Dedication

To the good archivists, editors, historians, philosophers, and spies

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Phenomenologist

Chapter 2: The Professor

Chapter 3: The Anti-Semitic League

Chapter 4: The Secret Base

Chapter 5: Code Name A12

Chapter 6: The Killers

Chapter 7: The Battle for Berlin

Chapter 8: Loyalty to Loyalty

Chapter 9: Nazis in Eden

Chapter 10: The Paris Editor

Chapter 11: The Polish Plan

Chapter 12: The Trusted Men

Chapter 13: The Baltic Adventure

Chapter 14: Terrorism and Communism

Chapter 15: The One Hope for the World

Chapter 16: Lord No and Sir No

Chapter 17: Afterlife

Chapter 18: The Philosopher

Chapter 19: The Sabotage Game

Chapter 20: The Holocaust Code

Chapter 21: The Last Warning

Chapter 22: The Secret Elevator

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Photo Section

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

On Sunday, March 19, 1939, Winthrop Bell opened his basement vault and stepped inside, through an imposing green steel door designed for a bank. He lifted a file holding copies of still-classified espionage reports he had written for the British Secret Intelligence Service twenty years earlier. He knew how to manage the risk. Sealed behind a massive lock, the papers were safe from thieves and Gestapo spies.

In his hand were London’s first warnings about the Nazis, written during his mission to Berlin. He locked the vault behind him and returned to his basement study. Because he had built the house on land sloping down to the harbour, the back wall was at ground level, with two sunny windows and a door opening onto the garden. He looked out one window and took in a commanding view of Back Harbour in Chester, Nova Scotia.

Bell was half a world away from the Nazis’ violent, racist Berlin. Twenty years earlier, the Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, had sent him on a classified mission to that dangerous city teeming with democratic heroes and terroristic villains. His assignment was to gather intelligence about the situation in the German capital, where people were still licking their wounds after their defeat in the First World War. Gradually, he had gathered threads of evidence, hints from sources, and interviews with aristocrats, politicians, bureaucrats, military officers, soldiers, scientists, and ordinary citizens. Woven together, he revealed a secret group with a dangerous plot.

Now, twenty years later, the terrorists controlled Germany. Bell’s democratic sources had been murdered, exiled, or were working underground.

In 1919, some powerful British bureaucrats had been incredulous of Bell’s warning. The Nazis were at the time attacking Jews from the shadows and weren’t perceived as a threat. Officials decided to bury Bell’s report under a restrictive top-secret classification rather than release it to the public as he had hoped. Two decades later, he still kept a copy in his vault. The other copy was stored in the Foreign Office’s secret library.

By the spring of 1939, the Nazis had grown strong enough to plot a war of revenge against the entire world. But they kept their plan and their ultimate purpose—the Holocaust, as we now call it—as their most closely guarded secret. Bell was the first to decipher their code, just as he had been in 1919. He knew he needed to put his retirement on hold so he could thwart the Nazis once again.

Bell added his twenty-year-old intelligence reports to the stack of documents on his desk. Next to his typewriter lay a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in German and transcripts of recent speeches by leading Nazi officials. He picked up his pen to add to the notes he had drafted for what would be the world’s first published warning of Hitler’s plans for worldwide genocide. He flipped through the pages of the file from the vault until he found the words he’d typed when he was secret agent A12. He translated the German shouts he remembered from listening undercover on the first secret Nazis in Berlin: “Hatred, revenge, uncompromising enmity; these must be our watchwords!”¹ Then he reread the words he had shared with his 1919 readers, men and women with top-secret clearance: “They know very well that Germany is herself in no position to gratify this desire. The Reactionaries know that their hour is not yet come. The more far-seeing would wait a long time yet.”

Two decades later, Bell felt no better that he’d been proven right. Now he needed to make up for lost time.

BELL HAD NOT READ Mein Kampf when it came out in 1925 because he was busy teaching philosophy at Harvard University. But once he brought his full intelligence to the Nazi Code in March 1939, reading between the lines of Mein Kampf and recent statements by leading Nazi officials, cracking it was surprisingly easy. Hitler could not come right out and say what he meant to do with conquered populations because it would provoke overwhelming opposition. So he and his top leaders spoke in a secret language that made the plan clear to their fellow racists while leaving everyone else in the dark. For instance, Hitler cleverly pointed his followers to ancient historical examples in which conquerors had slaughtered defeated populations. Bell, as expert in history as he was in the German language, saw the implication that Hitler left unstated. By piecing together historical clues with other data, Bell deciphered a secret message that had fooled the world for fourteen years.

But revealing the Nazis’ hidden intentions was the easy part. It remained a far greater challenge to convince others that the German führer seriously meant to obliterate all non-Aryans, and that the scope of his plan extended far beyond Germany and even Europe. It would be a difficult picture to paint.

In late April, he was still at work writing his warning. His diary recorded him pruning trees and then listening to Weber’s Oberon Overture, Haydn’s Oxford Symphony, and Brahms’s First on the radio. He made cocoa during the Brahms intermission but, distracted by his conversation with his wife (“Brahms was vigorously played, but too rushed in many places”), accidentally used salt instead of sugar. Then he sat back down to work, but once in a while, he looked out at a heavy spring snow that made the view from his office beautiful. Eventually, he turned to his typewriter, which stood solemnly at the centre of his desk.

The repairman had visited on April 21 to ensure it was in top form. “First rate again,” Bell noted, “after months of wretched functioning.” The tuned and oiled machine stood ready to fight the Nazis. He rolled a sheet of paper into position. The room transformed from silence to the machine-gun fire of his practised typing.

In the spring before the war was launched, the murderous Final Solution to the Jewish Question still had no name. The führer described it only by hints and implications. Bell named it Hitler’s Extermination Program, and its scope, he typed, was “worldwide.”²

This was the first clear warning of a strange fact that most people still do not realize today: Hitler and his allies meant to destroy all non-Aryan races on every inhabited continent of earth. By the end of the Second World War, the Nazis had killed approximately twenty million innocent people, not including combat deaths.³ That was far short of the number they’d hoped to kill. Even before the war began, Bell knew they aimed to massacre hundreds of millions.

And yet, as the Holocaust historian Jürgen Matthäus notes, in September 1939, “no one, not even seasoned observers of prewar terror, had a clear idea what the Nazi regime’s next step toward its goal of solving the ‘Jewish question’ would be.”⁴ In her book Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933–1945, Deborah Lipstadt shows there are no known earlier warnings about the Final Solution in English-language newspapers.⁵ Before 1942, she explains, journalists understood Nazi “extermination” to mean deportations of Jews and occasional murders to frighten other Jews out of Germany. “No one could imagine even in 1941 that it would soon take on an even more diabolical meaning” as the systematic and complete murder of European Jewry. And as Andrew Nagorski writes in Hitlerland, people had no inkling of the Nazi plan, even though today, “it’s conventional wisdom that Hitler’s intentions were perfectly clear from the outset and that his policies could only result in World War II and the Holocaust.”⁶ Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, American visitors to Germany did not see Hitler’s ultimate purpose. For those who met him, “he was not some abstract embodiment of evil but a real-life politician.”

But Bell knew. And he alone, in early 1939, knew enough to give a startlingly accurate warning that Hitler meant to kill all Jews and non-Aryan peoples everywhere in the world. Agent A12’s clear view, at a time when the Nazis proclaimed a desire for peace, no doubt owed to his close-up observation of the Nazis in 1919. He had seen their hidden essence months before Hitler was even a player in the movement.

And now, two decades later, Bell realized that their race war would not stop with the Jews. Next on their hit list were peoples like the Poles, Ukrainians, French, Russians, Czechs, Slovaks, Asians, and Blacks. All non-Aryans, he typed, were to be “quite literally, exterminated ” (emphasis in original). This was, in Hitler’s depraved imagination, the only way to protect German blood from racial poisoning. “Hitler’s European policy,” Bell typed, “is thus merely the first stage.” Hitler planned to murder non-Aryans in North America just as surely as he meant to destroy them in Europe.

Bell knew that if the Nazis won the war, SS troops would one day be in Nova Scotia to round up the Jews and other minorities, as well as liberals like him. But this time, unlike 1919, he had an important advantage. Now he was no longer a professional spy but a private individual. No clueless government bureaucrats could censor him.

He gazed out his window and remembered how it all began. It was the summer of 1914. He was a doctoral student in the heart of Germany, enmeshed in the mysteries of a new philosophy called phenomenology.

Chapter 1

The Phenomenologist

Aller Anfang ist schwer, nothing so hard as the beginning.

—DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH AND GERMAN LANGUAGES, 1914

It was a peaceful summer night in Göttingen in 1914. The ancient university town lay nestled in Germany’s storied Harz mountains. It is the place where the Brothers Grimm wrote their fairy tales, and where legend tells of witches flying at midnight among the mountain peaks.

In Göttingen’s Altstadt, the old city, the criss-crossed beams of the medieval half-timbered houses were visible in the moonlight, and the fragrance of late summer blooms wafted from ornately carved window boxes overhanging the narrow and winding cobblestone streets. It was the middle of the night, but a light still shone in the apartment of a doctoral student of philosophy.

Thirty-year-old Winthrop Bell sat by his electric lamp, writing his dissertation in a room he rented in Frau Peter’s house. His work aimed to show how ideas reach out to grasp objects in the world in the relation called “knowledge,” or Erkenntnis. It is one of the thorniest topics in philosophy, but he had travelled to Deutschland to write his dissertation, in German, so he was ready for challenges.

Bell was a British subject born in Halifax, Canada. Not a typical academic, he had also spent time surveying a railway route through the Canadian wilderness and as a shrewd businessman. But he was now on the fast track to scholastic success, with a job lined up teaching philosophy at Harvard as soon as he finished his PhD. The famous German philosopher Edmund Husserl, his dissertation director, thought he was brilliant, not just as a philosopher but as a multitalented renaissance man. As the professor put it in a letter to his star student, “You can work not only with shovels and hoes, cutting trees and building houses, but also with a fine intellectual scalpel—you have fine fingers, and an incorruptible love of truth, free from prejudice to the last.”

That night, when he finally went to sleep, Bell was confident that he would soon be at the Georg-August University’s grand auditorium, the Aula, wearing the formal student gown as he was tested on his knowledge of philosophy, economics, and psychology. His performance would decide whether he would become a doctor of philosophy.

Bell was born and raised in the crisp maritime air of Halifax, where he grew up in a loving, well-connected family of merchants. His father, Andrew, was friends with Prime Minister Robert Borden, who also hailed from Nova Scotia. Andrew was a successful business owner, which gave Winthrop enough money to pursue extensive academic studies in Canada, the US, England, and Germany, and to engage in a life of cultural appreciation. He particularly loved classical music.

Bell had blue eyes, dark blond hair, and the muscled frame of a strong swimmer and Cambridge University rower. He was nearly six feet tall, and his complexion, as his passport records, was fair; he had a medium nose and mouth, a round chin, and a high forehead. He was handsome without standing out. His diary innocently complained of women who did not stop talking to him even after he gave clear signals that it was time to say goodnight. He grumbled that these young women were “boring” or suffered from too much “curiosity.” He tended to be serious, but he wasn’t gruff or rude. He was polite and well-mannered, and no doubt would have responded interestedly to their conversation, even as he gave signals that he was tired.

Bell’s photographs as a young man show him with an intense stare and a determined set to his jaw. His expression was steely, but he wasn’t given to melancholic brooding. The philosopher Edith Stein met him a year earlier, just after she’d arrived for her own doctoral studies with Husserl. Professor Richard Courant, her mathematician cousin, asked if she’d met her fellow philosophy student. She had not. Courant heartily recommended the Canadian: “He is the nicest student in Göttingen.”¹

Later, Stein spotted a student wearing a sport coat, waiting on a ramp near the auditorium, looking for someone. “That’s Bell,” she thought. How did she know? He matched Courant’s description of him as the “nicest,” as there was something “winning and unaffected” about his bearing. Another important clue: he wasn’t wearing a hat. For Germans it was a chilly day, but for a Canadian used to frigid winds, it wasn’t so uncomfortable. He was nearly thirty at the time she showed up in Göttingen for her studies, but, as Stein wrote, he “looked much younger.” Stein and Bell soon became close friends.

Winthrop’s friends commented on his wry sense of humour and his intense powers of concentration. The newspaper in Sackville, New Brunswick (which told of the comings and goings of the town’s notable institution, Mount Allison University, where Bell received his first degrees), recalled his “amazing capacity for hard work” and his deep engagement in all facets of university life, “moral, social, cultural, and intellectual.” And he managed it with a “studious, friendly, gracious, attractive” personality.²

He was an introvert, but he was popular with his fellows. He was class president and valedictorian of the 1904 graduating class at Mount Allison, wrote the school’s “Alma Mater Song” (still proudly sung at major university events to this day), was a member of the New Brunswick championship debating team, and was such a good actor that a reporter fondly recalled his harrowing performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet fifty years later.³

But his personalism meant he was far from intimidating.⁴ His nephew Andrew Wood and niece Heather Johnston explained in an interview that he never bragged about himself.⁵ Instead, he was interested in what they did, and how to support them.

ON THE MORNING of Sunday, June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a young man with sad eyes, watched for his target on a Sarajevo street. An assassin of the Black Hand, Princip had a pistol and a cyanide capsule hidden in his clothing—the first for his victim, the second for himself. He waited for his target, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Meanwhile, Germans were enjoying the same beautiful, peaceful Sunday. No one knew that it would be the country’s last normal morning for decades. The next would not dawn until near the end of the century, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That day, Bell left his apartment early to meet a German friend for a day of hiking. In his traditional hiking shorts and hat, the Canadian looked like one more German. He walked through charming medieval Göttingen, past the Vierkirchenblick, where one could see a Catholic and three Protestant churches from the same spot, and close to the Jewish synagogue, which could seat over four hundred people.⁶ He then saw the bronze Goose Girl (Gänseliesel) statue. Though small, she commanded the central Market Square. Bell, like all Georg-August University’s doctoral graduates before him, would be bound to kiss her in celebration of earning his degree. The kiss seemed his.

But Husserl, the old donkey (“alter Esel”), as Bell put in his diary, piled on more problems on the theory of knowledge for him to solve. No matter, Harvard’s fall term wasn’t slated to begin for a while, so Bell had plenty of time. Until then, he lived a beautiful life with amazing friends, world-class professors, and stunning surroundings. For a man who liked to hike, swim, and learn, Göttingen was magnificent.

At 11 a.m. in Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s open-topped car crept along Franz Joseph Street. His entourage was supposed to take a different route because an assassination attempt had already been made against him earlier that day. But Ferdinand’s driver, a Czech, did not understand German. He missed the change and continued to drive the route where assassins still lingered. Nineteen-year-old Princip stepped into the street and fired a fatal shot, point-blank, into Franz Ferdinand and another into his wife, Sophie.

As the would-be future ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dying, Bell was leaping over brooks and climbing steep rocks. By midday Sunday, he had enjoyed beautiful vistas, sung traditional German songs, exchanged stories, and played games. It was like living a scene, as he wrote in his diary, from As You Like It. But shocking news ended the pastoral revelry—at a restaurant for lunch, he learned about Ferdinand’s assassination. The news echoed around the world, with inevitable questions. Would Austria–Hungary lash out in revenge? Or would this be another false alarm, like the Agadir Crisis of 1911?⁷

Given that Bell had arrived in Göttingen as the Agadir Crisis unfolded, it’s natural to wonder if he was already a British agent during his student days. By his own repeated and unwavering testimony, he was not. He showed up in Germany for strictly academic reasons, to learn about phenomenology with the professor who invented it, Husserl. In fact, Bell had wanted to earn his PhD at Cambridge University, where he began his studies at Emmanuel College. But he left England when his doctors warned him that its muggy air could kill him, owing to his pleurisy. (It was perhaps industrial pollution, not English humidity, that bothered his lungs.)

Phenomenology was, for Husserl, the science of “seeing.”⁸ That might sound straightforward enough, but authentic seeing, as the American philosopher Charles Peirce (who influenced Husserl) described it in 1903, is a difficult task: “When the ground is covered by snow on which the sun shines brightly except where shadows fall, if you ask any ordinary man what its colour appears to be, he will tell you white, pure white, whiter in the sunlight, a little greyish in the shadow. But that is not what is before his eyes that he is describing; it is his theory of what ought to be seen. The artist will tell him that the shadows are not grey but a dull blue and that the snow in the sunshine is of a rich yellow. That artist’s observational power is what is most wanted in the study of phenomenology.”⁹

Phenomenology is a philosophical approach that aims to see essences through appearances. For instance, when we look at a die on a table, we see a cube, even though only a few sides appear to us. This means that we see more than the actual flat appearance. We see more than what strikes our eyes, because we know the essence—or whatness—of things and can recognize what a whole thing is even though we see only a part of it. For phenomenology, the essence is suggested by, but not reducible to, the appearance. We can also know mathematical and logical necessities that go beyond appearances, even though they are first suggested by them.

Phenomenology’s distinctiveness comes from close attention to appearance as the route to the essential. By contrast, a long-established habit in philosophy urged ignoring appearances in favour of intellectual essences. For instance, the ordinary work of doing justice was seen as far inferior to reflecting on the form of justice. Meanwhile, a skeptical philosophical backlash against essences argued, in turn, that there are only appearances.

The phenomenological method, by contrast to both, emphasizes careful attention to the essential givenness of the thing from the perspective of unbiased observers, without papering over distinctions and difficulties. It was a return to a Socratic tradition of philosophy, one interested in essential questions but skeptical about pat definitions. As Bell later taught at Harvard, the Socratic tradition of philosophy had been largely ignored and even maligned by modern philosophical intellectualism, searching for rational mastery of the universe, until phenomenology resurrected philosophy as an infinite quest.

Another key feature of phenomenology is its attention to interpersonal relations. In contrast to Cartesianism, which holds that the ego is automatically given, phenomenology attends to the way that the ego arises in a dialogue with the Alter, or Other, of experience. According to Josiah Royce, Bell’s Harvard professor, our ego arises in a comparison of our experience with that of others. Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, later popularized the doctrine.¹⁰ Instead of the simple Cartesian cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), phenomenology described an ongoing relation among the cogito (I think), the cogitamus (we think), and the world. To understand nature, we need to compare notes among poets, natural scientists, and all honest observers who prefer truth to falsity and knowledge to ignorance.

For Professor Max Scheler, another important influence on Bell, phenomenology reorients philosophy to the full wealth of personal experience and away from simplifying reductions.¹¹ Modern philosophy and science, from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, had fallen into the bad habit of collapsing the rich complexity of experience to simple schemes, which gave the comfortable illusion of a complete description. These systems diminished the interesting diversity of life to something simple and uninteresting, as when an artistic creation is dismissed, for instance, by claiming it is actually nothing but a utilitarian example of how all human behaviour is motivated by attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain, or just another example of Sigmund Freud’s reduction of childhood to frustrated sexual attraction to parents.

This helps to explain the nearly religious fervour that inspired students from throughout the world to travel to study with Husserl. Phenomenology offered an infinitely rich buffet of experience.

BELL HADN’T BEEN worried during the Agadir Crisis, but the news of Ferdinand’s assassination badly shook him. He kept feeling worse until he finally decided to hike home to Göttingen, a trip that would take several hours. He knew he couldn’t be good company for his carefree German friend.

Bell sensed he should leave Germany quickly because the Germans would likely team up with their Austrian allies. But it wasn’t at all clear then that Britain would become involved. In fact, a strong anti-war sentiment there urged against it. Still, the situation was precarious enough that he redoubled his efforts to finish his doctorate. He would calmly hike, not run, towards Germany’s exit.

Two weeks after the assassination, Bell met with Husserl and learned he needed to make further revisions to his thesis. He had decided before the meeting that if Husserl asked for a lot of changes, or none, he would immediately return to Canada to see his father, who was in poor health. Instead, Husserl asked for relatively minor changes. That meant, Bell thought, that he could make the changes quickly, then buy a one-way ticket to North America, rather than going back and forth.

The next day, he worked fourteen hours. Like the young hero in the Grimm story “The Goose-Girl at the Fountain,” he grumbled about the absurd load an old person had asked him to carry. Still, he was duty-bound to complete his task.

In the days that followed, the diplomatic situation grew more precarious. Russia hinted it would grudgingly defend Serbia from an Austrian attack. But the Russians also hoped to avoid provocation, since they knew their military could not match Germany’s.

Meanwhile, the Germans privately offered unconditional support to the Austrians. But they stayed publicly coy about the matter, lest they give away their Schlieffen Plan, which called for a surprise attack on France through neutral Belgium. France would likely fight for Russia. Great Britain remained the unknown factor. Many Germans wagered Britain would stay on the sidelines. They forgot that Britain had already revealed its loyalties during the Agadir Crisis.

In mid-July, Bell’s diary recorded a “strange dream” in which he stood at the corner of two of Göttingen’s major streets, Schillerstraße and Friedländer Weg. He noted the strangeness of the dream not so much for the location but for its vividness. It was as if, through the remarkable reality of even physical sensations, his subconscious mind drew attention to an ordinary scene. Bell’s diary does not note that at that corner stands a stone monument, erected in 1910, celebrating the German “defenders” at Namibia. The Germans’ coordinated slaughter of the Namibians was the first genocide of the twentieth century.¹² Their military drove ten to twenty-five thousand people, mainly civilians, into the desert, intending them to die of thirst. The occupiers wanted to control southwest Africa and were furious that the people who already lived there tried to defend their land. German snipers were posted at oases to shoot those who were desperate enough for a drink. Had Bell’s mind sent him a subconscious message, pointing out a past event to warn about the present situation? A tight-knit group of German serial killers first stalked their victims in Africa. Who would be next?

