Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada's Greatest Spy

The Institute of World Politics

About the Book: In public life, Dr. Winthrop Bell of Halifax was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman. But as MI6 secret agent A12, he evaded gunfire and shook off pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy in 1919 Berlin. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for WWII, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6. Throughout this, a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress Bell’s alerts. Nevertheless, agent A12’s intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways that are only now being revealed. The Harvard philosophy instructor Winthrop Bell, aka British secret agent A12, was a star student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern German phenomenology. Bell was the first spy to fight the Nazis, in 1919, and the first to warn against their plans for the Holocaust, in 1939. His papers were held under classification for many years and were only recently declassified. They show how he dealt severe blows to the earliest Nazis, hindering them from taking over the world. How can this history help us to combat antisemitism today? About the Author: Jason Bell is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. He has taught in the graduate program at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and at Mount Allison University in Canada. He has served at the University of Göttingen in Germany as Fulbright Professor, as scholar-in-residence at Boston University, as Research Fellow at the Husserl Archives-Leuven, and as d’Alzon Fellow at Assumption University. He was awarded the doctorate in philosophy at Vanderbilt University.