CRACKING THE NAZI CODE

A Canadian scholar tells the story of a dynamic yet understated Renaissance man who was the first to decipher the plans for Hitler’s Final Solution.

University of New Brunswick professor of philosophy Jason Bell presents a remarkable book about a remarkable man heretofore unknown. Yet in this author’s capable hands, the name Winthrop Bell (1884-1965) should resound in the annals of history. The author was granted access to the previously classified espionage documents of the other Bell (no relation), a Canadian academic and MI6 spy known as A12 who diagnosed the rise of the Nazi conspiracy in Germany just after World War I and became one of the Hitler regime’s greatest enemies. The author’s own academic talents serve him extremely well throughout this fascinating, well-paced text. He’s cobbled together information gleaned from unpublished papers in Canadian, German, and British archives to demonstrate how Winthrop Bell’s knack for intelligence gathering, his intellectual prowess, and his keen reading of the subtext of Mein Kampf, along with his facility in the field of phenomenology, enabled him to decipher Hitler’s plans to eradicate not only Jews, but all non-Aryans. Winthrop Bell’s notes, writes the author, became “the world’s first published warning of Hitler’s plans for worldwide genocide.” The author provides vivid, exciting descriptions of Winthrop Bell’s often harrowing experiences, observational powers, and yeoman efforts to warn those in power in Great Britain and elsewhere of what was really happening in Germany and how to stop it. This book is a significant and timely achievement, and the author should be commended for bringing to colorful life the story of the courageous, intelligent, and infinitely interesting Winthrop Bell, a man whose name should always be registered in the first rank of heroic freedom-fighters and who, as the author points how, cracked not only the Nazi code but the peace code as well.

A masterful profile of a significant historical figure.