Bell’s dream gave him a clue. The killers would eliminate anyone who stood in their way. In the opening months of the coming war, Belgian citizens were massacred in the thousands to prevent them from becoming rebels in the future. Germany was also the first country to deploy poison gas against its enemies and to use U-boats to sink passenger and hospital ships at sea. And in 1915, high-ranking military officers began to plot an attack on the Jews.

But Bell missed the meaning of the dream message. Before the outbreak of war, it was easy for his conscious mind to overrule his subconscious. The Germans he knew—student friends and university professors—were not ruthless killers; they were cosmopolitan liberals, and most would later become anti-Nazis. Many of Göttingen’s citizens leaned democratic. Lower Saxony, prior to Prussian dominance, took its political cues from Britain. And many of Germany’s public-facing leaders genuinely wanted to avert war. But the real power was the Prussian military, and among their number were racist murderers who had massacred innocents in southwest Africa as part of the campaign to extend Germany’s empire. They would stop at nothing in their single-minded quest for power. Germany held two opposing personalities, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. On the one side were the decent liberals, conservatives, socialists, and moderates—all of whom supported democracy. On the other side were murderous génocidaires.

On Thursday, July 23, 1914, Austria issued Serbia an ultimatum. Its conditions ranged from the sensible, like prohibiting arms smuggling across the frontier, to the intolerable, like allowing Austrian law enforcement officers free rein in Serbia. Serbia refused.

Bell was worried but not panicked. No one in the world, it seems, realized the extent of the secret system of alliances that would force nations many degrees removed from the fight into combat once their ally became involved.

As Austrian ships began to bombard the Serbian capital, Belgrade, Bell met with the suave mathematics professor Constantin Carathéodory, the son of an ethnically Greek diplomat who had served the Ottoman Empire in the peaceful years before the First World War. (The conditions for the Ottoman minorities soon changed drastically during the war, when the empire committed genocide against its own Greeks and Armenians.) But in midsummer 1914, nothing looked so unlikely as a world war. Carathéodory convinced Bell that cooler heads would prevail in Europe. All the diplomatic signs pointed to a peaceful settlement once Austria gave Belgrade a bloody nose for whatever help it had given the Black Hand.

Yet behind the scenes, the German military command cared little for diplomacy. At the end of July, England was shocked at Germany’s own frank admission that it planned war against France, Russia, and likely Belgium. It’s hard to imagine what the Germans were thinking by offering this confession. Later, Bell suspected that Germany was enthusiastic about recruiting Britain into a race war against the Slavs. The proposal was a non-starter in England, but the German militarists were diplomatically clueless.

Once Germany had revealed its attack plans, London quickly announced its support for France in explicit terms, rather than with the subtle diplomatic language that Germany repeatedly failed to understand. The blunt language almost worked. A larger war likely could have been averted, against the German militarists’ ardent hopes, if Russia hadn’t announced a full mobilization in response to Austria’s declaration of war on Serbia. Germany responded with its own mobilization, and Turkey and Germany agreed to an anti-Russian alliance. Then, on July 31, Germany threatened to attack France if Russia refused to stop its general mobilization. France obviously had no control over Russian policy, but the situation spiralled into dangerous absurdity.

As more countries signalled their support for one side or the other, it no longer looked obvious that the fight would merely be between Austria and Serbia. Bell started carrying his passport and cash with him in case he needed to make a quick escape. It was too late. The next day, August 1, German troops invaded neutral Luxembourg and declared war on Russia. Germany conscripted all trains for military purposes, and just like that, Bell was trapped in beautiful, ancient Göttingen, surrounded by forested hills. The hiddenness had made it an ideal place for the Brothers Grimm to collect their folk stories in the previous century. But now Bell was caught there as surely as if bound by a spell. The seven hundred kilometres to England might as well have been a million.

AN INVASION OF tiny, neutral Luxembourg? England and its allies were, for long hours, too shocked to act. Germany’s absurd defence was that if it did not invade, France would do it first. For centuries, Europe had broadly accepted the idea that wars within Christendom were morally justified if they were in self-defence. But at the dawn of the twentieth century, materialism, nationalism, and racism steadily replaced Christianity as state forces. And now in small, quiet, peaceful Luxembourg, the last place anyone would have expected to be invaded by the world’s most powerful army, the birds of war came home to roost. The First World War had begun, but it seemed like a joke. The Luxembourgers couldn’t even mount a defence against overwhelming odds.

Meanwhile, the weekend weather in Göttingen was beautiful as the police scooped up Russians, who were suddenly “enemy citizens.” But since Britain was not yet at war, Bell remained free. He entertained guests, like the physicist Max Born, who later won the Nobel Prize for his research on quantum mechanics, and he watched as Göttingen’s 82nd Regiment headed for the French frontier. His friends shared urgent rumours throughout the day. It made it hard to work on his exams. In the evening, he was visited by his friend Wilhelm Runge, who had returned to the city to join his military company.

Finally the cauldron boiled. On Monday, August 3, Germany and France declared war on each other. The next day, Germany invaded neutral Belgium. Britain gave Germany an ultimatum to withdraw by midnight, Berlin time. When the deadline expired, Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, described the scene: “Along the Mall from the direction of the Palace the sound of an immense concourse singing ‘God save the King’ floated in. On this deep wave there broke the chimes of Big Ben; and, as the first stroke of the hour boomed out, a rustle of movement swept across the room. The war telegram, which meant, ‘Commence hostilities against Germany,’ was flashed to the ships and establishments under the White Ensign all over the world.”¹³

An hour later, it was quiet, picturesque, and peaceful in Göttingen, except for a police car winding through the deserted streets towards the half-timbered home of Frau Peter, who had let a room to a serious but exceedingly polite foreigner who spoke excellent German. The police suspected her tenant might be a secret agent. In any case, he was now officially the enemy.

Sudden loud steps and a bang on the door jolted the philosopher from his slumber. The police hauled him roughly out of bed and threw him into the back of their waiting car. Sombre officers drove him through lonely streets, under a full moon, towards the jail.

With the stroke of Britain’s pen, Winthrop Bell had become an enemy citizen. As millions of young men were called to military duty throughout Europe, he was brought, along with other university prisoners, to a girls’ middle school hastily transformed into a makeshift jail.

Later that night, Bell saw the arrival of a dirt-covered man whom he noted in his diary as Levin, a Jew from Manchester. He wound up in a different cell, so Bell never had a chance to ask, but the likeliest explanation for his dishevelled appearance was that the police had shoved him forcefully on the way to the car. Not all Germans were racists, but for the sizable number who were, a man like Levin embodied the hated Jew and Englishman in one person.¹⁴

In the next cell, eight Danes cooled their heels. The police had arrested them at the train station. Playing cards appeared, and Bell’s fellow prisoners taught him to play whist. It wouldn’t be the last skill he picked up in lock-up.

The next afternoon, Husserl came for a visit. With his pontifical pose and well-groomed white beard, he was always conscious of how people saw him, yet he was a completely honest and humble man. He cared deeply for his imprisoned student, no matter that he was now a national enemy.

That evening, Bell received a sleeping sack and some of his most important books. Although working conditions were far from ideal, he started to prepare, once again, for his doctoral exam. After midnight, he was finally given straw for a bed.

WHILE THE GERMAN attackers plotted artillery fire onto the heavily fortified city of Liège in eastern Belgium, three professors bombarded Bell with academic questions in his place of detention. His doctoral examiners, the philosopher Husserl, the psychologist Georg Müller, and the economist Gustav Cohn, arrived in his makeshift cell for his interrogation. Bell faced one of the most unorthodox doctoral defences in history.

He thought he did poorly. He’d hardly had time to prepare over the last days. But his background knowledge was excellent, and he passed with high marks.

The following day, Bernhard Runge, the brilliant, athletic, bright-eyed seventeen-year-old son of the university’s president and brother of Wilhelm, tried to visit him in jail. Runge was in uniform, ready for the front. But the guards refused him entrance, so Winthrop and Bernhard shouted through the window instead.

Despite a difference in age, Bell and Runge had formed a close friendship based on shared interests and enthusiasm. Neither of the two friends wanted to choose between math and economics, psychology and art, nature and architecture, poetry and music, thinking and athleticism. They loved everything that was beautiful. They spent long hours hiking together, playing sports, and talking. As Aristotle put it, “Friendship of good men is good, being augmented by their companionship; and they are thought to become better too by their activities and by improving each other . . . ‘noble deeds from noble men.’”¹⁵

As Bell began to imagine his courageous friend at the front, he worried that Bernhard was as good as dead. He would be the spear’s tip in the charge against enemy lines. The thought made Bell quite depressed. He wished, as he later wrote in a notebook, that he could be in battle, charging Bernhard’s regiment from the other side. Then he could take a bullet “without wincing,” and fall near his beloved friend.

It seems that Bernhard’s father, Carl Runge, the university president, exercised his ancient academic authority to authorize Bell’s release from custody. In those days, German university presidents were something like mayors of the students. Universities even ran their own jails (and kept doing so, until Hitler rescinded the privilege).

Bell received parole, but he needed to check in with the police twice each day. Göttingen was such a low-crime city that one day when he visited the station for his check-in, no one was there.

GERMANY KNEW THAT its enemies had more manpower and industry. The only way to win was to win quickly. Enraged when Belgian resistance slowed their advance, German troops began to execute civilians and to use others as human shields. Meanwhile, Zeppelins bombarded cities from above. The message was clear: If the defenders surrendered without a fight, their lives would be spared, as had happened in Luxembourg. If they fought back, they would be ruthlessly slaughtered, as in Namibia.

The police arrested Bell again on August 21. This time, it was more serious. They took everything from his pockets, even his handkerchief. Now they had a reason beyond mere suspicion to think that he might be an enemy agent. And who knew what a trained British saboteur could do with a handkerchief?

The guards brought him to cell 1, where the police had at one time taught drunks a lesson. It was now repurposed to make the suspected enemy agent extremely uncomfortable.¹⁶ Bell slept that night on a wooden plank with no mattress or blanket. The police interrogated him in the morning. He soon learned that one of his stray wry comments had put him in peril.

A neighbour, Baroness Uslar-Gleichen, a member of the nobility that had ruled Göttingen for centuries, reported him to the police as an enemy. She had overheard Bell’s German friend Otto Joerden, who had written on Chaucer, shout up to Bell’s window: “What do you think of the Japanese ultimatum?” At a time when Germany was deeply paranoid about spies and saboteurs in its midst, Joerden posed a spectacularly unfortunate question. He was perhaps snared by Chaucer’s waggish spirit without realizing the danger.

Japan’s ultimatum was that Germany leave its naval base at Tsingtao, China, and remove all its ships from Japanese and Chinese waters, or Japan would declare war. Germany refused to even respond. It would have been wise for Bell not to respond to Joerden either, but the baroness informed the police that he said, “That’s one more enemy for Germany, and good news as far as I am concerned.”

Bell told the police he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said, only that it was just a flippant remark involving the “cheekiness” of the Japanese. But he insisted he certainly did not say “enemy.” It made a crucial difference to whether he was a spy to be executed or an innocent student.

The Göttingen police were puzzled. Just who is this Bell? they wondered. A philosophy student with training in engineering who owned sophisticated photography equipment, made freehand drawings of German architectural features, and showed up in their city during the Agadir Crisis? And at thirty years old, he was rather old for graduate studies.

His bones hurt after nights of sleeping on the plank. His jailers fed him a ration of a little dark bread and thin soup, then patiently waited for him to confess. He wrote his diary entries on the lining of his jacket. Three days after his arrival, he was finally offered a mattress. His happiness was tempered, though, when he saw it was full of fleas.

His captors were torturing him with starvation. Powerful friends intervened to break the lopsided stalemate before it killed him. President Runge was likely the most important of Bell’s allies. On the fourth day, Bell was given permission to buy his own food, and he was able to walk into the hallway to get a bit of fresh air by the window. The next day he got his things back, including his handkerchief. Finally, on Wednesday, August 26, the jailers moved him to cell 2, a more civilized place. The worst misery was over, and later in the day, the authorities transferred him to an old vocational school newly converted into a jail. It was hardly luxury, but it was a big improvement.

Soon after, the university called him to its grand Aula on the charge of being an enemy of Germany. He was facing the more serious accusation—that he’d declared himself Germany’s enemy—and not the statement he had agreed to (that he’d made a badly timed joke). It was unfair, but now it was just an academic charge, not one that could lead him to the gallows.

President Runge acted as his defence attorney. Bell’s close friend Edith Stein (later declared a Catholic saint) wrote, “He intervened for Bell not only because he felt that justice demanded it but for personal reasons as well. Bell was a close friend of both his sons, Wilhelm and Bernhard.”¹⁷

Bell became, for the faculty, a casus belli—a cause of war. He wrote, “I was simply the insignificant ‘straw’ over which the more chauvinistic and the more liberal-minded fought. The former would, I think, have boiled me in oil; the latter could not see that there was any real occasion for keeping me interned.”

At the end of the trial, the university voted to annul his doctoral exams. He had worked hard for years, and now it seemed as if it were for nothing. Bell was crushed—“niedergeschlagen,” as he wrote in his diary. “Erklärlicherweise,” he continued. “Understandably.” As a philosopher with emotions, Bell still demanded that they be understandable.

His powerful friend President Runge likely saved his life by diverting the charge from a criminal accusation of espionage or sabotage to an academic one. It was better to lose his PhD than to lose his life. The worst the university could do was expel him, not torture or execute him. The administration even kindly refunded his student fees.

At least he was out of the city jail. He enjoyed the freedom to wander the yard of his new prison, the trade school, which gave him a place to play ball with Bernhard and Wilhelm Runge. But on September 6, their game ended when they lost the ball. That same day, the easy game ended for the German military too. The French and British began their first significant counterattack, at Marne. Germany’s rapid advance halted.

It was like a sumo match where the smaller but faster German wrestler started by quickly shoving the larger and slower British-French wrestler backwards by several steps. The match looked like it would soon be over. But then the bigger wrestler regained his footing and began to slowly push his opponent back. The physics of manpower and industrial capacity suggested that the Germans could no longer win the war. And then the “cheeky” Japanese surrounded them at Tsingtao and laid siege. It was a serious blow to Germany’s hopes to keep eastern sea lanes open.

When the Germans crossed France’s Marne, it proved a river too far. They finally overextended their supply lines. The front-line troops lost communications with headquarters in Koblenz, hundreds of kilometres away. The armies commanded by Karl von Bülow and Alexander von Kluck momentarily separated, and the agile British, composed of professional soldiers rather than recent conscripts, advanced calmly into the gap. On Wednesday, September 9, the Germans retreated to avoid being outflanked.

The Schlieffen Plan had never envisioned a German retreat. Lacking a plan B, the Germans stayed with plan A. But now they conducted the plan in slow motion, abandoning the blitzkrieg that Schlieffen called for but pushing forward just the same. To try to salvage the war, they called up their reserves. On September 16, Bernhard came to the prison to say his final goodbye to his friend. The military then shipped him out, with the rest of the Göttingen volunteer regiment, to the Western Front.

Bell noted in his diary that the local newspapers now bragged about “victories” in places behind where the Germans had advanced two weeks earlier. At their high point, September 5, German troops were only 30 kilometres from the gates of Paris. Then the Allies shoved them to the Marne, nearly 100 kilometres from Paris, and then to the Aisne River, 120 kilometres away. There the Germans took a commanding ridge.

When direct attacks failed, the two sides dug trenches. It made it hard to shoot anyone with bullets so long as the soldiers stayed submerged. But it was easy to entomb them with artillery fire—or later, to suffocate them with poison gas. For four years, the battle lines at the Aisne remained virtually unchanged, even as the war’s death toll catapulted into the millions. Hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed to capture a few kilometres of territory. Then the gains were quickly reversed in the inevitable counterattack. The warring sides fought to see who could bleed the most and live.

On a crisp mid-October day, the authorities moved Bell to a cell in the Aula, on the top floor. It was the university’s own student jail. A few weeks earlier, he had suffered in one of Germany’s worst jail cells. Now he was in one of the best, with a beautiful panoramic view, decent furniture, and even art, in the form of skillful graffiti, painted by past student inmates.

Stein, in her hometown of Breslau, read about the arrest of her friend, an “anti-German Englishman,” in the local newspaper.¹⁸ At first it seemed like a foolish joke, but Bell responded to a letter from her with a confirmation that his imprisonment was quite real. She hurried back to Göttingen and marched to the police chief to arrange a permit to visit him. As she wrote: “Besides my natural sympathy for the prisoner, there was probably a romantic aura to the idea of ‘visiting the lock-up.’” She was the feisty daughter of a prominent Breslau businesswoman (her father had died years earlier) and used to getting her way.

But she was surprised by what happened next. As soon as she entered the jail cell, the guard locked her in with her friend. “Bell greeted me joyfully,” she recounted. “The gesture with which he invited me to have a seat transformed the rough wooden chair into a wicker armchair. I was to look around the room first and see that it was not too bad a place to live in. He was right; it was light and spacious. On one wall was depicted Die Mütze [‘The Cap’], the famous Göttingen inn, the most attractive of the town’s ancient houses. The artistic painting had originated with one of the room’s former occupants. On the other walls were more drawings by less skilled hands. There was little furniture; but he had all the necessities: an iron bedstead with a rough woolen blanket, two wooden chairs, and a solid wooden table piled with books.”

Bell, she wrote, was “thoroughly content with his lot and harbored no bitterness against the persons responsible for his arrest.”¹⁹

Reading between the lines of Stein’s writing, it is easy to imagine that she had a crush on Bell. But he was too much of a gentleman to notice, or if he did, he wasn’t interested. For this handsome, rich, charming fellow, who had until recently been free to travel the world, romance was the last thing on his mind.

WHILE BELL WAITED in his cell, the Battle of Ypres began. It was the northern terminus of the race to the sea. Ten million troops clashed head-on. Each side desperately tried to outflank the other to the north. The sea above Ypres was the end of the road.

Bell’s diary noted the bizarre contrast between the world at war and him in his scenic little cell, which looked, he wrote, like something from a prison opera, like Strauss’s Die Fledermaus or Beethoven’s Fidelio.

On Friday, October 23, Göttingen’s 234th, Bernhard’s regiment, fought a desperate combat in West Flanders, Belgium. Gerhart, Husserl’s son, was also a member of the regiment and wrote his parents four days later: “My best friends are dead or wounded . . . All around us there are burned farmsteads, dead cows, bursting shells.”²⁰

Bernhard was, Gerhart heard, probably dead.

Farther down the German line, a young Austrian recruit named Adolf Hitler fought as a member of a German-Bavarian regiment, even though, legally, the Germans should have deported him to Austria to fight with his own country. Like the other conscripts, he hardly knew what he was doing. The enemies mowed them down en masse. By the end of the battle, his company of 250 was devastated. Only Hitler and forty-one others were still able to fight.

Young Hitler saw that the Germans held together through the carnage, while the Austrians fell apart. To a person who had not thought the situation through, it could easily seem that the difference was racial. The interracial Austro-Hungarian Empire was failing to fight together effectively. The seemingly monoracial Germans could. In reality, it was a matter not of race but of language and empire. The Germans could speak the same language, while communication was virtually impossible among the many tongues of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But to Hitler, it seemed that the mistake of the Austrians was that their conquests had let minority populations survive.

On October 31, All Hallows’ Eve, Bell learned that Bernhard was dead. That day, Winthrop carved his own name in his cell door at the Aula (you can still see it today on the official Göttingen city tour). The wide, deep letters, neatly arranged, would have taken a long time to carve. He couldn’t concentrate on reading or writing, but he could take his grief out on the wood of the door.

He then entered a long and deep depression. “The Interest has gone out of everything.” Bernhard was, Bell wrote in German, “the most splendid person I’ve ever known. I loved him so.”

In the coming weeks, after the Runges inherited Bell’s letters to Bernhard at the front, President Runge visited his son’s friend often. Stein wrote, “These letters showed the parents how affectionately Bell had been concerned for his young friend, so they now reciprocated by considering him a son of theirs.”²¹ But at the beginning of 1915, the authorities remanded Bell to a new prison in German national custody. President Runge’s authority could trump the city but not the nation.

The January weather was bitterly cold. Bell’s new cellmate came down with a serious fever. Bell gave the man his blanket and slept, shivering, in just a winter coat. In early February, he read Thomas More’s Utopia, about an island of five thousand people who found a rare way to live at peace in a world at war. It required the abolition of private property and privacy. A few days later, he learned the authorities were moving him to a prison camp near Berlin. The place was called Ruhleben, German for “the peaceful life.”

Like the people in More’s Utopia, Ruhleben’s five thousand inhabitants were at peace, but they lacked property and privacy. Could the prisoners build a tranquil island of culture in a world at war?

Chapter 2

The Professor

Then swords, and knives, Poison, guns, halters, and envenom’d steel.

—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, DOCTOR FAUSTUS

Bell’s new home was a horse-racing track hastily converted into a prison camp for foreigners. It looked, at first, like any other Konzentrationslager (concentration camp): filthy, depressing, oppressive, and brutal.

Ruhleben was bordered by the Spree River on the north and a street ironically named Freiheit, or Freedom, on the south. Armed guards and two forbidding fences stood between the prisoners and Freiheit. The camp’s original eleven barracks were built for horses. Bell’s Barrack XI stood at the southwest corner of the grounds, next to the casino and the guards’ quarters.¹ Each barrack had on average twenty-seven horse boxes with muddy floors, and each box housed about six men in three sets of bunk beds arranged against three walls of the stall. Above them, the lofts, once filled with hay, housed more men in cramped quarters. Life was uncomfortably stuffy, crowded, and dark. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Privacy was rare; theft was a frequent fact of life.

