John G. Stoessinger was born on 14 October 1927 to a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. After the annexation of Austria in March 1938, he and his mother fled to her parents in Prague; his father had emigrated to Palestine, where he died in 1939. In March 1941, the family – Stoessinger's mother had meanwhile remarried – fled from occupied Prague via the Soviet Union and Japan (Kobe) to Shanghai, where Stoessinger was able to attend an English school. In 1947, he went on to the United States; his mother and stepfather followed him there in 1949. John Stoessinger began studying politology at Grinnell College, Iowa, where he obtained his B.A. in 1950. He then went on to Harvard, where he first and foremost attended lectures by Sigmund Neumann; here he was awarded an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1954. After various teaching posts, for example at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, John Stoessinger began teaching political science at City University of New York's Hunter College in 1957; in 1964 he was appointed to a professorship. In 1969, he led the Seminar on International Relations at Harvard University. From 1967 to 1974, he was the acting director of the UN’s political affairs division; he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Besides holding academic and political offices, he lectures extensively, also on radio and television. Nowadays, Stoessinger, who lives in Encinitas, California, teaches global diplomacy at the University of San Diego, California.

John G. Stoessinger has published 10 books on the subject of international relations, including “The United Nations and the Superpowers” (New York, 1965) and “Nations at Dawn: China, Russia, and America” (1st ed. New York, 1971 under the title “Nations in Darkness”). His book “The Might of Nations: World Politics in Our Time” (New York, 1961) was awarded Columbia University's Bancroft Prize for the best book of 1962 and went into 10 editions.
His work “Why Nations Go to War” (New York, 1974) appeared in 2007 and also went into 10th editions. Stoessinger has received numerous awards, including an Honorary Doctor of Law degree from Grinnell College, Iowa, in 1970 and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Drury University, Springfield, Missouri, in 2007.

The pre-mortem legacy bequeathed to the German Exile Archive includes personal documents from Stoessinger's exile in Shanghai such as school certificates from the Public & Thomas Hanbury School for Boys and numerous photographs. It also includes documents and letters from Japanese diplomat Ryoichi Manabe, who the Stoessingers met when fleeing from Prague on the Trans-Siberian Express; as the Japanese consul in Shanghai, he made it possible for them to live outside the Jewish ghetto in Hongkew, which was established after Pearl Harbor and directly controlled by Japanese military forces. In his autobiographical essay “Good Men in Dark Times: a Story of Moral Heroism”, Stoessinger remembers Ryoichi Manabe, whom he met once again in Tokyo in 1995, and Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Prague, who obtained a Japanese transit visa for the family and thus saved their lives. The pre-mortem legacy also includes specimen copies of all Stoessinger's publications, including the typescript of his dissertation of 1953, which was published in 1956 under the title “The Refugee and the World Community”. Furthermore, the collection contains 13 letters from former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a friend of Stoessinger's who was a fellow student at Harvard and whose politics Stoessinger investigated from his perspective as a politician and academic in his book “Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power” (New York, 1976).