United States. He continued to work as a journalist, writing for The Nation and the New York Post. He was alleged to have had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence during World War II.