Prisoners were free to wander through the interior of the camp, except when the guards locked them down because of escapes, quarantines, or as group punishment. On foot it was about ten minutes from one end of the camp to the other. Noise was constant, and so were arguments among prisoners. Fortunately, the inmates had a punching bag. When that didn’t suffice, they strapped on gloves and stepped into a boxing ring.

The guards, some of whom picked on the inmates mercilessly, hardly improved the atmosphere. Nor did the nearby war industry. Ruhleben was at the industrial outskirts of Berlin, where smokestacks belched non-stop poisonous fumes. Nearby weapons factories were money machines for their owners, producing poison gas to suffocate soldiers in the trenches, bombs for Zeppelins to level apartment buildings in Belgium, torpedoes to sink passenger ships on the Atlantic, and artillery shells to hit Paris.

At first the situation was utterly miserable, as people who were happily minding their own business in peaceful Germany were suddenly hauled in and imprisoned under difficult conditions, with poor food and sanitation, constant noise, and a loss of privacy. But the prisoners had a meeting and made a group decision to pull themselves out of the slough and make life worth living. Leaders like Bell’s biologist friend Michael Pease wanted to stay civilized by building their own civilization. The prisoners decided to recreate Britain, and refused to be downhearted. The guards did not object, perhaps because many of them found ways to profit from the camp economy.

If you had to be imprisoned, it is hard to imagine a more fortunate situation than Ruhleben. The sheer musical talent crammed into one small spot meant that prison life was close to a Broadway show. Some of its musicians were touring professionals of the highest calibre. Others had been in Germany for the Wagner festival, like Bell’s friend, the great Canadian conductor Ernest MacMillan, who spent most of the war in Ruhleben. The German police scooped up the performers, like the rest of the “enemy citizens,” when the war began. It meant Bell heard concerts with renowned instrumentalists at what was surely the top-ranked prison music venue of all time.

Meanwhile, the Ruhleben Theatre presented lavish productions with experienced actors. Michael Pease directed his own play, while Bell built scenery for Shakespeare’s As You Like It. A visiting dignitary wrote that a Shakespeare performance at Ruhleben was as good as any in the big city.

Although they were all prisoners, the men imported the social class hierarchy from England. Those who had money to spend (which included funds sent to them from home) could pay others to cook and clean up. The captured sailors, already used to having such duties, were glad to earn money. By and by, Ruhleben became a little island of relative peace and culture for an elect five thousand while the Great War destroyed the lives of millions.

Still, it was far from a life of luxury. The camp housed thugs and criminals, antisemites, knife-wielding assailants, and future Nazis. Some of the “foreigners” were German-born and, by accident of parentage or birthplace, were counted by Germany as “enemy citizens.” And yet, even though they were stuck in prison, their sympathies still lay with Germany.

The noise at Ruhleben was atrocious. Angry, shouting guards arbitrarily threatened to shoot people. Practice with machine guns at a nearby field sometimes made work and conversation impossible.

Inmates could grab some quiet in the synagogue, the library, or the YMCA. But for personal time, you needed to rent a “cubby hole,” a small booth where pre-war gamblers had placed their bets at the grandstand. Bell was quick to reserve his place. He shivered through the winter months in his unheated cubby, writing letters, reading books like Faust and the newest phenomenology research (Edith Stein sent him the latest articles), and filling his diaries. He wrote, among other activities, a play, a novel, architectural designs, philosophy, history, and self-analysis.

By mid-1915, Ruhleben boasted newly built barracks and improved plumbing, and it hosted sports leagues, plays, and academic lectures. A self-government organized life among the internees. Everything owed to the ingenuity and resources of the prisoners. For instance, an internee named Albert Kamps set up a Ruhleben post office with its own stamps and employees. Soon the Ruhlebenites had formed their own society, a true Little Britain at the unlikeliest outpost of the empire. The prisoners with capital repurposed wooden buildings fit for horse-track gamblers, imported goods, and sold them to their fellow inmates. On Bond Street, Bell could start an afternoon buying shoes and then proceed to pick up soap, a fork, a new book, and even a tuxedo, if he wanted it. Next to the barber shop stood the Ruhleben cinema, its name professionally stencilled on the side of a wooden building. There, according to a picture Bell took of the scene, he could see the newest Mutt and Jeff movie, Mess Kitchen, which was, as the advertisement promised, “Some Film!” Bond Street didn’t look like the West End of London, but for a prison, it was astounding.

In the spring, the Germans gave the prisoners a morale-improving offer: they allowed them to rent the large field at the centre of the camp for sports. Michael Pease grumbled about the meanness of charging rent for land that was otherwise useless, but the prisoners ponied up. Bell played tennis and hockey. The level of competition was often remarkably high. Many professional athletes had been arrested when war broke out, along with talented amateurs like Bell, who had rowed competitively at Cambridge University. The prisoners organized teams and scheduled practices and matches like they were professionals.

Next to the playing fields, the camp had vegetable gardens supported by Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society. There was an effort to beautify the camp by planting flowers. It even had gardens originally financed by Pease, who was quite nearly ruined in the effort, owing to a muddled order that sent him an industrial-sized delivery of bulbs. But other prisoners stepped in to save him and bought and planted bulbs, turning the operation into a co-op. Bell did his part to help his friend’s gardening.

The inmates created an institution of higher education, affectionately named Ruhleben University, or sometimes Grand Stand University (for its main lecture hall). Germany had hosted many leading British scholars and promising students at its renowned universities; when war broke out, the police snatched them up and threw them into prison. At Ruhleben U., students were able to choose from around three hundred different courses. Pease (later a Cambridge professor) taught biology and set up a lab for the purpose; the Oxford reader John Cecil Masterman taught history; Winthrop Bell, the future Harvard and Toronto professor, taught philosophy, finance, railway engineering, history, architecture, and stenography.

The university was a remarkable success. Distinguished institutions such as Oxford, Edinburgh, and the University of London later recognized Ruhleben credits. Many Ruhlebenites from the working classes, who never would have gone to university otherwise, received a nearly free education that allowed them to assume prestigious positions after the war.

Yet despite the fantastic culture, few would have chosen to remain there. One strange exception was Bell’s close friend Pease. His story played out like the Faust Bell read in his cubby, but with a twist. Although he thought less about politics than he did about academics and flowers, Pease was extremely well connected. After the war, he introduced Bell to Maurice Hankey, a central figure in British secret intelligence, and to key players in the Fabian Society, like Sydney Olivier and Graham Wallas.

Because Michael’s family were the Peases (the lifeblood of the Fabian Society, whose members included famous writers like George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, E. Nesbit, and Annie Besant), the Germans offered him a nearly unconditional release. After they realized they could not win the war, some wiser heads began to think about a negotiated peace. Pease, they thought, might be able to help as an intermediary.

They offered to let him leave the camp and live almost anywhere that he wanted in Germany. The offer seemed too good to be true. But why, Pease wondered, should he leave? Perhaps he was caught up in the beauty of his flower gardens. Besides, he had friends, research, and academic commitments at Ruhleben U. Pease countered that he would not leave unless he could go to Potsdam, near Berlin, where he could do high-level research.

His chutzpah was astounding. Potsdam was a non-starter because of the military research that happened there. Pease’s counter-offer was too rich even for Mephistopheles to accept. But somewhere else? No, Pease said, but he would accept a fortnight’s vacation outside the prison. The Germans shrugged their shoulders and granted his wish. It was a decision he would soon come to regret. Once he was on leave in a beautiful part of Germany, he realized that whatever Ruhleben’s charms, it was still a miserable dump. He asked the Germans if the offer of freedom still stood. They said they would think about it. If they ever did, it was while laughing.

For Bell, Pease’s decision to stay meant he kept one of his closest friends, a connection that could help him land his future job in secret intelligence. Even with good friends, Bell was still often depressed, yet there is no doubt that his long talks with Pease helped. The connection was also fortuitous for Pease, giving him a Canadian friend to whom he could send his children to escape the bombs of the next world war.²

THE FIRST DAY of July 1915 was beautiful and sunny. It was hot on Canada Day, but a pleasant breeze cooled things a bit at Ruhleben. The Canadian Club, around two dozen men, gathered for tea under the shade of a tree. They chose Bell to conduct his first intelligence mission for the Canadian nation. He had the best diplomatic connections (including to the prime minister, Robert Borden) in the group. Bell needed to write and send words of loyalty, without endangering the Canadian prisoners. He wrote: “We Canadians in Ruhleben want to assure our friends at home that our thoughts are with our country and that our deepest regret is that we are unable to help our country actively in this crisis. Our friends are not to worry about us. We are keeping health and courage up, and are trying to maintain the honor of Canada among our fellow Britishers in Ruhleben. We are looking forward eagerly to the time when we shall be back in Canada again, to take our share in the work of building up our country.”

Bell’s message was subtle enough to make it past the censors, but it said what was necessary. He wrote of an emergent Canadian identity as a worthy loyalty. Before the war, Canadians had not thought of themselves as “Canadian” so much as members of their respective provinces or as “British.” But now it was possible to begin thinking of loyally serving a country that was “our” country, distinct from but connected to Britain. It was the position that Prime Minister Borden advanced at the Paris Peace Conference after the war.

Among the Ruhleben internees were important future members of British intelligence, including Wallace Ellison, who later served MI6 on the German–Swiss border, and John Cecil Masterman, who was one of the major intelligence figures involved in fighting the Nazis during the Second World War. As head of Britain’s Double Cross committee during the Second World War, Masterman orchestrated an operation that used the Nazis’ own spies, converted by the British into double agents (with the threat of execution if they refused), to convince Hitler that the D-Day invasion would happen at Pas-de-Calais rather than at Normandy. The ruse completely fooled the führer.³ Like Bell, Masterman felt a sense of uselessness at being imprisoned at Ruhleben rather than getting to contribute to the war effort. For both, getting to later serve British secret intelligence allowed them to feel they were fully doing their part. If they had been able to fight and die in 1914, the future would have suffered a great loss.

For Britain’s future anti-Nazi intelligence agents, Ruhleben was a four-year espionage training camp, paid for by the German government. Some internees wasted time fighting, drinking, and gambling. Others used their years behind barbed wire to strengthen their bodies and minds. Bell continued writing his diaries in German to keep up his skill.

In late February 1916, Bell showed yet another area of expertise when he lectured about agricultural credits to a Ruhleben group known as the Banking Circle. It was experience he had gained as a member of a family with diverse business interests in the Maritimes. Perhaps he was already thinking about his forthcoming financial rescue plan for post-war Europe.

Meanwhile, Germany debuted its newest battlefield horror, the flamethrower, and launched over a hundred thousand shells filled with poisonous phosgene gas. Phosgene smelled like freshly cut grass and killed by suffocation. At Verdun, Germany’s newest offensive, generals heaved soldiers towards enemy lines like coal into the furnace of a speeding train. And yet the battle lines scarcely moved. Three hundred thousand men were sacrificed for another tie. Bell noted that dissatisfaction began to infect Germany. The government had promised a quick victory but delivered another bloody stalemate. The Allies always won the tiebreaks because they had more resources to throw into the fire. Germany could win only with a decisive battlefield victory. Verdun was supposed to be that victory. When the attack failed, the country’s fighting spirit began to break. The people had suffered for a supposedly inevitable victory that now looked impossible.

Bell read in the newspapers in early April that Germany’s centre-left party, the Social Democrats, had urged an end to the war and a return to pre-war boundaries. That meant ceding vast conquered territories. At the beginning of the war in 1914, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg had declared that his country was fighting strictly in self-defence, not to enlarge its borders. He agreed that the invasion of Belgium was illegal, but he argued it was necessary for Germany to protect itself against the existential threat posed by Russia. As soon as the country had defended itself, he claimed, it would return Belgium.

But on April 5, 1916, the chancellor declared before the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, that Germany would keep Belgium. He pretended that nothing had changed: “Germany is only fighting in self-defence . . . Can anyone believe that Germany is thirsting for territory?” The leftist parliamentarian Karl Liebknecht could believe it. “Yes, certainly!” he asserted. Germany, Liebknecht continued, was “assailing and strangling” its neighbours, and committing war crimes. With that statement of uncomfortable truth, some were ready to assail and strangle Liebknecht. The president of the assembly called the Reichstag to order “to prevent personal violence to Liebknecht.”⁴

Foreign newspapers reported Liebknecht’s speech, but the censors gagged him in Germany. He was an unpopular man in the Reichstag, but he received hundreds of congratulatory letters from ordinary Germans, who were growing sick of the war.

The government refused to let Liebknecht’s account appear in the press but essentially admitted his point. Of course Germany was now fighting to grow richer by acquiring new territories. So what? The country deserved it for its wartime sacrifices. The admission was a serious blow to the government’s prestige. The people had been deceived at the beginning of the war, but they weren’t immoral. The government told them their countrymen had died en masse in Flanders because they were supposedly defending Germany against foreign aggression. But now the public learned that Germany was the aggressive one, fighting for the conquest of innocent Belgium. The war enrichened the military industrialists and corrupt regime while it destroyed, starved, and impoverished everyone else.

Meanwhile, the German army was paralyzed at Verdun, even as Bethmann Hollweg declared that victory was imminent. By the end of 1916, the country was becoming desperately hungrier and poorer. Over a million German soldiers were dead and millions more mangled.

Bell knew that while Kaiser Wilhelm II formally held nearly absolute power, he usually did what the military, under the functional control of General Erich Ludendorff, told him to do. But Germany’s constitution had given both Wilhelm and Ludendorff an Achilles’ heel: the Reichstag could cut off new debt to fund the war. If that happened, the fighting would simply vanish.

ON JULY 1, 1916, the British, Canadians, French, and their allies attacked the well-fortified Germans at the Somme River in northern France. It began with the greatest artillery barrage in history. Soon hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed in the battle. Once again, the lines hardly moved.

Corporal Adolf Hitler served at the Somme as a German regimental runner, typically several kilometres behind the front lines. It let him spend quality time with the militarist Prussian officers who wanted to keep up the fight no matter the sacrifice, and with his beloved dog, Fuchsl (Little Fox), an English terrier who had wandered from the British side into no man’s land, chasing a rat.

On Saturday, October 7, an exploding shell tore open Hitler’s left leg. He was evacuated to Munich but begged to return to the job he loved. The work had given him his first intoxicating taste of authority. Men had to do what the piece of paper in his hand told them to do. His abusive father, Alois, had demanded obedience on a pathetic scale.⁵ Now Hitler experienced it on a grand, earth-shaking scale.

Hitler twice refused promotions for more pay but a different job. For him, commanding hordes of men, even at second hand, was more precious than money or rank. Money was particularly low on his value hierarchy. When a railway officer offered to buy Fuchsl for two hundred marks—equivalent to a month’s salary for a German worker—Hitler was indignant. He wouldn’t sell his beloved dog for even two hundred thousand marks.

But soon handsome Fuchsl was stolen, or perhaps he chased another rat back across the front. Hitler’s beloved mother was dead. Artillery had buried his friends at Ypres. Then the disappearance of the English dog broke his heart. What did he have left? Virtually nothing, except he could make himself feel better by hating the Jews. Of course, we don’t know the precise moment Hitler decided to become an antisemite, but antisemitism, as the 20th century existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, was an easy way for an antisemite to feel better about himself without having done anything on his own.⁶ And as the 19th century Polish-German⁷ philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, it was a sign of envy of a weaker culture for a stronger one.⁸ The origins of antisemitism are much older, but likely have origins like these.

Jew-hatred was also the quasi-official ideology of the German army under General Ludendorff. Hitler could love Germany’s new absolute military-politics, which subsumed everything else, including life itself, to its own expansive purposes. It was the opposite of phenomelogical personalism, Bell’s philosophy. But Hitler was impressed by the steely resolve of the Prussian officers, who calmly ordered hundreds of thousands to their deaths to advance the battle lines by a few kilometres. He learned that land was worth killing for, a doctrine he later developed into his concept of Lebensraum.

But in 1917, the racists’ dreams of gaining new land were being stifled not only on the battlefield but also on German farmlands. While the country’s military planners knew a great deal about artillery, they had not fully considered agricultural questions. The winter of 1916–17 was one of the worst in European history, and it wrecked the harvests. The impact was less severe for Britain and its allies because they were able to import food. But the hunger struck Germans with full force while the British blockaded their ports. It had been Britain’s strategy for centuries, as they didn’t need a large land army when they controlled the seas. Densely populated European countries could not produce enough calories at home, so they needed to import grain from abroad. That’s what made the British blockade so deadly effective. Their immense navy always won the hunger games against foreign armies because soldiers needed to eat.

The wounded died of hypothermia in no man’s land while their comrades in the trenches suffered frostbite and trench foot. And now the homeland suffered too. An estimated four to eight hundred thousand German civilians died during the war from starvation and resultant diseases. Many of the victims perished in that bitter winter. Bad harvests, the British blockade, the loss of farmers to conscription, and the diversion of food to the front lines meant that poor urban Germans bore the worst of decreasing rations. It set the conditions for rebellion and political insecurity in the years ahead.

By comparison, the Ruhleben prisoners were well off during that terrible winter, despite the bursting pipes, broken heat, and frigid feet. The official rations weren’t great, but prisoners could buy extras at the canteen, and quality food came by post from charities and families. Bell’s weight in 1917 was 64 kilos, or 141 pounds. For a nearly six-foot-tall man, he was thin but not emaciated. Strangely, the prisoners had it better than the guards, who grumbled to Bell about their conditions back home.

As Germany starved, Christmas 1916 featured Ruhleben’s musical spectacle of the century, The Mikado, about a fictionalized Japan where the authorities punished flirting by execution. Even the still-neutral American embassy bought seats. The Mikado was comic fare for the all-male Ruhleben. The audience members dressed in their best suits, sat under enchanting coloured lanterns, and forgot for a moment they were in prison.

On New Year’s Eve, the camp was “horribly drunk, and completely wild,” Bell reported. Someone kicked in the door of the soldiers’ barracks. The next day, while many of the men suffered the worst headaches of their lives, clear-headed Bell, who had stayed sober the night before, resolved to learn French, and hit the grammar books. He also began to read the German novel Auch Einer (Also One) by Friedrich Vischer. It was a message of love and peace, weighing a dying man’s last moments with his adoring family against the outbreak of a new war between Germany and France. Germany’s militarists weren’t subtle enough to censor it.

On January 3, Bell received a dangerous present by post. He tore off the packaging to find an anti-war book by Friedrich Förster, given to him by a Göttingen friend, Lieutenant Richard Courant, Edith Stein’s cousin. It was a risky gift because military command wouldn’t have appreciated learning that a peace advocate was in their ranks, particularly because Courant occupied a sensitive position in military intelligence.

Courant was a Jew, a mathematician, and a rising star in the military science bureau. It wasn’t a strange résumé at the time, even though his Jewishness later made him unemployable under the Nazis. (He moved to the US after Hitler seized power in 1933, leaving Germany like so many other of the country’s best minds.) During the First World War, Courant was among Germany’s top experts in secret communication and also one of the world’s smartest men (New York University’s math institute is named in his honour.) Carl Runge, president of the University of Göttingen, had pulled strings to get him off the front lines and into a research laboratory, likely saving Courant’s life, just as he had likely saved Bell’s.

In his personal life, Courant’s habit of seeking to consider all sides of an issue tended to paralyze action. For instance, he would spend so much time ruminating about whether to go to the theatre that it became too late to show up. His soon-to-be former wife Nellie did not appreciate the habit. But what was overthinking in private life was just the right amount of thought to create crucial new military technology. The enemy’s artillery barrages often severed communication wires and killed regimental runners who bore crucial messages. Courant figured out a way to solve the communication problem. There was safety below ground, and he exploited it by inventing a device that signalled through the earth using low-frequency currents. Soon he was in contact with wealthy industrialists who sensed a profitable opportunity, and top research scientists were placed under his command.

At Courant’s request, the military assigned Wilhelm Runge (Bell’s friend, Bernhard’s brother, and President Runge’s son) as his assistant. Runge’s new assignment would later prove a crucial advantage in Bell’s future fight against the Nazis.

THE NEW YEAR began the same way the three previous years had ended, with explosions and mass death at the front lines, and gnawing hunger throughout Europe. Nothing was certain, not even that the war would ever end. Bell’s diary records him weighed down by a melancholic thought: What if the war went on forever?

January 6, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, was “cold and very beautiful,” Bell’s diary notes. He stayed up late in his frigid cubby, reading about the ancient Germans, a warrior people. Late in the evening, he walked back to his barracks under a beautiful waxing moon, over earth frozen fast and blanketed with snow. Finally, the horrible mud was gone.

Reading German history was Bell’s Christmas present to himself. History helped him to better understand the present and anticipate the future. He understood what George Santayana, one of his favourite philosophers, meant when he said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Were the Prussian warriors still fighting the same kind of race war in the present moment as they had two thousand years earlier against the Romans? The only way to break the old habit would be to understand it.

While Bell experienced the consolation of philosophy, Germany’s military began unrestricted submarine warfare on Thursday, February 1. Still-neutral America grew angry and armed its ships. Germany knew it needed to win the war before America, with its massive industrial ability and millions of fresh soldiers, joined the fight. The only way to do that would be to quickly win in the east, on the Russian front, then turn all its forces west, towards France and Belgium. It was a desperate gamble.

