A professor of philosophy—and occasional spy for Britain—sent back early warnings from his time in Germany after World War I.
By Andrew Nagorski
A Nazi rally in Munich in 1923. PHOTO: ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES
Winthrop Bell, a British subject born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was studying philosophy in the German university town of Göttingen in 1914 when World War I trapped him there. Detained as an enemy alien, he was nonetheless allowed to defend his dissertation (which he had written in German) with three of his professors questioning him in his cell. As Jason Bell writes in “Cracking the Nazi Code,” this amounted to “one of the most unorthodox doctoral defences in history.”
Though he shares a surname with his subject, the author is not related to Winthrop Bell. He is, however, a philosopher as well, teaching at the University of New Brunswick. In “Cracking the Nazi Code,” Mr. Bell offers a deeply researched, intriguing portrait of Winthrop. After emerging from four years of largely genteel captivity in Germany, the young scholar was recruited in London by Britain’s nascent Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS (the department later known as MI6). As his biographer puts it: “In 1918, no Briton knew more about Germany than Bell.”
SIS quickly dispatched Winthrop, under cover as a Reuters correspondent, back to Germany, which was attempting to reinvent itself as a liberal democracy. His mission, as he saw it, was to help his German friends who supported that goal—and to warn the victorious powers of the sinister forces seeking a very different postwar outcome. He dined with top officials and businessmen and dodged bullets during Berlin street battles between extremists of the left and right.
Winthrop’s career in the next few years included stints as a philosophy professor at Harvard and businessman in Nova Scotia before he embarked on more intelligence gathering in Germany during Hitler’s rise in the 1930s. It is a remarkable story, but until Mr. Bell received permission to examine Winthrop’s papers, which had been under government seal, his story was not so much forgotten as unknown. The author, who spent 15 years on his research, argues that his subject was a super-spy who “led the fight” against the Nazis, both in their early days and on the eve of World War II.
