BRITAIN'S MAN IN BERLIN
Read how a dashing intellectual from Nova Scotia become a spy who warned the world of Nazi Germany's plan for a race war
Of the many important figures that had the bravery and conviction to stand up against Nazi Germany, one has remained unnoticed in war history until now. Recently declassified papers reveal that British intelligence’s secret agent, Dr Winthrop Bell, provided the first warnings about the Nazis, and thwarted their earliest battle plans.
As an undercover operative in Germany, Bell, codenamed A12, gave the first warnings of the nascent Nazi ideology in early 1919. Months before Adolf Hitler was a player in the movement, Bell warned of Nazi plans for race war. In 1919, he described how the extremists planned to target Jews and team up with Russia and Japan to fight a war of revenge. His report was an eerily prescient warning of the birth of the Axis.
Two decades later, in spring 1939, Bell wrote the first intel alert of Hitler’s plans for the Holocaust, and later that year published it in a leading Canadian newspaper. It was the first warning of the horrors to come.
Bell wanted to warn the West to eradicate the Nazis before they became powerful, but the plot he described seemed, to some, too incredible to be true. Still, his warnings were sufficient to raise the alarm among far-sighted people, like the chiefs of MI6. Britain was sufficiently worried about the Nazis to rearm and counter them.
Thinker, student, spy
Nearly 6ft (1.8m) tall, Bell was a handsome, blond, blue-eyed philosopher, outdoorsman, engineer and businessman. Before beginning his espionage career, he was a railway surveyor in the inhospitable northern Canadian forests and served on Emmanuel College’s rowing team at Cambridge University.
But he wasn’t just muscles and rugged backstory. A New Brunswick newspaper described his “amazing capacity for hard work” and “studious, friendly, gracious, attractive” personality.
Bell was born in 1884 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and raised in a prosperous, academically inclined family. His father, the owner of a successful ship-outfitting business, was a genial, humble man who gladly stood against injustice. Bell’s mother, a perfectionist unto exhaustion, studied music in Boston before teaching piano in Sackville.
After graduating with honours from the prestigious Mount Allison University in Sackville in 1908, Bell went to Harvard to study philosophy. He was planning to become a philosophy professor at Harvard when he arrived at Göttingen, Germany, in 1911, to become the first Anglophone doctoral student of the famous German philosopher Edmund Husserl, who was greatly impressed with the young man. Bell was making his final dissertation revisions when Britain entered the Great War in August 1914. As a British subject, he was arrested and his doctorate was withdrawn.