But how would Germany quickly win in the east? They needed a traitor to undermine Russia from within. Tanks, poison gas, flamethrowers, and artillery had not yet succeeded. Now they launched their ultimate secret weapon: German economic theory, delivered by the ideologue Vladimir Lenin. They sent Lenin, a ruthless Russian communist revolutionary and follower of Karl Marx, to knock Russia out of the war by fomenting class-based civil war. He went with tens of millions of marks in German financing.⁹

The danger for Germany was that ideological poison, just like poison gas, could waft back over the side that had fired it. It took a while, but it happened—German troops returning from the east came back with destroyed confidence in the old regime. Many soldiers returned with a new faith in Marx’s coming communist world revolution and its promise to empower the workers. It was a joyful thought to the soldiers who saw themselves as the hardest workers of all.

Germany was desperate. The government announced a cut in civilian bread rations from 200 grams to 170 grams per day—more fuel for the revolutionary fire. Workers’ unions responded to the bread reduction with massive strikes that threatened to paralyze the country. The government relented, but it was just words. Politicians could command the presses to print more money, but they couldn’t print more bread. Germany was past its limit.

April 6 was a cool and overcast Good Friday. Bell attended the Ruhleben theatre to watch a play about Pontius Pilate, the Roman leader who ignored advice and omens and sentenced an innocent man to death. The costumes were good, Bell decided, but the piece itself was disappointing. That same day, America declared war on Germany. It was a bad omen for Germany’s chances, but the country’s militarist government played the role of Pilate, ignoring the signs.

Others paid more attention. In mid-May, the centre-left politician Philipp Scheidemann, speaking in the Reichstag on behalf of the German people, warned that the government’s demand for conquest was the speech of robbers. If the military continued this path, he said, there would be a revolution.

Bell also paid attention to the signs. On May 18, his diary reported that a huge eagle flew over Ruhleben. That day, the Selective Service Act became law in the US. Millions of fresh American soldiers would soon arrive in Europe to join the fight. Then, on Wednesday, July 4, Bell watched a total eclipse of the moon. In the ancient world, an eclipse heralded disaster. As it turned out, Russia’s disaster was coming. Bell read in the newspapers about a massive Russian army attack against the German side. Its initial success concealed the Russian Empire’s death throes.

Within weeks, Russian forces disintegrated. The communists were waiting in the wings. Germany’s theoretical poison—Marx administered by way of Lenin—worked even better than actual poisonous gas. Russia collapsed from within in a paroxysm of civil hate.

Two weeks later, Bell read the astounding news that by a vote of 212 to 126, the Reichstag passed a peace resolution by Matthias Erzberger, the Catholic Centre Party leader. He was inspired by Pope Benedict XV’s peace proposal, which urged the fair reconciliation of land and sea access. (The Nazis never forgot Erzberger’s alleged treachery, nor that he signed the Armistice in 1918. He was assassinated in 1921 in southwestern Germany. The mastermind of the killing was the ironically named Manfred von Killinger.)

Would Erzberger’s Reichstag proposal finally mean peace? No. Bell learned from the next day’s papers that Germany’s militarist government treated the Reichstag with indifference, as if it were a student council.

Through the summer and fall, the war dragged on in France and Belgium under the same brutal conditions, but the sudden collapse of Russia meant that Germany gained momentum. Just as Germany’s democrats sought a way out of the conflict, the country’s warlords saw a path to victory.

ON DECEMBER 8, 1917, without warning, much of Halifax, Bell’s hometown, was reduced to rubble. The largest man-made blast to that point in human history instantly killed almost two thousand people, when a heavily-laden munitions ship caught fire in the harbour after a collision with another ship.

Several days later, Bell was relieved to learn that his family members, protected by a hill between them and the explosion, were safe. Ralph, Winthrop’s brother, took a position on the executive board of the Halifax Relief Commission, overseeing $27 million in emergency funds (around $500 million in today’s money). It was a job that put him into regular contact with prominent Canadian and American politicians. It thus gave him an outstanding position from which to pitch his older brother for a post-war job.

In late February 1918, the air at Ruhleben was terrible—and so were Bell’s lungs. The Russian front collapsed, and the Germans were triumphant in the east. Lenin prepared to cede immense tracts of land to his German sponsors. They signed a deal on Sunday, March 3, and Russia gave up control of Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Finland. Then Lenin took over the Germans’ war work and got busy killing his fellow Russians.

Fifty freed-up divisions of battle-hardened German troops from the east now rushed to the west. Could they finally smash through enemy lines? The German government was awash in optimism, but the country’s democrats were furious about the land grab that happened in Russia. Germany’s leaders had convinced the public to fight the war to prevent a Russian pillage of Germany. But it was once again becoming clear that Germany was doing the pillaging.

By early April, the Germans looked like they might achieve victory on the Western Front, just as they had on the Eastern Front. The Allies had not been prepared to suddenly fight fifty new German divisions, and the massive attack nearly succeeded in outflanking the British. Germany’s big guns advanced far enough to shell Paris. On Good Friday, an explosive hit a church on the right bank of the Seine, killing ninety-one and injuring scores more.

Britain’s General Douglas Haig rallied his troops with a valiant speech: “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.”¹⁰

His troops held their wall, even as casualties ran into the hundreds of thousands.

LIFE WENT ON in Ruhleben. Bell began teaching a ten-session master class at Ruhleben U. on value theory. Forty students were present at the first lecture. He noticed a lot of bored faces, but he was unsympathetic. He had been clear in the advertisement that the class would not focus primarily on economic values (which disappointed those looking for a business class), and he would not be giving sermons (which disappointed those looking for compact, edifying lessons). Still, twenty-four students returned for the second lecture—not bad for a philosophy class.

Bell’s course focused on two questions: What is the essence of value that all good history, science, ethics, religion, and art share? And what is distinct to each field? His values course synthesized two seemingly irreconcilable philosophical arguments—monism, which contends that deep down everything is the same despite apparent differences, and atomism, which holds that individual things share nothing in common. Bell’s course showed that value has certain universal features, but it is also infinitely diverse.

On the fourth of July 1918, the Spanish flu struck the prison camp. It was the deadliest pandemic in the modern era, killing two hundred thousand in Germany alone. The next day, it hit Bell. He took some aspirin and thought he was fine. But soon he had a bad fever, a headache, and a constant cough. For a man who already had a lung condition, the infection could have easily proved fatal. Weeks later, he was recovering but in pain, particularly in his eyes, which still hurt when he taught his final values course on Wednesday, August 14 to eight weary students, while others coughed miserably in the barracks.

In late September, his close friend Wilhelm Runge came for a visit. After a hellish life on the front lines, Wilhelm had been reassigned to the military intelligence division in Berlin. Bell learned interesting facts he could use in his future intelligence career, but nothing that he could commit to his diary, which could be read by guards at any time.

On the first Tuesday in October, Bell learned of the passing of his beloved father, Andrew, in Nova Scotia. For four years, Winthrop had desperately wanted to return home so he could spend time with him. The death of his father was painful but liberating. He reflected that he would not necessarily return to his hometown if released from prison.

Five days later, Prince Max von Baden became Germany’s new chancellor. Now Bell was but a step from the pinnacle of German power—his Göttingen friend Kurt Hahn, who served in the military office of Germany’s Foreign Ministry, was Baden’s speechwriter.

Baden’s and Hahn’s 1918 ascendence was unmistakable evidence that Germany’s democratic forces had launched their peaceful coup. It was so quiet that few noticed it, but Bell knew what was happening because he was paying a lot of attention. As the philosopher Molly McGrath writes, “Evidence is at the center of phenomenology.”¹¹

The German imperialists had conquered the east and still occupied much of Belgium and France. But they had begun to fall back before their western enemies, now fortified by the US.

The German army’s spring 1918 offensive gained a lot of territory, but at a tremendous cost in lives and equipment. Worse, the attack failed to achieve the promised breakthrough that would win the war. The political climate shifted. Ordinary Germans began to wake up to the truth. Labour strikes intensified. The Socialist and Catholic parties became emboldened to demand peace. The far left threatened revolution. On the battlefield, German soldiers surrendered and deserted en masse.

Meanwhile, on the home front, the democrats were gaining the upper hand. Germany’s militarist leaders began to plan their escape to neutral nations.

Bell waited for the newspapers with “huge expectation.” On October 28, although the weather was beautiful, the “sports fields were empty.” Two weeks later, revolutionary German sailors marched on Berlin, having staged their invasion just outside Ruhleben. Bell and his fellow prisoners had front-row seats.

Few students showed up to class at Ruhleben U. It didn’t look like they would finish the semester.

On November 9, Prince Max showed Kaiser Wilhelm the exit, packing him off to bitter exile. The guards at Ruhleben ran up the Red Flag, symbolizing their loyalty to socialism. Now the prisoners and guards were all one, comrades. Everyone was free to come or go. Bell watched in amazement as six prisoners disappeared through the hedge. Weeks earlier, truncheons or gunfire would have stopped them.

On Monday, November 11, the Armistice was signed. The shooting on the battlefields stopped. Yet it was not a peace but only a ceasefire. It seemed certain, though, that a peace would quickly follow. Bell soon visited Berlin on leave and saw and heard “signs of the Revolution.” Gunshots rang out from time to time, but restaurants stayed open. For ten marks, he ate an excellent meal. The black market was alive and well. Then he returned to Ruhleben, just as he’d promised.

On the twentieth, he and Lieutenant Courant had a “fascinating” discussion about German politics at Wilhelm Runge’s place in Berlin. Bell would soon be reporting its details to prime ministers. The next day, he said goodbye to Runge and to Pease’s biology laboratory, then stayed up extremely late packing. Two days later, he took a cold, slow train from Berlin; the next day, he was on board the SS Dronning Maud, accompanied by a torpedo ship to Copenhagen, through treacherous minefields.

On Saturday, November 23, he boarded the “beautiful, luxurious” Frederik VIII and was finally en route to England along with other Ruhlebenites. The leading intellectuals of Grand Stand University didn’t know it yet, but important people were waiting to interview them on the other side of the Channel. British intelligence needed information on what was going on in Germany.

With highly placed friends in German politics and military intelligence, expertise in the language, and a broad-based liberal and technical education, Winthrop Bell was well placed to provide it.

Chapter 3

The Anti-Semitic League

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, TWELFTH NIGHT

On November 26, 1918, a foggy, mild evening, Winthrop Bell paced on the deck of the Frederik VIII. The ship had set anchor at sunset. The sea bobbed with anti-shipping mines, making night travel impossible. Owing to the lack of trains and ships and the dangerous conditions in the water, Bell’s trip from Berlin to England, which might have taken two or three days pre-war, was turning into a six-day ordeal.

He carried two passports. One was British, the other a powerful academic passport, his doctoral education with Husserl. Two weeks after the end of the war, after four years of imprisonment, Bell was finally heading home to Halifax by way of England, and then to a job teaching philosophy at Harvard.

Or so he thought. As it turned out, Prime Minister Robert Borden had some other ideas about what Bell should be doing. World leaders were gathering in Paris to decide the new shape of the world. They would construct the League of Nations, divvy up the fallen empires that had once belonged to the Germans, Austrians, Russians, and Ottomans, and dictate the terms of the Treaty of Versailles to the Germans. To make good decisions about Germany, Borden needed good intel, and he needed it quickly. Could Bell be his man?

But first on the agenda was getting Bell to England alive. The Frederik gingerly restarted its voyage, with sailors on the deck watching out for mines. The German version was the deadliest. If the Frederik’s hull struck one, it would trigger a chain reaction: a soft lead horn would compress, breaking a vial holding acid, activating a battery, and detonating over three hundred pounds of explosives.

Bell, on the bottom of the North Atlantic, would have missed interviewing for a top-secret job he knew nothing about.

OWING TO MINES, blockades, and U-boats, business had not been good for the Frederik during the war years. The ship, commissioned in 1913, was the flagship of the Scandinavian American Line. Its main work was carrying well-to-do Scandinavian emigrants to the United States. It could carry around twelve hundred people, and even the third-class passengers were accommodated in staterooms. For the task of travelling through frigid North Atlantic waters, it was a sleek improvement over the much larger Titanic, which had sunk in 1912. After that disaster, passengers were less interested in getting to the New World big than getting there alive. Frederik was the “best ship yet built for northern service in ice, fog, and snow,” with an “extraordinarily large” number of lifeboats, thirty-four, superior to the Titanic’s twenty.¹

Life on board, Bell wrote in his diary, was “Interessantes, and, in comparison to what came before, luxuriöses Leben.” He slept on sheets for the first time in years and wrote letters in the ship’s writing room, off the well-stocked library, both of which were panelled in polished mahogany. Nearby, accomplished musicians played as best as they were able on the swaying sea, in an acoustically fine room made of American cherry.

Bell found it difficult to fully enjoy this luxury, however, because he knew Germany’s desperation. Though the war was supposedly over, British warships continued to block food and supplies from reaching a starving country. The Armistice was only a ceasefire, rather than a peace treaty. The difference between one signature and two meant that the children of Germany’s new democracy continued to waste away from hunger.

For the British, it was a calm, cool bet about how to win a war. For Bell, it meant watching his German friends suffer from malnourishment. To change the policy, he needed to change the minds of both the British government and the English-speaking public. It was a tall order. Anti-German hatred filled the atmosphere. Yet for all the unnecessary tragedy, he knew that the political situation was salvageable. Germans still hoped that democracy could finally succeed. But how long could democratic optimism hold out in the face of emaciation? And what happened if the government failed? The centre still held, but the equilibrium was unstable. It was difficult to be a moderate government in revolutionary times.

Embarrassingly, MI6 was a lightweight in Germany in late 1918.² Its primary task during the war was to figure out where the next attack would come in France or Belgium, rather than what was going on in the enemy’s homeland. And of course, it was extremely difficult to recruit there during the war years. Despite the limitations, the spy agency had thoroughly outplayed the Germans by using a network of clandestine train spotters in Belgium to detect enemy movements towards the front. The operation, Dame Blanche, was run by Richard Tinsley and Henry Landau out of Rotterdam. Leslie Renwick Grant, military attaché to neutral Sweden, ran agents into Germany after surviving the battle at Gallipoli. Meanwhile, an MI6 source named Karl Krüger gave exquisite information that let Britain predict naval movements. Other British intelligence agencies also did their part. MI5, the domestic intelligence agency, rooted out German spies at home. And Room 40, the decryption bureau, intercepted the Zimmerman Telegram, which tried to goad Mexico into attacking the US but instead sped America’s entry into the war. Despite these wartime successes, MI6 faced serious budget cutbacks after the war.

While Bell was perfectly suited for a job in Germany, it was not yet clear there would be money to hire him. It’s difficult to know if Robert Borden already had Bell in mind for an intelligence position in Britain’s Foreign Office in November, or if the idea only occurred to him the following month. But it is certain that Canada was comparatively well off, thanks to its vast natural resources, and it had the funds to keep a new British agent employed in style.

In 1918, no Briton knew more about Germany than Bell. While the other Göttingen student phenomenologists tended to socialize only among themselves, Bell had befriended interesting people wherever he found them. Among this group were mathematicians and physicists like Richard Courant, Wilhelm Runge, and the future Nobel Prize–winner Max Born. When the war began, these men became leaders in Germany’s military-scientific intelligence. They spilled their secrets to Bell because they knew he loved Germany and democracy, and he was trustworthy. Steaming towards England was a valuable source of crucial inside information.

On November 27, the Frederik arrived at King George Dock in Hull in a heavy fog. An enthusiastic public reception, complete with sirens and music, greeted the freed prisoners. A first group disembarked while Bell and others remained on board. The fog turned to rain. There was an hours-long wait. The provisions ran short. Bell reported a “struggle for biscuits” when tea was finally served.

At long last, Bell and his group left the ship in the evening and were bustled onto military trucks. After a bumpy two-mile drive on solid rubber tires, they arrived at Army Camp Ripon at 8 p.m. Ripon was the depot for Northern Command, headed by General John Maxwell, who was intimately acquainted with Britain’s new secret intelligence service through their shared work in trying to defeat the Irish insurgency. It is doubtful that mere coincidence brought Bell’s group to Maxwell’s command.

Bell hopped from the truck into the rain and mud. He lined up alongside his close friends Michael Pease and Grant Lochhead. Like Bell, they had been studying at German universities in 1914 when war erupted. Now they were waiting in line to be interviewed by a man who pointed a flashlight in their faces and asked rapid-fire questions. The interviewer’s job was to sort them into their housing with commissioned officers, non-commissioned officers, or enlisted men, each man to his own caste. The soldier with the flashlight assigned Bell the best housing, with the officers.

Bell closed out the day with a pleasant evening in the Ripon casino. An officer struck up a conversation. Could the communists (aka Soviets, Bolshevists, Reds) really take over Germany? A lot of people thought it was possible. The Socialists were the new ruling power in the country, and communists agitated among them.

Bell shook his head. The Social Democrats had temporarily allied with the Communist Party, which formed in Germany at the end of 1918, but profound differences divided them. The militant branch of the Communists, meanwhile, was a discredited force. He explained that the soldiers hated the Liebknecht-led far leftists because his men distributed weapons that fired on the soldiers during the November Revolution. And the democratic politicians hated them because they had taken over government offices and tried to run the country.

While Liebknecht had support among some unions in Berlin, most Germans supported one-person, one-vote democracy. The mere fact that the German government was “socialist” was misleading. “The Revolution was supported not only by the Socialist parties,” Bell noted, “but also by wide circles of the German people, who had been anything but revolutionary.” Despite its “socialist” name, which scared some in official Britain who detested the left and sometimes conflated socialism and revolutionary communism, the Social Democratic Party was really a centrist and democratic one.

Bell went on to say that it wasn’t yet possible to gain a comprehensive political read on the German military officers. The officers he personally knew all supported democracy. Men like Courant and Born “supported the Revolution, and were working in perfect harmony with the authorities.” But given the utter disorder in the officers’ ranks after the war, Bell admitted that it was difficult to discern the overall situation.

The revolution was pro-democratic. But the new rulers were trying to learn how to govern. Most Germans, even highly educated ones, had no political experience. In England, there was a long tradition of parliamentary democracy, but Germans were so used to the Prussian Junkers (the ancient military-political ruling class) running everything that most paid little attention to politics. Bell’s German friends belonged to the broad class of men who “previous to the war had taken no interest in politics. The average educated man pretended rarely to a political opinion and would say quite frankly that he left that to those whose business politics and statecraft were.”

These average men were ordinary patriotic Germans who had believed, for a long time, the propaganda about the justice of their country’s military cause and its imminent victory. But towards the end of the war, “the dramatic collapse of Germany’s military position within so few weeks has convinced the people that those whom they trusted as their military and political authorities have been playing a great speculation with them.”

Was the democratic awakening a momentary change or something enduring? Bell responded that his friends “told me that the events of the last year had convinced them that just this political apathy of that class of the people to whom they belong was that which had been fatal to Germany, and that they were ready and believed that the large majority of the younger men of their type were also ready to support wholeheartedly the moderate, that is to say, the democratic as distinct from any Bolshevist Revolution.”

The British officer nodded appreciatively. He was learning something new. Newspapers on the extremist right and left wings of German politics had sprung up since the revolution. The country’s democrats, meanwhile, had been quiet because they were busy trying to figure out how to run a government. The torrent of threatening words from the extremists made Britain fearful of the German situation and prepared to fight on. Yet what Bell said meant that Britain had good reasons to be hopeful about, and helpful towards, German democracy.

Bell did not know, at first, that he was being tested. As far as he knew, he was simply having conversations about interesting topics that British officers just happened to want to know about. He charmed his hosts and shared valuable intel that only he among the British subjects knew. Through Runge, he had access to Germany’s secret military cyphers, which in turn gave him access to highly classified information. Bell had seen one decoded message, for instance, that showed the Kiel Mutiny, which was the beginning of the end of the German militarist government, began as a mistake. At Kiel, the sailors incorrectly thought their superiors were sending them on a suicide mission to fight the British fleet, so they rebelled. In fact, the battle order had only been suggested and was rejected. Bell’s listeners leaned in, realizing they had a great link to German intel in front of them. Meanwhile, he was glad to be sharing important information, and his take on it, because of his deeply grounded sense of loyalty.

The next day, Bell went into Ripon to buy collars and get a shave, and he returned to the base looking sharp. He always wanted to be as neat as possible, but perhaps he also suspected that he was up for a position, and was probably embarrassed mingling with the officers in his shabby Ruhleben togs.

For Michael Pease, meanwhile, the thought of being stuck at Ripon Army Camp after being stuck in German prison camp seemed absurd. He had spent years as one of the key organizers of Ruhleben’s academic life, and now he looked forward to a well-earned vacation. He was also keen to meet Helen, his future wife, a fiery intellectual who had begun a correspondence with him during his imprisonment. He walked out of Ripon, but not before inviting Bell for a visit. Pease had, among the upper crust of British intellectual society, friends and family who were waiting for him. Nearby to the Peases, in genteel Limpsfield, Surrey, lived Maurice Hankey, a top figure in Britain’s Foreign Office and secretary of the War Cabinet. Michael Pease thought his father, Edward, a driving force in the Fabian Society, and Bell would have a lot to talk about. If Hankey joined them, the political discussions could become remarkably interesting.

Bell accepted the invitation for the near future but stayed at Ripon for the moment to see how events played out. He had no ties nearby, and he was probably also beginning to see how his information could promote friendship between Britain and newly democratic Germany. On the afternoon of November 28, he saw General Maxwell, who had set up the Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau during the war with MI6’s permission. Bell then spent another enjoyable evening in the casino, entertained by a Lieutenant Dyer, who regaled him with tales of battles on the Western Front. In exchange, Bell shared his knowledge of the uncertain situation in Berlin. Dyer wondered if the right wing would be able to make a play for power in Germany. “The suggestion, in Berlin at least, is received only with a sarcastic smile,” Bell responded, “but more than one of my informants thought that in case of the chaos which would result from a Bolshevist coup, great numbers of the people who are at present ready to accept the democratic Revolution might be ready to support an attempt at a reactionary movement, purely from a desire to secure order at any price again.”

