Photo by Robert Blanchard
Jason Bell is the author of the new book Cracking the Nazi Code. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, and he lives in New Brunswick, Canada.
Q: What inspired you to write Cracking the Nazi Code?
A: In 2008, I made an extremely lucky find in a German library that led me to the book’s real-life hero, Winthrop Bell, who was a Canadian-British spy in 1919.
Though I was originally interested in Bell as a philosopher, I was inspired to write about his hidden role in history after seeing the light his intel shines on the secret origin of World War II.
I was originally looking in the German archives for a missing link between the philosophical schools of pragmatism and phenomenology. I found a century-old dissertation explaining the connection, which was an amazing philosophical find, but it was missing two pages.
I soon learned that the collected papers of the author, Dr. Winthrop Bell, are housed in New Brunswick, Canada, at Mount Allison University. For a reason that wasn’t known to me at the time, they were being held under restriction. I asked for the papers to be opened, and the authorities agreed.
I soon learned that the papers had been classified as secret because Bell had been a spy for the British and Canadian governments in Germany after World War I. Remarkably, he was the first to warn the West about Nazi plans for World War II, in 1919.
Two decades later, in the spring of 1939, he read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and speeches by leading Nazis, and warned his intelligence contacts about the Nazis’ plan for worldwide genocide against the Jews and other races. Later in 1939, his alert was published in the Canadian newspaper Saturday Night—three years before the next known warning in English-language newspapers.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I began researching the book by spending two years at the Bell papers at Mount Allison University. Though my initial focus was his philosophical writings, I also read through his voluminous notes from his espionage career, and realized it was a story that needed to be told. I made additional research visits to archives in the United Kingdom, where other of Bell’s declassified papers are held.
In the course of my research, I was surprised to learn just how much British intelligence heard about antisemitic plots in Germany, even before Hitler became a leader in the movement.
Besides Bell’s reports, news ran in British newspapers in early 1918 about plans for Germany’s secret Weltkrieg--World War--that would begin against Jews on the same day the Great War ended. I was astounded to learn that November 11, 1918 wasn’t just Armistice Day—it was also the first day of World War II.
Q: The writer Rosemary Sullivan said of the book, “Brilliantly researched, Cracking the Nazi Code upends our conventional, often inaccurate, understanding of the Nazis’ rise to power after WWI.” What do you think of that description?
A: Rosemary Sullivan is pointing to inaccuracies in a widely believed portrait of Hitler as creating Nazism from nothing, then building it into a world-threatening power, virtually single-handedly.
Bell’s declassified intel shows that months before Hitler was a junior leader in the movement, Nazism was already in full swing. By the fall of 1919, Bell warned, the Nazis were in a position to take over Germany any time they wanted. The führer’s ascendency to national power happened because of enormous behind-the-scenes support from powerful racist groups.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Readers will gain a more accurate understanding of the birth of Nazism. This newly revealed intel history can help us be more scientific in defeating resurgent antisemitism today.
Bell’s spy career shows a period of weakness in the gestational period of racist extremism. He had a brilliant plan for defeating the Nazis by 1920—Germany’s economy would be rehabilitated so that dangerous young men could get jobs and become productive citizens rather than terrorists.
Tragically, the plan wasn’t adopted by British authorities at the time. Yet, after World War II, Bell’s plan provided intellectual foundations for the Marshall Plan. Readers will see how this approach can help make peace postwar in places like Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East in our own day.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am writing a book about a daring, successful and virtually unknown World War II Allied secret mission that was designed to trick Hitler into thinking the D-Day invasion would happen in the Balkans, not France. Like Winthrop Bell’s story, this research draws upon research from recently declassified documents.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Despite the coincidence in surname, Winthrop and I are not family relations.
But in philosophy we are twins, given our rare interest in relations between pragmatism and phenomenology.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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