Student of German philosophy proves key in ‘Cracking the Nazi Code’
How does a book reviewer choose books to review? A good question. Sometimes for me there is an element of chance in the process. I recently came to “Cracking the Nazi Code” through a friend in the Bonachords Mens Choir. Don Pettypiece has a daughter down east and he handed me the book after rehearsal one evening (it was a gift from her) knowing that I might be interested. It proved to be a firecracker of a Canadian story and a path-breaking look at the inner workings of British intelligence between the two world wars.
“Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada’s Greatest Spy” is the story of Winthrop Bell, a well-to-do Halifax native and graduate of Mount Allison University, who — after studying German philosophy in Gottingen and earning his PhD — was well positioned to serve as a spy for British intelligence in Germany during the months that proceeded the Armistice after the Great War. It was slowly being worked out in Paris in the wake of the fighting and there were many who feared that it might prove to be a shipwreck. Winthrop Bell’s story has remained hidden in classified archival papers at Mount Allison and in intelligence documents for over a century. It is a doozer of a tale.
The author is a young University of New Brunswick philosophy professor named Jason Bell, who is no relation to the spy at the heart of the story. Winthrop Bell was a brilliant and talented Canadian whose story has been hidden in classified files for decades. He is, for instance, nowhere mentioned in Margaret MacMillan’s magisterial “Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World” (2001), though Bell provided information and advice to leaders like David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. This period did indeed change the world but in ways that require further study given Winthrop Bell’s adventures and achievements as a British spy. Code-named A12, he proved a very effective agent during these tension-filled, postwar months.
Bell’s diary and his journalistic columns as a Reuters reporter (this was his cover as a spy) take the reader inside a war-torn and “broken” Germany as the peace negotiations were slowly unfolding in Paris. With France pushing for a crippling set of restrictions and penalties against Germany, we get a first-hand look at a country suffering under devastating prohibitions but not yet ready to be sorrowstricken with guilt.
Knowing Germany well from his Gottingen studies and through his important social connections there, Bell found himself arguing persuasively on the one hand for a necessary benevolence to Germany and on the other for rigorous attention to the rising power and influence of right-wing political forces in the country. As such he was quick to identify the emerging power and swagger of the Friekorps who only partially masked their anti-Semitic goals in their pursuit of power from 1919 onward.
Jason Bell presents Winthrop Bell’s story as dramatically as he can, striving to capture the events in his life in Berlin when he was a spy. He argues convincingly that “a good spy can prevent a war so quietly that hardly anyone realizes it.” Bell was that effective in his contacts and several of his prescient warnings. Drawing upon his matter-of-fact diary entries and his factual newspaper articles, the author makes a compelling and exciting case for the effectiveness of Bell’s work.
It was never easy sledding and there were dangers aplenty. As a working spy for British intelligence, Winthrop Bell had little time for personal pleasures, but his biographer manages to generate great excitement in his treatment of Bell’s adventures as a spy in Berlin. Among his many connections we meet is a young Albert Einstein, then a well-respected physicist in Berlin but not yet famous.
Winthrop Bell was an active spy for less than a year, but he crammed many interviews and observations into that time. His experiences led him to warn British authorities not to be too restrictive in seeking to limit the recovery of the German economy. He saw a country on the edge of misery and much in need of economic stimulus rather than harnessing policies. But he also identified two powerful factors on the rise in postwar Berlin — the communist Soviet threat from the east and the rise of what would later be called Nazism among the decommissioned soldiers and rightwing fanatics within Germany.
Try as he might to warn those in power about the true nature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, he found little interest in his concern. He knew that behind the asserted superiority of “pure Aryan race” lay plans for the slaughter of the hated Jews and other despised minorities. The plan was on the verge of becoming a horrible initiative in Europe. Bell later named it “Hitler’s Extermination Program.” This was the ‘Nazi code’ that Bell identified as operating as early as 1915. The antics of right-wing leaders like General Ludendorff masked, but only partially, the genocidal plans of his growing army. Ludendorff is described as a “jew-hating” racist, “one of history’s most devastating but least known dictators.” He was preparing the way for Hitler who was still a minor military figure in the shadows of the party.
But how did Winthrop Bell become A12? He came to Gottingen as a mature philosophy student to study under the famous German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. With degrees from Mount Allison and a varied work history behind him (one that included rugged outdoors labour and indoor business success), he arrived in his late 20s to beautiful Gottingen and was much admired by Husserl himself. He had money enough to study and enjoy life, though the winds of war were rising around him.
After three years at Gottingen with his thesis defended, the war broke out and he was imprisoned as an alien. His doctorate was arbitrarily taken from him and he became an inmate of Ruhleben, the famous German prison of some 5,000 inmates where he spent the next four years learning from others and teaching philosophy to fellow inmates. With rather cheeky hindsight, Jason Bell calls Ruhleban “a four-year espionage training camp.”
But he had social connections and a standing offer of a teaching job at Harvard. As Jason Bell puts it, he had two passports — his British document and “his doctoral education with Husserl.” However, he did not go home directly upon leaving Germany.
In London he met with an old Nova Scotia friend of his father, Prime Minister Robert Borden, who was there for the peace talks. Borden recognized Bell’s knowledge of Germany and appreciated his informative reports so much that he circulated them among his high-placed colleagues. These connections helped Bell to land his place as A12 in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.
This clearly was a special assignment for a young Canadian and Bell took it on with utmost seriousness. His strong work habits allowed him to spend long nights in getting his journalistic cables ready for secret mailings out of Germany.
Though he would go on to teach philosophy at Harvard, he was happiest when he could return to his native Nova Scotia. There he married and built a home near Chester, though not before he worked on Canada’s behalf during the Second World War. That too makes a good story as with his brother he helped build the Canadian aviation industry even as he continued to try to expose the still-hidden agenda of the Nazis.
Winthrop Bell was an extraordinarily able Canadian. I am sure we will learn more about him in the future. And I thank Don for providing me with the book.