The right-wing militarists could only plot for the future, he explained, since their chances were non-existent in the present. “The great majority of the German people is undoubtedly at present more hostile and bitter toward just these circles than toward anything or anybody else.” The militarists had dragged Germany into a war of choice and lied constantly about their impending victory, and then they went on to lose. The cost was immense misery.

The hope that had made the deprivations of the war bearable, explained the journalist Sebastian Haffner (who experienced the events in Berlin at first hand), was the constant reassurance that Germany was about to win. The shocking revelation that Germany had lost was scarcely understandable. Haffner, who was eleven on the day the Armistice took effect, entered a deep depression. “Where could one find stability and security, faith and confidence, if world events could be so deceptive? If triumph upon triumph led to ultimate disaster, and the true rules of history were revealed only retrospectively in a shattering outcome? I stared into the abyss.”³ He wasn’t the only one. Adolf Hitler recounted a similar bewilderment at the news, but a more dramatic outcome, as he buried his “burning head in the sheets and pillows.”⁴

The British officers were also curious about the continuing influence of the top German military leaders, Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff. As for Hindenburg, the titular head of the military who had been promoted to Field Marshal in 1914 for his campaign against the Russian forces, he was popular for supporting the democratic revolution. But, Bell continued, “for the past two years all real power resided with Ludendorff. He has apparently called into being all sorts of agencies reporting to himself, and dealing with the most various matters, with which he, in his nominal official capacity, should have had no concern. Ludendorff had really been the dictator of Germany for a year and a half. This was confirmed for me by some of my informants in the best positions to judge.”

Ludendorff had pulled off what amounted to a military coup. For the moment at least, he was in exile in Sweden and out of power. But the framework of his organizations lived on. Bell’s informants were worried less about immediate violence that his organizations could perpetrate and more about what could happen in the future.

The rapid demobilization of Germany’s military meant that up to three hundred thousand unemployed soldiers flooded Berlin, with more on the way. This was the “one question,” Bell continued, “occupying the minds of intelligent people.” These ex-soldiers had weapons but no food or money, which made them a “constant source of danger.” He had seen pandemonium at the train stations. Ex-soldiers clambered on top of trains for a free ride, despite the fatal risk. Armed police stood at the stations to prevent soldiers from disembarking without proof they lived in Berlin. After facing enemy troops on the battlefield, troops now faced unsmiling German police in their own homeland.

The British officers were also curious about German public opinion. Bell described the situation: “I found a very general acceptance of the fact that Germany must expect to be poor and to have to work very hard for many years as a result of the war and of the conditions of peace which are to be expected; but the German people as a whole has not the slightest idea of the real popular feeling in other lands towards it. The horror of the German name which has been induced during the war by all the well-known facts is not understood there.”

During the war, the local press had not carried reports of German atrocities in Belgium. And the newspapers justified the submarine warfare against civilian ships as a proper response to the Allied blockade of German ports. Now most Germans were clueless that foreigners despised them. They were baffled that a blockade continued starving them even though hostilities had stopped. It played into the extremists’ propaganda that “England does not want a League of Nations or a just settlement to affairs, but desires to annihilate and crush Germany.”

The Canadian seemed to know everything related to Germany, including a lot that even specialists like Maxwell and Dyer did not know. Could there be a place for him in the intelligence division?

His personality was right for such work. Bell was loyal, honest, and fair. His closest German friends all supported liberal democracy. He wanted them, and Germany, to succeed. And he was a proud liberal. That was fine, as many liberals inhabited government and intelligence service posts. But he was far from being a Bolshevist-leaning socialist, which would have immediately disqualified him from consideration. For Bell, “liberal” meant he believed in minority rights and the ability of individuals to bear the rewards and consequences of their own actions, free from external pressure, whether public or private. (He later decried the co-opting of the word “liberal” to mean “socialist.”)⁵

At nine in the morning the next day, he was off to the train station for London. There he met a group of soldiers and answered their questions about the German Revolution. Everywhere he went, it was the topic du jour. No one had seen it coming. Britons had imagined the war would continue for years in a desperate slog through Germany, with more grinding trench warfare and millions more deaths. And then, suddenly, on November 11, the fighting in Belgium and France stopped without the Allies even entering Germany. It was a shock. Bell knew the inside story, which made him a popular speaker.

In London, the streets teemed with horse-drawn carriages, new-fangled automobiles, and pedestrians. Bell went with Grant Lochhead, one of his closest Ruhleben friends (later a chief scientist for Canada’s department of agriculture), to stay at the Imperial Hotel, a turreted giant that managed to combine art nouveau, Tudor, and Gothic styling in one building. Over the weekend, Bell discovered Pinoli’s, a restaurant in Lower Wardour Street “that offers almost as much at its two-shilling table d’hôte dinner as some other restaurants do at twice or more that price.”⁶ He ate there often in coming days. Finding good food at a decent price was another sign of a promising intelligence agent.

Soon Bell would be dining at London’s most exquisite, and expensive, restaurants. It wouldn’t be on his own shilling.

THE ROOTS OF Germany’s militarist anti-Jewish scheme went back to a secret meeting of the racists in 1915. Those proto-Nazi plotters could not yet know that the Armistice would go into effect on November 11, 1918. But they knew that on whatever day the fighting ended, the Second World War would begin. Jews would be their first target.

Why? When they failed to win the war immediately in 1914, the clever militarists realized that they would likely lose. And yet, the racists still believed they needed to win. For them, they could only win or lose a race war, but not negotiate. The only way out of the seeming paradox was to regroup and try again. They already hated the Jews before their 1915 plot, but now they had the clever thought that a racist attack would camouflage their failure to win the war they had unwisely begun.

On November 30, 1917, a German newspaper, the Jüdische Rundschau (Jewish Review), posted a notice about its discovery of the Anti-Semitic League’s “strictly confidential” 1915 plot for a world war (Weltkrieg) against the Jews and Judaism.⁷ The newspaper had unearthed a letter sent by the group to raise funds for the next stage of the fight, to pay for distributing their anti-Jewish plans to “officers, civil officials, landowners, merchants, and large manufacturers, lawyers, doctors, and students,” to bring them on board without letting Jewish people know what was happening.⁸ The secret war would be a real “surprise” for the Jews, the letter stated, and it would start “immediately” after the present war ended.

Among the funders of the scheme was Count Ernst Reventlow, a leader of the antisemitic press. He was an enthusiastic supporter of genocide who declared in 1915, after hearing reports of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Germany’s Turkish allies, “If the Turkish authorities believe it opportune to take vigorous measures against unreliable, bloodthirsty, riotous Armenian elements, it is not only right but even their duty to do so.”⁹

While Bell would be the first to discover, in early 1919, the formation of a nationalist-socialist-racist alliance that would eventually become known as the Nazi Party, credit is due to the Rundschau for giving the first clear evidence of the antisemitic military plotters for the Second World War at a time when they were racists and nationalists with an underground plan to fight a great campaign (Großen Feldzug) against Jews and Judaism. The Jewish newspaper revealed some of the plot’s main leaders, including Count Reventlow, an intermediary between antisemitic theorists and the government, as well as other anti-Jewish writers and theorists. But two names in the Anti-Semitic League’s letter remained secret: a person referred to only as the general, and a senior civil servant in the government.

The evidence that the military official was General Ludendorff is circumstantial, but it all points in the same direction. First, Ludendorff distributed copies of an anti-Jewish publication, Germany’s Renewal (Deutschlands Erneuerung), to military officers in the same year the Rundschau warned that “renewal” is what the unnamed general had in mind. Second, the pure-race ideology, the worship of war, and the vision of military socialism were Ludendorff’s ideas. Other leading German generals, like Hindenburg, did not share them. Third, Ludendorff created the “stabbed in the back” myth at the end of the war, which held that Germany lost because of treachery on the home front, rather than defeat on the battlefield. Fourth, there is the sheer smugness of the secret letter. It is just what you would expect of a racially narcissistic conspiracy theorist who suddenly held the levers of government power.

The machinery for the war against the Jews was no grassroots movement from below, but a command from a powerful group of conspirators. Ludendorff’s support meant the group soon to be called the Nazis was not the ragtag Munich group of the early 1920s, led by the poor street preacher Hitler, as popular history has sometimes made it appear. Already during the war, the Jew-hating racists ran Germany behind the scenes through Ludendorff, a dictator-general who exercised almost complete control of the military, government, economy, and press. He was later an early supporter of Hitler, which explains why the Munich organization so quickly grew in strength.

Ludendorff is one of history’s most devastating but least-known dictators. He stayed virtually unknown to the public in recent years, until his fictionalized turn as villain in the 2017 Wonder Woman movie. Part of the reason for the oversight is that he was a de facto dictator, not an official one. He ruled behind the scenes, telling Kaiser Wilhelm II, the nominal head of government, what to do.

Ludendorff didn’t look like a stereotypical steely-eyed dictator. He looked like a sad, overgrown baby. His pudgy cheeks pulled his mouth into a pouting permanent frown; his sad eyes always appeared ready to burst into tears. He hardly slept during the war, and his battle plans became ever more confused and desperate. By 1918, he was raving mad. Eyewitnesses reported weeping outbursts and literal foaming at the mouth.

Earlier in the war, he was just as insane, but he was able to deliver his madness calmly and insistently. Tens of millions of Germans, military and civilian, obeyed his orders, and he was completely confident in his success. But others began to read the signs of Germany’s failure to win the war. First the communists defied him, and then the Social Democrats and the Catholic Centre did as well. He hated them all, but they were too powerful to confront at once. The Jews were a small minority, so he fixed his firepower on them.

Ludendorff hated Jews, Catholics, democrats, socialists, and Freemasons for being “internationalists” instead of nationalists. He later fancied himself a priest of the war god Odin. He served a god far removed from the “cowardly” Jewish and Christian God of peace. Ludendorff did not invent the theology—Nietzsche had lampooned German racism and nationalism writ as religion in the nineteenth century—but he had the military means to try to impose his war gods on the world.

A major reason for his influence with the government during the war, in addition to his success on the Eastern Front (which probably owed a lot to the poor state of the Russian military), was that he was the bearer of a simple optimistic message: Germans would soon win. His insanity was that of the idée fixe. His “Total War,” he insisted, would punch a hole in the Allied lines and gain vast new territories. He would then expel enemy populations and replace them with Germans. Even as his country’s chances in the war dwindled, its population starved, and its men were killed and wounded, Ludendorff promised an immediate victory with a final push.

It was just what his protégé Hitler did twenty-seven years later as Germany’s military crumbled at the end of the Second World War. It is no wonder. Hitler was an early subscribing member of Ludendorff’s Anti-Semitic League.¹⁰

Chapter 4

The Secret Base

The war was regarded as part of a struggle for racial supremacy.

—WINTHROP BELL TO PRIME MINISTER ROBERT BORDEN, DECEMBER 1918

Winthrop Bell aced his interviews with the British officers. On Tuesday, December 3, he received an invitation to a meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden, who was in London to help Britain figure out what to do next. Germany’s military collapse had been so sudden that its enemies had not had a chance to think through the post-war peace. And now, several weeks after the Armistice, they still needed a plan.

Bell had one. He walked to Claridge’s, one of the finest hotels in London, and headed up to Borden’s suite. On his way, he walked by the hotel’s “inner hall, with its pillars and walls of white, and its reflected light . . . a most comfortable lounge in which to sit after dinner and listen to the orchestra, and out of this open two rooms, one of Wedgwood blue with Wedgwood designs on it, and the other of old gold.”¹

He found Borden’s impressive, well-furnished suite and soon saw the welcoming face of an old family friend: the prime minister himself. Borden was a tall, affably imposing man with a broad moustache and hair so famously handsome that even some women who were not his wife felt free to tousle it.

Borden respected Britain. He was also eager to make a play for Canada’s emergence from a child of empire to an independent but loyal adult. Canada’s tremendous war sacrifices helped him make the case. Could Bell now help advance it in the world of information?

The two Nova Scotians exchanged pleasantries, but it was soon clear that Sir Robert was not interested in a casual social visit. The men sat in the prime minister’s temporary office and spoke for nearly two hours about the democratic revolution that had seized control of Germany a month earlier, and what it meant for the present and the future. Not even government leaders knew what was going on inside Germany.

Bell described the situation. First, the good news. Most Germans still supported democracy. The bad news? Everything else. Worst of all was that a powerful group of militants, just deposed from the government but now scheming in the shadows, eagerly plotted race war. They saw themselves as Germanic warriors, fighting for victory against other peoples, particularly the Slavs. For them, Britain’s entry into the war was not a mere tactical inconvenience. It was betrayal. The English traced their ancestry to the formerly Germanic tribes of the Anglo-Saxons. How dare these race-cousins side with the hated Slavs? The cult wanted revenge.

As odd as it may seem given today’s anti-racism in higher education, at that time this racist group was well established and common among Germany’s professorial class. It gave them a platform from which to recruit young minds, not only by teaching but also by publishing books of the kind that young Adolf Hitler, an avid reader, devoured. These professors, Bell explained, taught “that England desired to crush the German people and annihilate the competition of German industry.” Racism was also a real fact in the English-speaking world, but it was clearly the case, he continued, that it was “stronger in Germany than any corresponding feeling in Anglo-Saxon countries.”

Liberal democracy still had, however, plenty of time to deal with the men who would become the Nazis. There was simply no possibility that they could again seize power in the next days or weeks. But the future was an open question. The country’s continuing disarray gave them their only chance of growth. It also meant there was an easy way to reduce the terrorists’ chances to zero. Bell suggested that foreign financial aid to democratic Germany would ensure the extremists could never win.

Borden listened patiently as Bell discussed the situation. The information about the racist plot was no doubt new, but the prime minister already had reasons to agree with Bell’s economic diagnosis. The Allies, Borden thought, had taken too much from Germany in the Armistice. For instance, they seized German trains, and now the country lacked the transportation needed to feed its cities and demobilize its troops. Meanwhile, the German economy was worse than just depressed. It was quite nearly broken, a dangerous situation when hungry and disorganized soldiers were easily recruitable into extremist militias. Even if the newly mercenary troops did not share the ideology, they needed money. Borden understood Bell’s point that the onerous Armistice demands were checkmating the Allies’ own desire to receive reparations payments from Germany in the future.

The economic desperation contributed to an atmosphere of civil war in Germany, Bell continued, even during lulls in the fighting. The urban and industrial classes despised and envied the well-fed factory owners and landowners, and dreamed of socializing their property. Meanwhile, the owners hired fringe-right militias, the seedlings of the future Nazi Party, to protect what was theirs.

This division was soon overlaid with ever-greater doses of left-wing versus right-wing theory. But at first, it was largely a matter of survival in a suddenly desperate economic situation. Bell described how Germany’s raw materials were used up. The country “needed to import at once raw materials and foodstuffs, and she had little or nothing ready for export in order to purchase these things. Her Valuta was depreciated, her foreign credit gone. At the same time there were being thrown upon her hands within a period of two or three months millions of demobilized men for whom employment must be found unless starvation and anarchy were to result.”

All of this meant grave political danger. Germans thought that the “Armistice conditions were not only in themselves very drastic, but were indication that the Allies intended purposely to dictate peace terms to Germany which it would be impossible to carry out.”

Borden asked Bell about the foreseeable consequences. Bell replied that the masses remained apathetic for now. The danger would only come later, if the country remained hungry. Another reason for the current calm was that most of those of fighting age would not fight, no matter how bad the situation became. They had exhausted their war spirit in the last days of combat. But that, too, was a danger. If the tendency to apathy continued, the people “would accept, without any resistance, a coup.” Then a terrorist takeover of the German government could succeed with only the small minority of extremists in its favour.

Despite the misery, Bell was certain that so long as Germany’s provisional government could prevent the utter collapse of the food supplies until the democratically elected National Assembly met in February 1919, “the situation would be saved.” Most Germans—including liberals, conservatives, and most socialists—supported democracy. Even during the war, the average German did not run on unhinged racial hatred. Most saw the war as a matter of self-defence against French and British encirclement. Later in the war, many Germans became skeptical of their government’s propaganda. They switched allegiances, embracing President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s proclamations that the Allies weren’t fighting for the destruction of Germany but against German militarism.

By and large, Germans were now democracy’s friends and liked Britain, but Britain did not realize it. The United Kingdom was fixated on what the communists were doing. Bell pointed out that while the far-left German socialist extremists who had embraced Russian communism commanded a lot of ink in the British papers, they were still basically powerless. And while the fringe right-wing militant racists hoped to avenge themselves in a do-over war, Bell found “no appetite for a war of revenge in the wider public.” Thus for the moment, democracy was firmly in charge. Unfortunately, that meant democracy would carry the blame if Germany’s poverty continued.

It was a dangerous situation. But post-war Germany was now, to many British officials, an afterthought. They were preoccupied by the Allies’ new war against communism in Russia, a world war in miniature at Archangel and Murmansk. Like a 1:133 scale model of the Great War, the Russian campaign involved token British, Canadian, French, American, Serbian, and Italian troops fighting alongside their White Russian (monarchist) allies against the Russian communists (the Reds). Caught between pacifist demands to do nothing in Russia and Winston Churchill’s demand to launch a full invasion, the British compromised on a little invasion. It was enough to sting and anger the Russian communist bear, but not enough to kill it. Bell joked in one of his reports that British policy towards Russia was like the writer who did not know whether to use a comma and decided to use a little one.

The suspicion was widespread that the Allies “desired simply continuance of disorder in Russia without decisive victory by any party.” Had they either stood on the sidelines or committed to a full-scale war, they might have succeeded, but this half-hearted war only stoked disorder. It also strengthened Germany’s right-wing troops. They gained support from middle- and upper-class Germans terrified about the Russian menace spilling towards them.

But a near-term communist takeover of the country was an overblown concern. The two main pillars of Germany’s November 1918 Revolution made it friendly to social democratic centrism but not to communism. First, the public resented the old government at the end of the war. Close allies of the German bureaucracy had grown richer while nearly everyone else was poorer. Second, the men who later became advocates of the revolution were the ones who sounded clear warnings about reforming corruption before the government fell. They were moderating reformers, not radicals or opportunists. Once the militarists fell, these reformers became the new government.

These victorious democratic Germans were uncomprehending that in late November, two weeks into their new regime, English politicians and newspapers did not understand this, and still thought of them as the old enemy. Bell insisted that all the evidence proved the democratic bona fides of the revolutionary government. The mainline German socialists wanted social progress, and even socialization where it made sense, but only by legal, democratic means.

This centrist path immediately put Germany’s democratic-socialist revolution at odds with the militant communism of the Karl Liebknecht–led leftist group, the Spartacists, which advocated a Russian Soviet-style revolution and the immediate redistribution of property. Soviet was the Russian word for “council” (or Rat, in German). Bell typically used the word “Soviets” because it was most familiar to the British, but communism was originally a German idea, not a Russian one.

The friendly relation of Karl Marx’s communism and German democracy among the leftist socialists may sound jarring to modern ears, given the genocidal turns taken by communism in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and other places. This can make it seem like Marx and political murder are necessarily linked. But Marx, writing in the previous century, urged peace and was deeply inspired by the American example of revolution, which aimed for representation, rather than genocide. It was no surprise, then, that many German socialists saw no contradiction between Marx and democracy.

Bell continued explaining the complex political situation to Borden. Soviet councils, he said, were set up throughout Germany during the revolution, in parallel with the democratization of the National Assembly. The question now was whether the Soviets or the National Assembly would be supreme, or whether there would be a compromise.

Liebknecht’s violent Spartacists were another power, but they were still marginal. When they proposed a “Red Guard of Labour to defend the Revolution,” nearly all the speakers at the Soldiers’ Councils vigorously denounced it. These councils were deliberative bodies of workers inspired by Marx’s theory. They were to be the new governing structures of the country, or at least among the governing bodies. Most of the soldiers wanted democracy to succeed, and the councils to be a part of it. “Their determination not to be stampeded by the extremists remains as strong as ever,” Bell insisted.

What would the future hold for Germany? A lot depended on whether Britain acted or failed to act. Bell said two of his contacts worked for the German national electrical service and were urgently arranging necessary paperwork so they could escape the country. These men saw evil times in its future.

Reasons abounded for pessimism. Germany’s crushing problems included hunger, disease, unemployment, debt, and the obligation to make future reparations payments without a national income. But German democracy needed to try something, anything. A favourite solution was to stop runs on the banks by firing up the printing presses and issuing vast amounts of “questionable paper money.” This caused severe inflation. Even though no Great War battles ever took place within the borders of Germany, an invisible conflagration now tore through the nation, destroying wealth and burning real value. Inflation quickly impoverished patriotic Germans, like the philosopher Husserl, who had invested everything in now worthless war bonds. Meanwhile, it rewarded citizens who bet on their country’s fall by shorting the stock exchange. Sturdy citizens went broke while reckless speculators grew rich.

It looked bad, but Bell, sitting in his richly upholstered chair across from Borden, now turned to the hopeful case. The prime minister was listening carefully. Canada would profit a lot more from a free democratic Germany, with which it had a good trade relationship, Bell said, than from a destitute nation forced to cough up its treasures. Canada had disavowed any share of the reparations payments. But this wasn’t enough when the rest of Germany’s wartime enemies were lining up for their cut.

Bell proposed a financial rescue scheme for Germany that would at the same time be a rescue for Europe. First, he urged that German labourers be paid to rebuild devastated areas in Belgium and France. Ex-soldiers would not be tempted to become mercenary terrorists if they had gainful employment. At the same time, the sight of formerly enemy workers fixing the damage caused in the war would be good PR, helping the country rehabilitate itself in international eyes.

Second, the Allies should gain temporary control of certain great mining and industrial concerns, like Krupp and Thyssen. The Allies should, Bell continued, provide interest-bearing bonds so that these companies could buy raw materials to work with, which would in turn allow them to employ labourers, make and sell goods, and generate profits. The taxes on those profits would pay future reparations and support the country’s rebuilding at the same time.

Bell knew Germany would gladly go along with this plan. During his time in Berlin after the Armistice, he had already discussed his idea with people from all social classes, including top figures in government, the military, and business. He had likely already developed the plan Ruhleben. Bell’s genius friends from Göttingen had quickly filled important sensitive posts. He knew from these connections that responsible people would find nothing objectionable, and much to celebrate. Ceding temporary control of the largest industries would mean jobs, profits, and tax revenue. The alternative was full control over bankrupt industries in a starving and desperate nation. The only ones who would oppose the rescue plan would be the anti-democratic fringe militarists, who would detest the scheme because it would end the disorder that was their only road to power. But the extremists were still weak.

It was a brilliant plan. It would get the Allies their reparations, help regular German civilians, and prevent madmen from taking over and starting a new war. In hindsight, we can see that Bell had one of the best political ideas of the twentieth century. After two hours with Bell, Borden was now the world’s best-informed leader on the German question. He knew the country’s governing democratic centre was stable, for the time being. However, the outlook for the future was not good. Germany faced an impossible situation unless it received international help. Meanwhile, eager communists were angling to take over, although their support was still firmly capped. But they weren’t the only killers with guns waiting in the wings. A group of well-established racist militarists could easily grow more powerful if the economic misery persisted.

Borden asked Bell to type up his report on Germany, including the plan to rescue Germany and defeat the racists. The prime minister would personally hand-deliver it to Britain’s War Cabinet. Bell could make the case for Canada’s interest in a just and merciful post-war peace.

He had a proposal for Britain to stop the next world war. But while Canada could create an idea and help to see it through, it couldn’t do it alone. It lacked weight to throw around on the international stage and needed to bring Britain on board for the plan to succeed.

Bell knew it would take an act of magnanimity to extend a hand to a beaten-down adversary who had started the hostilities in the first place. But he also knew the historical precedent. While self-certain modernity gave rise to total war, medieval Europe practised a chivalrous tradition that forbade murdering or humiliating surrendered enemies. The magnanimous gesture was not just being nice. It was also enlightened self-interest. A fallen knight could stand again as a lifelong friend if his recent enemy showed mercy.

Bell applied the lesson to the German situation. His subsequent report explained, “The Allied Governments have an unusual opportunity just now of strengthening the hands of the Provisional Government in Germany and of the Moderate Revolutionaries generally without incurring the difficulties of a direct interference in the internal affairs of another land.” But if no saving hand reached out? Then extremist militarism could eventually “seem preferable to the mass of the people.”

Borden, a Nova Scotian like Bell, saw the business logic. Nova Scotians needed to make their way by trade and friendship. The province hangs off the eastern edge of the continent, almost an island. The rocky soil near Halifax is not fertile, making the city dependent on its neighbours for food. Pinched on the East Coast among three great rivals in the US, Britain, and French Canada, Nova Scotia needed to be diplomatic to thrive.

THE DAY AFTER meeting with the prime minister, Bell visited the War Cabinet at Whitehall Gardens. There he met with Borden’s top advisors, including his military advisor, Colonel Oliver Mowat Biggar, whom the diplomat Hugh Keenleyside later described as “spare in person, trim in dress, quiet in speech . . . meticulous, careful, precise, and reserved. Beneath the rather dry exterior, however, fires were burning.”² He also met the highly respected legal advisor Loring Christie, who became a close friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s. Then Bell and Biggar were off to lunch in Claridge’s fashionable high-society restaurant. The specialties were the filet de sole Tosca and the suprême de sole Pré Catalan.

Bell was glad he was not picking up the bill, which was a lot steeper than at Pinoli’s. Canada was buying him lunch as an honorarium for his invaluable intel gifts to Sir Robert. Bell’s evidence strengthened Canada’s hand for the looming high-stakes negotiations at Versailles.

Soon, Bell had a room at the first-class Strand Palace Hotel, situated among noble residences. His highly placed new political friends had pulled strings for him. The massive transit of humanity at the end of the war made it hard to find a decent place in London, or any place at all. Now he lived in luxury. A different kind of person might think, I deserve to take a break and enjoy this luxury after all those years in Ruhleben. But Bell was not one to be distracted from what is important, and from getting done what needed to get done. He felt the hardship of Ruhleben and appreciated the luxury of his new surroundings, but he didn’t let either one shake his foundations. He began to prepare notes for the report to the War Cabinet in the hotel’s pleasant writing room.

The next morning, Monday, December 9, Colonel Biggar drove Bell to Whitehall. The philosopher was no longer just a mere individual. He was now Canada’s agent. He was also standing for democratic Germany and the cause of peace. And if he did well in his report, he could become Britain’s agent as well.

He spent “almost the entire day dictating reports for the War Cabinet.” As Bell dictated, MI6 agents trained him in the genre of the intelligence report. Bell was to leave certain details, like names of sensitive sources, out of written reports, even though they could be shared in person. For his personal notes, created prior to the in-person meeting, he had listed his sources (Runge, Courant, Ludwig Dreyfus, Hans Jannasch, Professor René duBois-Reymond, etc.). But in the official typewritten report that followed, Bell referred to them by their positions, not their names. It was protection against prying eyes. If he were to be posted to Germany, MI6 still lacked cryptographic and courier communications from Berlin. Until that was established, telegraph clerks could read his reports.

He also learned the dry tone needed for written reports. In his spoken report, he referred to the “fools, who think simple legislative enactments can turn the ruined German state into a land flowing with milk and honey, when hard work is required.” The written version lost the “fools” and the “milk and honey.”

On the tenth, he received the typed draft of his report back from the War Cabinet. He stayed up until two in the morning revising it. When he awoke, he was back to the cabinet to discuss the revisions. He then worked until four thirty in the afternoon to shorten it. He was learning that an intel report is not a leisurely doctoral dissertation in philosophy. It was imperative to communicate information quickly.

On Friday, December 13, Bell visited the Canadian High Commission and the central Charity Commission at Salisbury House, London Wall. Along with the Red Cross, the Charity Commission was trying to keep central Europeans alive with the precious few resources at its disposal. He gave advice about the nutrition that Germans needed most, like fats. But he also knew that while charity helped, it wasn’t enough. Governments needed to step up.

He also had an appointment at the West Africa House, the centre of the Royal Air Force’s clandestine research organization. There he met Captain Jack Wallace of Experimental Station Orfordness. Once again, Bell impressed his hosts. Wallace invited him to visit Orfordness, Britain’s experimental aviation-intel facility, that weekend. It was an extremely rare honour. The secret base, hidden from public knowledge, was an advanced weapons testing centre and a place where analysts interpreted German messages. Wartime experiments included sending pilots like Wallace into the sky to try out new fighter technology in actual combat. Only the fittest technologies survived.

Two days later, an hour after sunset, he found himself in Woodbridge, an ancient port town in rural East Suffolk, to meet his ride to Orfordness. He was surprised to see that he was going by motorcycle. He took his spot in the sidecar, and his driver steered him through the darkness to Britain’s most secluded secret base, about fifteen kilometres away. The motorcycle’s headlight, helped by a bright moon, showed the path forward on a treacherous road.

The road ended at the motor ferry. From there, Bell proceeded by foot in the darkness over the muddy ground, through a biting sea wind. The barren region is famous for its ghost stories, but fortunately for his nerves, Bell was not superstitious.

A light emerged from the darkness and soon revealed a guardhouse. Guards interviewed him and called for Captain Wallace, who arrived in short order and warmly greeted his visitor. They ate dinner together in the mess hall and then went to Wallace’s hut, where they talked by the fireside. Bell had pleasant accommodations for the evening, including some interesting bedtime reading: the autobiography of Ármin Vámbéry, a Hungarian-born British spy in the previous century’s Great Game against Russia.

The next day, Bell and Wallace took a walk to the lighthouse and watched the spectacular sight of five airplanes taking off for Salisbury. In the morning light, Wallace pointed out the features of the base. Everything was virtually new. Orfordness had been quickly transformed during the war into one of the world’s most technologically advanced fortresses. The base was a lonely cluster of buildings and hangars built on a remote stretch of land, almost an island, that was exceedingly difficult to reach. The place had recently been a bustling war engine, but since the Armistice, it was a lot quieter.

Bell’s red-carpet treatment continued. He returned to Wallace’s hut for cocoa and cake with Captain F.W. Musson, another pilot who flew experimental fighter missions against German invaders.

On Monday, December 16, a cloudy and frigid day, Bell was back in London. In the evening, he attended Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at the elegant Court Theatre. The play’s theme was Bell’s own: Would peace follow war—or would there be another war when the defeated avenged themselves on the victors? Shakespeare proposed that a good secret agent could make the difference. Meanwhile, Bell received his steamship ticket for Halifax. He would soon have an important decision to make, between the comfortable life of a professor or the deadly life of a spy.

The following day, Bell met Christie and Biggar at Prince’s restaurant, one of London’s best and most expensive. It was a pleasant spot for Colonel Biggar to hand over a congratulatory letter and copy number 40 of Bell’s report, which the prime minister himself had circulated to the War Cabinet.

Biggar’s letter said that Sir Robert “appreciated very much the care and trouble you had taken in its preparation.” It was of “very great value,” not only to Borden but also to his colleagues at the War Cabinet.

The next day, Bell received a letter from Borden:

LONDON, DECEMBER 18TH

Dear Doctor Bell,

I very much appreciate your memorandum with regard to internal conditions in Germany which I have had circulated to the members of the War Cabinet. I am sure they will find it very useful; and I hope that my request for it and your compliance did not prove a serious inconvenience.

Yours faithfully,

R.L. Borden³

Bell’s report went from Borden’s hand to notables at the War Cabinet, like Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Andrew Bonar Law, Lord Reading, and Maurice Hankey. Canada and now Britain had scooped the story of the century. The extreme right was planning race war.

Canada’s plan would defeat Germany’s terroristic nationalists and communists in a single coup de grâce, while saving democracy at the same time. Now the British Empire had a copy.

But significant hurdles stood between reception and implementation. Some Britons wanted revenge against the Germans. And even those who were sympathetic recognized that post-war Britain was facing severe austerity. Economic orthodoxy dictated a quick reduction in expenditures to make up for the debts accumulated during the war. Maintaining a foreign intelligence service was proving a tough sell, no matter how impressive its successes during the war. With the fighting seemingly over, politicians with sharpened budget knives advanced upon Britain’s real crown jewel, MI6, the best intelligence service in the world, as if it were the agneau de Pauillac à la Grecque at Prince’s restaurant.

It was a serious mistake. Britain needed good intelligence more than ever. The end of the war did not mean the end of danger. If anything, the danger had grown. Now Soviet forces rampaged in the east and proto-Nazis gathered themselves in the west. The German racists, Bell knew, were fighting a long battle.

His knowledge made him ideally positioned to become Britain’s newest secret agent. He had passed his first tests with highest marks. But he still needed to ace one more interview, with a mysterious man known as “C.”

Chapter 5

Code Name A12

With regard to feelings of fear and confidence, courage is the virtuous middle.

—ARISTOTLE, NICOMACHEAN ETHICS

In late January, a rainy London day, a mysterious “Captain Spencer” called Bell over to 2 Whitehall Court, a French château-style building on the bank of the Thames.

But Captain Spencer did not exist, except as a code name. Spencer was actually Captain Mansfield Smith Cumming, aka C, the Chief, the founder and head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, now called MI6. He was an expert in naval technology and a well-to-do sportsman who hobnobbed with Britain’s governing aristocracy.

Cumming was a charming man who loved danger. He drove, boated, and flew at reckless speeds. He travelled on intelligence missions while wearing a disguise, with a sword hidden in a cane—just in case a promising source led him into a trap. It was, C proclaimed, “capital sport.” The force of his personality was such that later heads of MI6 have followed his custom of signing official letters “C” and writing in green ink. They have avoided, however, Cumming’s other notable calling card: his wooden leg (he lost the original in a high-speed car accident).

C’s agency was so secret that only a small group of people, at the highest level of government, knew it existed. The organization was summonsed into existence in 1909, under C’s leadership, to combat an imagined army of German spies who were preparing an invasion of England. Britain’s paranoia was overwrought but rooted in reality. At the time of the service’s founding, Germany had recently announced its intentions to build a navy to rival Britain’s, intimated plans to expand its empire, and committed genocide in Namibia.

Soon after its creation, C’s agency achieved major successes in Germany. Frederick Fairholme, a businessman who frequently travelled to German ports, gave C a detailed rundown of the country’s latest breakthrough howitzer in 1910. In 1911, Fairholme scored another intel coup: he described the precise details of a major technological advance in German artillery shells, a delayed-burst device that exploded after piercing a ship’s armour.

Cumming’s stunning intelligence successes owed much to the fact that he took risks on promising new technologies. But his government overseers were often of the horse-and-buggy school. MI6’s discovery of the delayed-burst shell should have inspired the leaders of His Majesty’s Royal Navy to copy the design and to thicken their ships’ armour, but they did neither. As the intelligence historian Michael Smith writes, “The report set an unhappy precedent in that the crucial capabilities of the shell failed to ring the right alarm bells in the Admiralty.”¹ It would not be the last time the government overlooked good MI6 intel.

And now Bell prepared to alarm “Captain Spencer” with dire news of the German situation.

The Canadian walked up a long flight of stairs for his meeting with the captain, carrying a briefcase filled with notes. He headed past the renowned Authors’ Club without stopping for a drink (as a Methodist, Bell did not drink much). Near the top floor, he entered a hallway with red carpet and saw two men in plain clothes guarding a door. They were expecting Dr. Bell. One guard opened the door for him, and Bell entered a rollicking racket. Men and women hurried about, shouted into phones, worked wireless and mimeograph machines, and conducted top-secret scientific experiments.

Cumming’s office was still higher, on the very top floor. Bell walked with a secretary through a bewildering maze of desks and hallways. She led him to another stairway and pushed a button. C pushed the answering button that let the door open to the inner sanctum.

Bell walked up the last flight of stairs and saw a white-haired man wearing a white navy uniform. He was sitting behind a huge desk, silhouetted by a sunny western window. He had a large head and a jovial smile, with a jutting chin appropriate for a leading man. His bright eyes and cheery mouth gave the impression of a happy adventurer who would laugh during a swordfight.

The ceiling was lower here, as they were directly under the roof. During the war, the floor was reinforced and the wooden roof beams were clad with steel to fortify against Zeppelin attacks. A massive steel safe, painted green, stood at one end of the room. Maps and charts hung on the walls, and one side was dominated by a large painting of German soldiers shooting unarmed French villagers in the previous century’s war. A half-dozen telephones stood on one table; another table supported models of innovative airplanes, submarines, and mechanical devices; a third was a set-up for chemical experiments, with beakers, reagents, and a distilling device.

Bell began his interview by quoting his friend Lieutenant Courant, a well-placed figure in German intelligence and politics, who had pointed out the beginnings of a dangerous schism in the country’s military. The officers and the enlisted soldiers were growing to despise one another. It was at the root of the explosive civil war that was soon to follow, as the soldiers fell in with militarist communist rhetoric from the left and the officers with reactionary politics from the right. In Berlin from January 5 to 12, a shooting battle had raged between the leftist Spartacists, led by Liebknecht, and the militarist right-wing volunteer forces, or Freikorps. Bell advised that the localized fighting could be a foretaste of much greater violence.

The fighting was a symptom of an underlying disease—the military itself was riven by hatred and factionalism. It was so dangerous for officers to walk in uniform after the November Revolution, lest they be beaten up by disgruntled soldiers, that they abandoned their offices and started dressing in civilian clothes. The total lack of obedience and command threatened a ruinous demobilization process that could be, Bell warned, “fatal to the country.”

The coming civil war, which would pit mercenary officers against mercenary soldiers, now took on a political mantle. But its roots were primordial, growing from the demoralized combat at the end of the war. The enlisted men hated their officers for ordering them to make suicidal charges for a cause they no longer believed in at a time when victory was no longer possible. And the officers hated their soldiers for refusing to obey.

Cumming became the newest person to be impressed by Bell’s inside description. He revealed his true name. Bell’s future diary entries no longer refer to “Spencer.” From then on, he met with “C,” the “Chief,” or “Cumming.”

C was now busier than during much of the war. MI6 was fighting three battles, one literal and two political, against the backdrop of a world in disarray. The German, Austrian, and Russian empires were collapsing; the British Empire was threatened by insurrection in places like Ireland and India.

Meanwhile, MI6 was literally fighting a war with Russian communism. British agents and Russian Chekists (secret police) killed each other in Russia with alarming regularity. It was a major change to MI6’s standard operating procedure. Intel networks liked to work by secrecy and use gunplay as a very last resort. But in Russia, the situation turned desperate. Britain’s allies, the royalist White Russians, risked falling. It meant handing MI6 agents live ammunition.

But in keeping up the other side of a shooting war, the Soviet Red Army was MI6’s unintentional budget ally. Cumming had feared that post-war cutbacks would make his organization disappear. But some powerful Britons hated the idea that Russia’s murderous brand of communism could gain a foothold on the Continent, and they saw MI6 as being able to help stop it. C’s allies put pressure on those who held the purse strings to keep the agency funded.

At the same time, C had political wars to fight. Britain’s new director of military intelligence, General William Thwaites, was gunning for Cumming’s portfolio. The Secret Intelligence Service was, after all, a decade-old product of the military, by way of the director of naval intelligence, Rear Admiral Alexander Bethell. Now the military wanted to reclaim it from the civil service. Thwaites was likely looking for jobs for men in his soon-to-be drastically reduced bureau of military intelligence. But the fight against an army takeover was personal for Cumming. The Chief hated the fact that the War Office had treated his agency like a farm team during the war, engaging in “constant robbery” of his staff.² Now he was in a position to fight back.

Cumming’s counterargument was that only one of the service’s functions was providing military intelligence. If military intel swallowed MI6, valuable intelligence diversity would be reduced to impotent singularity. C knew it would be a mistake because a lot of MI6’s work involved political, economic, and scientific questions in the grey zone between war and peace. Much of it involved shady characters, and some of it took place in neutral nations. Upright, rules-following soldiers would not know how to play the morally delicate game. Cumming urged that the grey-zone work needed an arm’s-length distance from official diplomacy. At the same time, the diplomats at the Foreign Office needed to know what was going on in MI6 so they could maintain plausible deniability. Cumming’s agents knew how to play the game.

It proved a winning argument. MI6 kept its home in the Foreign Office.

Meanwhile, even though post-war funds to MI6 decreased, making independent survival challenging, the demand for actionable intelligence increased. C’s customers, the various branches of the government, asked for a lot of fresh reports. Before the war, fewer officials knew about the existence of MI6, and thus they couldn’t regularly demand urgent answers to dangerous questions. But during the war, more people became used to having MI6 as a living reference library.

C realized that he needed to bring Bell on board. But the process for becoming a Canadian MI6 agent wasn’t exactly straightforward. Hankey informed Bell he needed to immediately write to Lord Rufus Reading (the British Ambassador to the United States, High Commissioner to Canada, Lord Chief Justice, Knight Grand Cross, and the second religious Jew to be appointed member of the British Cabinet). It seems that Bell learned from Hankey that he was about to be offered a desk job, and he had already decided to refuse it. On Nova Scotia Bureau stationery, from 57a Pall Mall, London, he drafted his letter, which, between pleasantries, announced his impatience with anything short of the most dangerous kind of posting: “I am quite willing to wait here a few days longer before taking steps to secure passage to Canada, if, as I take it, the work you think of using me for is one in which my knowledge and experience would be of definite service to you. When I postponed my original sailing date at the suggestion of Col. Hankey and Sir Robert Borden, I was under the impression that the work they contemplated using me for was a gathering of information in Germany relative to internal movements there . . . If, however, you had thought of using me for some sort of routine work—for which I would be no more especially fitted than any other—I would be grateful if you could let me know at once, as it is difficult to secure ocean passages now.”

Bell’s chutzpah seems at first glance simply extraordinary. But he wasn’t a young university graduate looking for a prestigious, stable posting with the Foreign Office. After four years of enforced inactivity, he was looking to do something to fulfil his duty to his nation and humanity. He knew Berlin was dangerous, but he also knew it was where he could be effective. That a secret agent job was dangerous wasn’t off-putting, it was enticing.

The Earl of Reading surely wasn’t used to being addressed so brusquely. Bell, without a knighthood or aristocratic title, was willing to give Britain only a “few days” to make up its mind. In fact, he insisted, his work ought to already have begun. It wouldn’t be his last warning about the danger of dithering on the German Question.

The Earl’s secretary responded that he was still thinking about it, but a positive word from him meant that Bell’s candidacy soon went to the next stage. Bell needed still another authorization from Lord Charles Hardinge, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, but by then it seemed a mere formality, although a necessary one.

The days ticked by. Everything was slowed down because of the great migration to Paris, to begin work on the Peace Treaty. The Foreign Office had a lot on its hands in other domains as well. The Great War was over, but many smaller wars took its place.

In the interim, Bell kept up an intensive schedule of visits, including with the War Trade Intelligence Department, one of the major customers for MI6 intel. His Lordship’s authorization finally arrived, and MI6 assigned him an agent identity, A12, and a cover, as a Reuters reporter in Germany. Thwarting the militant racists in a shadow propaganda war would require ink by the barrelful. The Reuters job gave it to him, in grand style, with access to millions of English-speaking newspaper readers across the globe. Cumming’s deputy, Colonel Stewart Menzies, who would take the helm of MI6 during the Second World War, negotiated Bell’s cover with the head of Reuters, Sir Roderick Jones. The idea for the placement was likely C’s.

Bell’s stories would run in the papers under a special correspondent byline, without his name attached. Like one of his favourite medieval artists, the creator of the Naumburg Last Supper, he would craft anonymously. If it came from Reuters Berlin, it was his story; others appeared under the description “Press Association special correspondent,” and still others under the heading “our correspondent.” Sometimes newspapers published his reports verbatim, or nearly so; some of his other reports were worked into compiled stories. And some were meant for MI6 eyes only.

The funding arrangement that paid Bell was so complex that only Colonel Menzies fully understood it. When the colonel was out on assignment at one point, MI6 asked Bell to clarify. It appears that Canada supplied a line of funding that covered Bell’s salary through the Bank of Montreal. MI6 covered his travelling expenses and the cost of his top-secret telegraphs. And Reuters covered the cost of his journalistic telegraphs.

LONDON WAS COLD, rainy, and grey on January 21, 1919. Bell learned MI6 would pay him at the excellent rate of £50 per month (roughly £3,000 today), with expenses apparently covered separately. For a man without a family to take care of, it was good money—the same salary Cumming planned to pay the director of the entire Indian operation, an expensive outfit with a £10,000 three-year budget. Bell’s generous salary was evidence that Britain was hiring him for something far from a typical entry-level intel position. His work would involve not only filing intelligence reports, handling sources, and writing for a global audience as a newspaper reporter, but also interpreting between Britain and Germany at a time when no official diplomatic representation existed between them. Usually ambassador, spy, journalist, agent handler, and intelligence analyst are different people. But desperate times called for innovative measures. A12 would be everything at once.

While he waited for his sailing orders to his first posting, Bell was invited to exquisite parties, ate gourmet food, and saw a festive atmosphere. But he was not enjoying himself. The British had just won the biggest war in history. The spoils of victory would be theirs. But Bell knew that while Britain was celebrating, the chances for Germany’s liberal democracy diminished each day that deprivation continued.

Left- and right-wing forces battled throughout the country, and the democratic government was helpless to do anything about it. The proto-Nazi Freikorps had set up headquarters at the luxurious Eden Hotel in Berlin, where they quickly outdid the sins of Adam and Eve. At Eden, they murdered the communist activist Rosa Luxemburg on January 15, beating her to death just outside the hotel’s revolving door, then shooting her to make sure she was dead. From Eden came the command to kill hundreds of others, including Karl Liebknecht, and soon thousands. It was just the beginning of a death toll that would total many millions by 1945.

The Freikorps were publicly pro-government patriots but privately murderously nationalist, antisemitic, and anti-democratic. The historian Robert Waite called them “the vanguard of Nazism.”³ As Sebastian Haffner wrote in his first-hand view, “In the spring of 1919 . . . the Nazi revolution was already fully formed and potent. It lacked only Hitler.”⁴ But what is clear in historical hindsight first needed to be discovered by Britain’s secret agent.

Meanwhile, Bell knew that German industry was frozen, inflation was rampant, and the people continued to starve under the British blockade of their ports. When the Germans signed the Armistice in November 1918, they never imagined that two months in the future, they still would not be allowed to buy desperately needed food. But the blockade remained in place, ostensibly to ensure that Germany would not be strong enough to start fighting again. The peace treaty had yet to be signed, which meant that the war was still officially going on. Bell’s first order of business was to end the blockade before it ended liberal democracy.

His knowledge of the growing danger and the task ahead meant he couldn’t enter the London party scene with enthusiasm. Still, he accepted invitations and kept up appearances. He knew he needed to make connections to advance his pitch to rescue Germany from the terrorists, and at the same time, to rescue Britain and the world from another great war.

Back at his hotel in the evenings, his misery compounded as he read Lord Northcliffe’s popular newspapers mocking German suffering. Bell knew about babies starving in Berlin because their malnourished mothers could not produce milk. Meanwhile, Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail ran a headline mocking the “Hun Food Snivel,” while an article complained of the “people in this world who are inclined to heed Germany’s whines for food.”⁵

It was easy for Britons without first-hand experience of Germany to think the country consisted entirely of militarists who’d committed atrocious war crimes. It wasn’t as easy to think about the German democrats who’d opposed the war and had overthrown the corrupt regime. Bell’s sources were among the finest exemplars of the good Germans. He and MI6 were eager to communicate the news of their existence to the British public.

Before and during the war, many among Germany’s now-ruling democrats were smitten with Britain’s dashing democratic courage. After Germany got rid of its arrogant suitors, the Prussian militarists, in the November Revolution, the new democracy asked Britain for the next dance. But London spurned them with a brutal shove back into torment. With it went the golden age of waltzes, which were quickly replaced by a loud, jarring new musical style, jazz, that had no need for a dance partner.

The Canadian phenomenologist-turned spy-knew it was up to him to help Britain picture the reality that nations are members of one another. He also needed to destroy the illusion that one nation can profit in the long term from another’s destruction. Bell’s phenomenological science focused on empathy, the way that we gain knowledge of the world by intersubjective and intercultural inquiry. And now the science helped him understand the British and German national perspectives at once. Bell intuitively saw how each nation’s good was tied to the success of its neighbours. Yet popular political opinion did not realize this, and punishment and revenge still seemed like good ideas. It meant that Bell’s two national friends now stood at the brink of another dangerous conflict.⁶

The phenomenological attitude is good for a lot of things, but it does not lend itself to frivolous enjoyment. A12 gazed out his window of the Palace Strand into a melancholic London fog. Bell was one of the few unhappy people in London, the celebrating, victorious capital of the largest empire in the history of the world.

Chapter 6

The Killers

The perpetual insurgents . . . reap, while grumbling, the fruits of trees they did not plant.

—GEORGES D’AVENEL, LES FRANÇAIS DE MON TEMPS

Winthrop Bell was already a smart man who had proven himself skilled in diverse academic and practical pursuits. Now, as A12, he picked up a new trade. A whirlwind weeks-long training session taught him how to make and break code, keep his cover intact, send messages out of Germany, cultivate and protect sources, stay alive in a gunfight, and notice if he was being followed.

Thanks to the investigative work of the intelligence historian Michael Smith, we know some of the essential lessons that Richard Tinsley, head of MI6’s Rotterdam station, taught a new agent. He should always “indicate clearly the source” for information, and “be content to state” what is seen “without drawing his own conclusions.”¹ Bell was, however, an exception to the no conclusions rule, because he was an agent and an analyst in one.

A new agent, Tinsley continued, needed to know that “only precise observations are really useful: by the juxtaposition of precise observations, a conclusion is arrived at.” And the agent “should be put on his guard against gossip, the cabaret and women, and told how these were the cause of recent arrests and executions.” Besides the part about gossip, cabarets, and women, the advice was virtually identical to the phenomenology that Bell had learned in Göttingen. Husserl wrote of the “faithful description of that which appears” in its manifold givenness.²

One difference between the phenomenology of spycraft and academic phenomenology, however, was the timeline. While academic phenomenologists linger on philosophical descriptions of phenomena like love or hate for years,³ the agent needed to quickly take in all the details of a weapon design or a secret meeting and, immediately and as accurately and vividly as possible, report those observations to headquarters. Minutes could make the difference between victory or defeat. As Tinsley put it, “The speed with which this is done is second in importance only to the accuracy and amount of detail of the information transmitted.”

At the end of January, after an already exhausting day, Bell spent the evening preparing his will. It was a crucial step before departure. Secret agents plied one of the world’s deadliest trades.

In early February, he would finally be off to the Continent. He arranged his visas and picked up his letter of appointment from Reuters:

Up to the present the English public has had to content itself with disjointed, partial, highly coloured, and often quite inaccurate reports of the present condition, political, economic, and financial, of Germany. We are most desirous of acquainting the nation with the actual condition of things and we are convinced that it is for the interest not only of Germany, but of Great Britain and the world at large, that a truthful account of the situation should be widely disseminated. You have the advantage of having had a long previous acquaintance, prior to the war, with Germany and her people, and you will therefore be a competent judge. We desire no sensational reports: our aim is accurate discrimination and a plain record of what you see and hear.

He needed to put his diary under lock and key, likely meaning at the Nova Scotia Bureau. It mentioned all the top players in British intelligence, so he couldn’t take it with him to Germany. He bought a new diary and switched from German to English. Bell would carry a lot of luggage with him to Germany, including research statistics, maps, a travelling typewriter, intelligence-grade binoculars, business cards, and not only the clothes befitting a journalist but also formal dress; as an intel agent doubling as a secret diplomat, he would soon dine with top-ranking politicians and high-powered business and military leaders. Other people’s business cards listed an address and an occupation, but not his. It was just his name: WINTHROP BELL. If he wanted sources to find him, he let them know how to do it.

Bell knew he had a lot to do to change British minds, and he was ready to begin. His intelligence work in Germany would not be so different from his studies in philosophy. He described philosophy in a letter to a friend: “Each of us is limited in his awareness of all there is for recognition. One thing philosophical argument has always been doing has been to expose the inevitable conclusions from any set of premises. And one result may be to bring people to a recognition of incompatibilities between what they held as convictions and this or that which they must recognize from experience. But while the dyed-in-the-wool representatives may not have been ousted from their positions, a good many others who were, or might have been, persuaded by their statements may have been brought by the discussion to see the insufficiency of them.”

He knew that not all people could be convinced with evidence, but others could. While some Britons hated Germany, others wanted to do the right thing. Bell’s evidence could show them the dire consequences of German suffering.

MEANWHILE, 6,200 KILOMETRES away in Winnipeg, the leading commercial centre on the Canadian prairies, the city’s volunteer Jewish intel community typed an urgent warning to the British Empire. The report, addressed to Robert Borden, described a “pernicious doctrine” that had begun in Germany and now circulated throughout Europe.⁴ This doctrine taught “that discrimination against Jews is right and deserved,” and that oppression of the Jews is the legitimate business of governments. Those pushing the doctrine, the report said, lacked all “respect for life or liberty.”

From Germany, the scheme for government-sanctioned theft and murder spread to Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Finland, and Hungary. It was like the deadly local pogroms of the past, except on a vast scale. Millions were in harm’s way.

How did the Winnipeg Jews know so much? Their community at the north end of the city comprised recent immigrants from all over Europe. That made it a buzzing nexus of news from throughout the diaspora. The community was also thriving and politically active. Winnipeg had hosted the Canadian Zionist Federation in 1917, and during the First World War, many community members had fought in General Edmund Allenby’s Jewish Legion in Palestine, the ancient location of Israel.

The Winnipeg warning pointed out that the new German-led oppression of the Jews was, in one sense, a repetition of an ancient hatred. But now a new ingredient was added to the dangerous brew: Britain’s Balfour Declaration of November 1917, which supported a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. It was a kind sentiment, but it unwittingly painted a target on the Jews.

In 1917, Palestine was an Ottoman possession, making it officially allied with Germany in the Great War. This made the Balfour Declaration akin to Germany’s scheme to encourage Roger Casement’s attempt at an Irish revolution in Great Britain’s backyard, or its attempt to persuade Mexico to invade the United States. A major difference, however, was that Britain and the US were not willing to commit murderous genocide against the Irish and the Mexicans. The Germans and their allied Ottoman militarists, by contrast, were willing to use literal extermination as a weapon of war, as they had proved against the Namibians and the Armenians.

The Balfour Declaration was not big news in 1917. Bell later recalled reading about it in the German newspapers while he was at Ruhleben, and hardly thinking about it. After all, Balfour’s intention of re-establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine was impossible while there was still a war going on. But for a dangerous group of anti-Jewish German officers aligned with the Ottomans, led by the dictator General Ludendorff, Balfour was at the top of the agenda. They saw it as an attack, and now they prepared their counterattack. As proxies for the foreign enemy, these Jews were suddenly and unexpectedly in great danger.

While Balfour’s declaration gave added impetus to an attack on the Jews, it did not initiate it. A year after the secret 1915 Anti-Semitic League meeting, the campaign, subtle at first, was underway. In October 1916, the German military conducted a survey of its troops, supposedly to discover whether Jews were shirking their duties to avoid the front lines.

Colonel Max Bauer, Ludendorff’s right-hand man, pressured the Prussian minister of war, Adolf Wild von Hohenborn, to conduct the survey.⁵ It might seem a dangerous move for a mere colonel to pressure a war minister whose name, translated into English, means “Wolf Wild from Highborn.” But photos of Wild von Hohenborn show a doughy man with an upturned moustache, looking more like a comic vaudeville figure than a fearsome warlord. While he would have had no problem saying no to Bauer, a mere colonel, Wild von Hohenborn certainly understood that the request was really coming from Ludendorff. It’s laughably impossible to imagine that a colonel could have pressured the whole military to move without Ludendorff’s approval.

The Jewish survey was not a statistical one, or even a real question. Its purpose was to imply that Jews were the real reason the country was losing the war. If the racist generals wanted to fight a second world war, they needed to blame someone other than themselves for losing the first. In fact, Jews were just as patriotic as other Germans. Indeed, some ethnic Jews did not think of themselves as Jews, any more than an American whose ancestors were born in the Netherlands would think of herself as Dutch today.

The Winnipeg report, which Borden would have certainly mentioned to Bell, sounded the alarm about German coordination behind the greatest attack on the Jews ever conceived. While there is no doubt that some of the 1919 antisemitic violence was genuinely local, and owed to the bad old habit of using the minority Jews as a scapegoat, the sheer scope and coordination of the attacks soon pointed Bell to something larger: Ludendorff and his plot for the next war. It was a mere stage of the attack plan that he and his cronies had hatched in 1915.

General Ludendorff was likely inspired by the scheming of the Russian secret intelligence services, who vilified the Jews in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first serialized in 1903. The book purported to be a plan for world domination by the Jews, and first was cover for the Russians’ attack on Japan and then a convenient excuse when they lost to Japan in humiliating fashion. But the propaganda merely inflamed an existing disease. Antisemitism was already set up in Germany. Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the late nineteenth century, condemned the country’s “anti-Jewish stupidity.”⁶ And during the Great War, as the historian Jay Lockenour writes, Ludendorff’s advisor Bauer “was especially vitriolic in his wartime denunciations of . . . ‘Jewish liberals,’ and ‘Jewish demagogues’ who were undermining the war effort.”⁷ Ludendorff, the country’s chief antisemite and Adolf Hitler’s most powerful early enabler after the First World War, surrounded himself with like-minded hateful men.

Bell didn’t yet know all the masterminds of the party advocating race war, but he knew they existed. For this dangerous faction, defeat in the Great War was only a pause, not an end.

Why did they first target Jews? Part of it owed to ancient racial hatred. They expected that Germany’s military would be stronger when it was exclusively Aryan. After the Jews were gone, the murderers thought, they could fight Western democracy once again and win. Another part was that the Jews were a vulnerable proxy for their hated international enemies. And then there was money, as the Jews, a small minority, were a source of plunder.

The historian Jeffrey Veidlinger describes how, in the territory occupied by modern Ukraine alone, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered beginning in 1918, with the most intensive violence in 1919.⁸ The slaughter has been virtually forgotten, overshadowed by the six million Jews and millions of victims from other races and groups who were murdered by the Nazis, in addition to the Soviet murder of millions more.⁹ Yet the roots of the Holocaust are traceable to 1919, in “the genocidal violence perpetrated against Jews in the very same region in which the ‘Final Solution’ would begin only two decades later.”¹⁰

Bell’s secret reports would soon show how the Ukraine genocides linked to Ludendorff’s anti-Jewish plot. If his plot had succeeded, the New York Times’s September 9, 1919, prediction of six million murdered Jews would have soon been true.¹¹

One of the men most responsible for the 1919 genocides in Ukraine was the White Russian general Anton Denikin, a man with “shaved head, prominent black eyebrows, silver goatee, and handlebar moustache.”¹² Veidlinger describes, in horrific detail, the murders, rapes, and tortures that Denikin’s troops committed against Ukraine’s Jews as they advanced into Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson. The killers under Denikin’s command were handsome, sharp-dressed Russian men “with manicured hands, with noble faces of princes, accompanied by their fiery, dark and beautiful friends from the Caucasus.”¹³

Denikin’s mercenary army was known as the Volunteers, the same as the English translation of the German word “Freikorps.” Like General Ludendorff, Denikin blamed the Jews for everything. Propaganda fed his soldiers a steady diet of lies masquerading as news, and Jews were painted as the ultimate enemy. At the same time, Denikin told his financiers from the British government, who were paying him to fight Russian communism, that he would put a stop to anti-Jewish violence.

Bell’s secret intelligence reports, filed later in the year, revealed concrete links between the German plotters and the Russian antisemites pillaging Ukraine and murdering Jews. On October 3, 1919, A12 wrote from Berlin, “BISKUPSKI is supposed to be here mainly because this is the best centre for maintaining communication between DENIKIN and the North–West Russian Army.”¹⁴ He was referring to General Vassili Biskupski (sometimes styled Vasily Biskupskii and Biskupsky), whose “proud martial bearing and . . . elegant military costumes,”¹⁵ as the historian Michael Kellogg writes, helped to ingratiate him in Bavarian high society, where he later became a key funder of Hitler’s rise to power. Veidlinger shows that Biskupski, “who had been the military governor of Odesa, became vice president of the right-wing Aufbau (Reconstruction) movement in Munich and conspired with . . . Ludendorff to invade Bolshevik Russia with a joint Ukrainian-German army.”¹⁶

It suggests the 1919 slaughter of the Jews in Ukraine and the Nazis’ wartime race massacres in Eastern Europe were not a mere coincidence, but two stages of the same Holocaust. History paints the ugly picture in a bright light. But in early 1919, almost no one knew that Denikin and others like him were slaughtering Jews in Eastern Europe on an industrial scale. The Winnipeg Jews were among the few who knew, and they also understood the plot came from Germany. Now, in early 1919, Winnipeg asked Canada, Could the nation help to fight the murderous conspiracy before the killing spread? After all, “Canada has played so conspicuous a role in exalting righteousness to prevail in the earth.”¹⁷

Sir Robert Borden agreed to do what he could. He handed off the Winnipeg warning to Britain at the highest level, directly to Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and he surely discussed the matter with Bell. Canada and Britain had early warning of an anti-Jewish plot that had started in Germany and spread throughout Europe.

But everything else remained in darkness. Agent A12 urgently needed to fill in the blanks. Who was the mastermind of the anti-Jewish plan? What was the timeline for the attack? What were the plotters’ strengths and weaknesses? Now Bell could serve his country, and humanity, more powerfully than if he had not been imprisoned at Ruhleben.

For Bell, the job was personal. Germany’s democrats, some of them Jews, were his closest friends. He would do everything in his power, including risking his life, to protect them from the extremists who had committed widespread acts of violence to buy chances in the biggest national lottery. If their number came up, the killers would control the government, and the noblest defenders of liberal ideals would be bullet-riddled corpses in Berlin.

German democracy still held and kept the confidence of the country’s middle classes. But for how much longer? During the 1919 campaign in Russia, a British airman stood on the right wing of a shot-up airplane and plugged a bullet hole in the fuel tank with his finger so that it could reach safety.¹⁸ Germany was like that: shot up, but still in the air thanks to the heroism of its democratic pilots. But whether the country could land safely was an open question. The lives of millions of Jews and other minority groups depended on the answer.

THE NEXT STEP Bell needed to take before departing on his mission was to become acquainted with his new cover as a Reuters journalist. On Tuesday, January 28, he met with Roderick Jones, the news agency’s general manager, and the chief editor, F.W. Dickinson. Reuters was both a legitimate news bureau and a front that offered Britain’s secret agents a perfect cover. Reporters could travel and ask a lot of questions without arousing too much suspicion.

Bell’s intel territory was all of Europe, rather than just one nation. That made him a rare, elite kind of agent. He would be submitting both news reports to Reuters, and intelligence reports to MI6 by telegraph from Berlin. Because of the lack of telegraph connections between Germany and England, he would first need to send the telegraphs to the press agency Ritzau in Denmark, which connected both countries. If a report was urgent, he signed it “from A12,” which routed it to MI6 alone. Otherwise, his reports went to both MI6 and Reuters, to major British urban newspapers, and eventually, through the Press Association, to newspapers throughout the country and world. That included the US, where Bell’s research would eventually appear in a front-page story in the New York Times as well as in the Nation.¹⁹

On January 29, Bell met up with Richard Tinsley, the spymaster who had helped train him, likely to get briefings on the German baron-diplomats he would soon meet in the Netherlands. Tinsley, back in London from Rotterdam, had a reputation as a scallywag who enjoyed fighting, drinking, and blackmailing companies that conducted illegal business with Germany during the war. For better or worse, MI6 later became a stable bureaucracy, but in 1919, it was still a place for eccentric melodrama.

A week later, on a cold and misty February morning on the North Sea, Bell’s ship “sailed close past floating mine in morning,” and then came in view of the Netherlands. Watching the coast as it slipped by was, as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow said, “like thinking about an enigma . . . ‘Come and find out.’”²⁰ Bell disembarked at Hoek. From there he took a train to The Hague. He saw “children skating on canals everywhere in Holland.” It was a last bit of normalcy before A12’s descent into the heart of Nazi darkness. Before entering Germany, he would first spend a couple of weeks in the Netherlands, interviewing sources in order to piece together the general situation, and to gain introductions to trustworthy sources in Germany.

Soon he was conducting an hour-long interview with Baron Eduard von der Heydt, a man who knew how to play both sides of diplomatic and banking games. The baron had profited handsomely from his high-level connections, and he poured the proceeds into his world-renowned art collection.²¹ Yet his standards were far from mercenary. He was a top participant in secret British–German diplomatic negotiations in The Hague in 1918 but resigned when the German government insisted that it gain territorial possessions as part of any peace agreement. And now von der Heydt laid out for Bell the major current events in German political life and the right diplomats to talk to.

On Sunday, February 16, Bell met with another baron, Ago von Maltzan, who was also among Germany’s best diplomats. He was, according to Time magazine, “a typical German aristocrat, medium height, portly . . . with an attractive genial face and sharp eyes.”²² He was an opponent of the militarists during the war and played a crucial part in bringing their Great War reign to an end. Bell wrote that it was a “very successful” interview.

With the help of the two barons and MI6, Bell carried a bewildering array of passes. Miss Frank of MI6 arranged the British passes; the German side called for officials to offer him protection and help (“Schutz und Hilfe”), and to accommodate him in sending documents by post and telegraph.

Over the next days, Bell met with many journalists, who were often the first to know the uncensored news on the ground. He also came to realize that his dispatches were taking three and a half days just to reach Copenhagen, before being re-sent to London. The delay was a shocking breach of protocol when, as Tinsley taught, time was of the essence. Still worse, when his messages did go through, some were mangled in transmission.

Bell hoped to switch the telegraph route. There was no alternative—the war had destroyed many telegraph connections. But people don’t call it the intelligence business for nothing. The workaround soon presented itself, as his editor, William Moloney (the future head of Reuters), wired Bell: “telephone expected shortly opened and as we have English stenographer here you may be able to arrange telephone messages.”

On Thursday, February 20, Bell booked a train from Amsterdam to Germany, with “pleasant travelling companions.” There followed an “unpleasant inspection” by the Dutch border guards at Oldenzaal, which involved arguing about his typewriter. They were likely waiting for their usual bribe, but it was impossible that the straitlaced Canadian would pay. After some delay, he got through—with his typewriter. Then Bell was at Bentheim for entry into Germany, where his inspection was “orderly and polite.”

The trains to Berlin were overcrowded, the carriages dilapidated. He took the opportunity to talk to passengers along the way. Some had been imprisoned in England during the war.

He got into Berlin after midnight and began a long search for the kind of hotel a journalist could afford, even though MI6 was covering his bills. Hotel after hotel was full. If German counter-intelligence agents were following him, his lengthy hunt for a place to sleep, while weighed down by luggage, would have helped to convince them he was just an innocent reporter. A12 was following another of Tinsley’s rules: never splash out upon arrival, or everyone will suspect you. A luxury hotel might be good only for the agent’s last night on earth. Bell’s search finally ended at Krausen Street, close to the future Checkpoint Charlie.

The next day, he met an engineer (possibly an associate of Tinsley’s), who arranged a “very good room” at the Hotel Fürstenhof at Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz, one of the busiest intersections in the world. The turreted Fürstenhof combined baroque, modern, and art nouveau styling, and featured original art. Still, it wasn’t Berlin’s most luxurious hotel, and it was in line with what a reporter could afford. Bell liked the hotel and returned there repeatedly, probably because of its location. It stood near the streetcar network that let him move around the city quickly. And it was a short walk to the Tiergarten, Berlin’s excellent public park, an ideal place for meeting sources without being overheard.²³

Over the next few days, Bell met Wilhelm Runge, his friend from Göttingen. Runge had top-secret clearance and was a rising star in Germany’s Telefunken radio service, which controlled important military technology contracts. Runge felt confident sharing what he knew about the growing extremism in the military, not only because Bell was a close personal and family friend, but also because the liberal Runges were enthusiastic supporters of Germany’s new democracy. Bell also talked with his Göttingen friend Kurt Hahn, the speechwriter for the country’s first democratic chancellor, Prince Max.²⁴ Hahn gave Bell a first-hand portrait of democracy’s growing despair.

Bell also learned a lot from talking to people he met on the street, like “two quiet ladies at a table” and the “old porter.” They were more pleasant company than his next interview. On February 24, A12 met Talaat Pasha (“pasha” is a Turkish title for a person of high rank), aka Talaat Bey, the leader of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. He was the world’s most prolific serial killer, having ordered the murders of over a million Armenians, Greeks, and Jews during the war.

Bell’s rendezvous point with Talaat was the luxurious Hotel Adlon, advertised, pre-war, as “one of the most Beautiful and most Luxurious Hotels of the World. Every possible comfort known in Modern Hotel construction.”²⁵ Talaat was a charming but melancholic man, broad-shouldered, with grey hair and black eyes. To disguise his appearance from justice (on one side, there was an Ottoman order for his arrest, and on the other, assassins who wanted vengeance), he had shaved the impressive moustache he had worn as Grand Vizier and swapped his Turkish clothes for Western ones. MI6 wanted to know what Talaat was doing in Germany. Fortunately, he liked to talk, and Bell was an expert at eliciting conversation.

During the war, Talaat first ordered the Armenian leaders violently killed. Then the Ottoman Empire collected ordinary Armenians in concentration camps and starved them to death. In 1915, he told his German allies that he would deport the Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, without mentioning that he in fact meant to kill them. But the Germans soon enough learned the horrifying meaning of “deportation.” In early June 1915, a German saw evidence of mass killings and duly reported the nauseating sight to his government. Talaat then patiently explained to his allies that his country was stronger without internal enemies. That, in turn, would make Turkey a better ally to Germany. To men like Hans Humann, Germany’s naval attaché to the Ottoman Empire (and soon to be an important figure in German military intelligence), the argument made perfect sense.

After the war, German military leaders were grateful for Talaat’s wartime help but afraid that he could reveal their complicity in genocide. They offered to keep him safe in the countryside. Talaat insisted on staying in Berlin. He wanted to continue his scheming, and Berlin was the best place to do it. There, Talaat negotiated among a peculiar network of contacts: German socialists, Soviet Russians, German nationalists, and Italian fascists.²⁶ Later in the fall, Bell discovered that the plotters also planned to recruit Japan into their alliance. Japan, like Italy, had been Germany’s enemy in the war, but the British, French, and Americans foolishly marginalized their erstwhile allies at Versailles, which made them ripe for recruitment. Talaat’s opportunistic network helped form one of the two teams that was destined to fight the Second World War beginning in 1939, while he also contributed to its main purpose of race war.

The British newspapers soon reported on Talaat’s latest plot, which was to cultivate the Soviets.²⁷ As usual, the stories were anonymous, but Bell’s interviews surely informed the news. Bell set up his talks as conversations, rather than as typical question-and-answer interviews with a notebook and pen. Talaat no doubt revealed more than he would have liked. Bell learned that the murderer planned to travel to Moscow with Karl Radek, the Russian Communist leader who was charged with exporting the revolution to Germany.

The Reuters reporter was on to an explosive story. A bizarre scheme for the next world war was now coming into sight, right on the pages of leading English-language newspapers. Yet it was still hard to believe. The idea of the beaten Germans, Russians, and Turks joining up in a counter-alliance to the Americans, British, and French? It could easily seem absurd, but it was true. A shadowy secret alliance of terrorists arranged the framework for a new world war. For the alliance Talaat was helping to build, millions of innocent victims meant something exceptionally good. It meant modern progress.

A few months after Bell’s first meeting with Talaat, in September, the young German intel agent Adolf Hitler signed a death warrant on the Jewish people called the Gemlich letter. It urged the “uncompromising removal” of German Jews. Hitler knew his argument would find an audience among his superiors. Top intel figures like Humann, a friend of the Turkish génocidaires, had supported racial killing years before Hitler put it into words. At first glance, rich Talaat and Humann shared little in common with poor Hitler. But as salesmen of genocide, these three men enjoyed lucrative career prospects.

Having exposed Talaat’s planned alliance, Bell next considered how to defeat it. He interviewed top German bankers and many journalists, including the socialist newspaperman Rudolf Breitscheid, Heinrich Mantler of the Wolff Telegraphic Bureau (as influential in Germany as Reuters’s Sir Roderick Jones in England), and Theodor Wolff of the Berliner Tageblatt, a writer so famous and dexterous that he was able to mock the government during the war and get away with it.

Bell also conducted a crucial first interview with the wealthy and prominent Captain Achim von Arnim, from one of Prussia’s oldest noble families. He was extremely well placed, as a member of the German military’s central command, the General Staff (Großer Generalstab), and a recipient of the Pour le Mérite, one of Germany’s highest military honours. Bell’s networking with von Arnim would pay a rich harvest in the fall.

A12 had been back in Germany for only a week, but his reports were full of top-shelf intelligence, as if he had been embedded for years as a sleeper agent. On Leap Day, February 29, at one thirty in the morning, he wired an early report to HQ. In just 817 words, written in terse telegraphic style, he gave an expert phenomenological portrait of Germany. The country’s surface, he warned, was deceptive. Its hidden essence was deadly. It was easy for the British to make the superficial observation that “Germany now needs only a small well-disciplined military force to enforce internal order,” he wrote. Yet “no such force exists.” Nor could it, without foreign help.

Most Germans supported the new democratic rulers and wanted friendly relations with the rest of the world. But the government commanded few loyal troops to defend themselves against terroristic extremists who wanted to seize the country and make war on its neighbours.

German democracy was in a pitiable condition, reduced to using scattered and unreliable units and forced to bargain to rent even that help. The mercenaries Germany hired were of dubious ideological provenance. Huge quantities of weapons were in the hands of the “worst elements” of the population.

The government’s main advantage was that the leftist groups, made up of soldiers rather than officers, were uncoordinated. Natürlich, a German might say, that is what happens to an army without officers. Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, members of the old officers’ corps gathered themselves into the Freikorps, ostensibly to protect democracy from the leftists. But rumours abounded, as Bell heard, that the officers were “planning to use these corps for a reactionary coup.”

Bell was not sure yet. A Freikorps leader, Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard, told him that he was loyal to the government. But Bell’s Leap Day telegraph was the last time he used the word “conservative” to refer to the extreme right wing. In early March, Bell discovered their true nature. From that point forward, he called them “reactionaries,” “anti-Semitic,” and “nationalists” (part of the root words from which the future epithet “Nazis” derived—but these proto-Nazis would only become actual Nazis several weeks later, as their nationalism had not yet merged with socialism). They were not, he soon realized, conserving anything at all. A minority of the Freikorps were interested in restoring the monarchy, but the majority wanted themselves in charge.

The Freikorps troops numbered between thirty-six and forty thousand near Berlin, Bell reported. In the east, “an extraordinarily informed exceptional source,” likely Captain von Arnim, “gives me an estimated total of over one hundred ten thousand” soldiers. But some of those troops were very old, he said, and others were very young. Many took the opportunity to sign up for bonus pay and a new uniform, whereupon they would desert, sell their uniforms, and sign up again a few days later under different names. It was a sign that even though the proto-Nazi reactionaries were now among the strongest forces in the country, they were still decades away from refighting the Great War.

Bell interviewed the ordinary soldiers in the reactionary regiments and saw that most of them were not political. Their purpose was pay, just like the soldiers in the so-called leftist regiments. The fighting men on both sides of the political spectrum clung to one basic fact: if food and work failed, they carried guns and took what they wanted. That, more than abstract membership in the “left” or “right,” was the glue holding them together.

Four months into the post-war desolation, Germans were losing faith in President Woodrow Wilson and the promises of friendship he had made before war’s end. Meanwhile, Bell reported, “the German democratic government is practically isolated in Weimar by strikes.”

The loss of faith in the West led Germany, like a spurned lover, to thoughts of an affair with the Russian communists. Yet Bell knew a Germany–Russia alliance would sound perfectly absurd in London, where common belief held that the two countries hated each other. Bell also knew, however, that men like Talaat Pasha were playing matchmaker. And it was not just Talaat. A common sense was arising throughout Deutschland that Russland was the country’s only salvation. Bell wrote, “I have been in the East End Factories, and the best-informed official circles, and I know whereof I speak.” Russian agents had thoroughly infiltrated the country, and “wherever group conspirators are discovered, Russians are among them.”

Bell’s well-placed liberal German friends knew that no government force was strong enough to rescue the country. Unless the Allies intervened to save their defeated adversary, German democracy was doomed. So they hit upon a plan to invite the Allies to get involved. “I’m not at liberty to give names,” Bell wrote, “but I have exceptional authority for the statement that the government and general staff would welcome the appointment of an Allied commission to investigate the situation everywhere and would place all facilities at its disposal.”

Bell needed to conceal his friends’ identities because if he did not, the extremists would add those names to their hit list. For the moment, Bell was alone in Berlin. No local intelligence apparatus supported him. And yet, all by himself, A12 delivered a stunning intelligence coup: German democrats were inviting a British commission to oversee their country.²⁸ His intelligence was not just passive. It was actionable, just like C loved.

Bell’s Leap Day report was brief, but it was 817 words of intelligence gold. If the extremists were unchecked, Germany would one day become a terroristic, anti-liberal nation bent on revenge. Or Britain could defeat them, support the country’s liberal democrats, and gain a valuable friend and trading partner in a newly rich land. “On returning from the continent,” Bell wrote, “I find myself asked to prophesy. But surely practical politics consists rather in sizing up a given situation, realizing what tendencies are latent therein, and taking the action calculated to make inevitable, or most probable, that particular development which one regards as most desirable.”

It was the philosophy of intelligence, and identical to a central philosophical question: Are we free or determined? If we love wisdom, we are free, but otherwise, we are determined.

In just a week, Bell had become Britain’s indispensable source in the dangerous country that was the linchpin of central Europe. Many spies in his position would have angled for a promotion. But inspired by his loyal, hard-working upbringing in Halifax, he just wanted to get the job done.

As Bell’s Harvard philosophy professor Josiah Royce wrote in Studies of Good and Evil, “Do your work as you alone can do it; fill the place that nobody else can fill.”²⁹

And now, in early 1919, Royce’s loyal student heeded the advice. He alone was in a position to fight a single-handed intelligence war against the powerful, ruthless men who would soon become the Nazis.

Chapter 7

The Battle for Berlin

We sit in a railway carriage and see on the adjacent track another carriage pass by . . . we have no immediate means by which to decide whether the two carriages are moving “in reality.” We find only that the relative position of the carriages changes in time.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN, “ON THE PRINCIPLE OF RELATIVITY”¹

Winthrop Bell had visited Berlin before the Great War, during it, and through the November Revolution. Each time, it was recognizably Berlin. But now, in the last days before spring 1919, it felt off. The psychological sensation felt, he wrote, like that of a cat in a strange new house. The whole city was mentally ill. It had the depressed feel of Ruhleben prison camp, except without the order. Urgent rumours predicted a great battle for Berlin between right-wing and left-wing mercenaries.

His travelling companion on his most recent train voyage into Germany, a successful Dutch consulting engineer, brought along food to distribute as gifts to the passengers. He and Bell were in the first-class cabin, but everyone gathered around to pick up their share. Not even the wife of a diplomat refused. Bell brought the party’s conversation to present conditions in Germany, “and then,” he noted, “the interest is intense. I hear about the suffering of the poorer classes; about the mothers who are unable, on the rations they get, to suckle their children. I hear about the doctors who have to shake their heads sadly when begged to prescribe a little milk for invalids; about the children who have been ill with some slight complaints, but cannot seem to recover again.”

Even for well-off people, he wrote, “the question of the daily bread is no merely theoretical one.” Buying meat was a dangerous game. Cats and dogs and God knew what else were sold as sausage. The Reuters reporter had heard of whole families poisoned by bad meat.

In Berlin, he saw hundreds of severely crippled soldiers begging in the streets. “Certain celebrated correspondents, who write from Paris about what Germany is doing, might reflect on the significance of that fact.”

Gunpowder and bullets contributed to the danger. Healthy-bodied ex-soldiers had ready access to rifles, machine guns, and artillery. “Literally hundreds of thousands of these men are out of work.” The extremist leaders had an easy time hiring recruits. The former soldiers fought for different militias, but “they are united by a common feeling of blind and only half-suppressed resentment and recklessness.”

The existence of a dangerous, dispirited mass of unemployed soldiers was, Bell chastised, a consequence of Allied demands. As a condition of the Armistice, the victors had forced a quick and massive reduction of the German army. It was foolish. The Allies were in no position to stop the movement of official troops to the extremist militias, at the exact moment Germany’s democratic government lost the ability to defend itself.

When they were not fighting for militias, these hordes of ex-soldiers did anything for money: juggling in the street, selling newspapers on corners, or hawking things stolen from the army. The police were powerless and heavily outgunned. “‘Move on’ has lost its magic.”

Bell made his way onto the proto-Nazis’ surveillance list on a dark and cold Friday evening at the end of February 1919. It was still days before these militants became actual Nazis, and a year before they announced their existence to the world. The surveillance began after Bell interviewed the Berlin Freikorps leader, Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard, a stern, moustachioed man who later became a Nazi politician and an officer in Adolf Hitler’s SS. At the time of the interview, Reinhard commanded a mercenary regiment that bore his name.

A12 was brought by car to the neo-baroque criminal court building on Turmstraße for the interview. The imposing building was one of the most modern in Berlin, complete with its own power station, elevators, telephone system, heating system, and water supply. It was a powerful early headquarters for the right-wing takeover of Germany.

At 6:15 p.m., Bell began the “impressive” (eindrucksvoll) interview. Reinhard wore the mantle of imperial authority and was surrounded by soldiers who were ready to do his bidding. A towering man, the colonel, like Bell’s source Achim von Arnim, had won the Pour le Mérite for battlefield heroism. Other than that, the two men could hardly have been more different.

After a few formalities, Bell aimed for the essence of Reinhard’s plot. Were the Freikorps planning to launch an attack on Berlin’s communists on March 5?

How, the colonel surely wondered, could a British correspondent know the secret? Reinhard did not explicitly confirm the timeline, but he let slip that a battle was on the way. “I, with my handful of men, will fight to the last breath.” It was a stirring claim, but absurd in the light of the battle that followed. The Freikorps controlled reserves and armaments that the communists could only dream of.

Bell’s follow-up question was even more serious. Were the Freikorps planning a coup to take over Germany? Again, it would prove to be true, though Reinhard, “apparently earnest and honest,” as Bell wrote, quickly denied it, and insisted he was loyal to the government. In fact, he and his men knew that before they could take over Germany, they first needed to control Berlin.

After his interview, Bell was watched, at first with subtlety. But when the Freikorps invasion of Berlin began a few days later, the subtlety was gone. Reinhard’s soldiers were posted as guards at his hotel door.

The Canadian agent had brought himself near the plotting of powerful, deadly men. Reinhard’s brutality in the coming March campaign would prove astounding. He personally ordered the murder of twenty-nine captured leftist navy men because they looked like the smart ones. Reinhard’s men tortured others, searched apartments, and summarily executed civilians, probably numbering in the hundreds, when a search uncovered weapons. It made no difference whether those killed had anything to do with the fighting.

Those rumours of a nationalist coup that Bell had asked about proved true as well. A year after his meeting with Reinhard, on March 12, 1920, the Freikorps launched that coup. They strutted through Berlin behind tanks painted with swastikas and unfurled banners from their armoured cars. Their message was simple: “Juden Raus!” “Jews Out!” By then, they were full-blown Nazis.

AS BELL WOKE up on the morning of Wednesday, March 5, 1919, it was beautiful weather in Berlin. The thundering sound he heard from his window wasn’t a spring storm. It was artillery. Machine-gun fire rang out throughout the city. The rumours were correct: the battle for Berlin, between the Freikorps and the left-wing Republican Soldiers’ Army, had begun.

Despite the mortal danger in travelling through a city at war, Bell refused to cancel the day’s interviews. He walked out of his hotel, found a lonely taxi in the street, and asked for a ride to his next interview at Haberlandstraße. He was shocked that the driver wanted an absurd price for a two-and-a-half-mile trip. Meanwhile, the driver was shocked that Bell was trying to talk him down in price—he’d be risking his life driving through a war zone. It was a good argument, but Bell managed to knock the price down to twenty marks. MI6 had taught him it was crucial to negotiate. If he paid the first price asked, people would suspect he was a spy.

His taxi wended its way through the streets, aiming to avoid the hottest part of the fighting. Reinhard’s Freikorps troops, Bell knew, had “discipline and experienced leadership.” But having interviewed leftist rebels before the fighting began, he also knew that most of them came for the paycheque.

The ideologues were concentrated among the managerial class and received funding from shady sources. On the Freikorps side, the managers were Prussian officers and the financiers were typically industrial and landowning titans who wanted their wartime swagger back. On the republican side, the managers were Marxist idealists and Russian provocateurs, with finance coming from a strange mixture of both the German government and Russian Communist agents.

As for the largest force of the Berlin leftists, Bell wrote: “They are well paid, have no officers, but elect their own ‘leaders.’ The Government pays them, but would like to get rid of them. It does not know quite how. To disband 18,000 armed men who do not want to be disbanded, and who have it in their power to turn you out of your imposing office buildings, bag and baggage, if you do not pay them, is a nice problem for a man gifted at one and the same time with diplomatic and military genius.” Germany lacked statesmen who combined these talents in the same person.

The Freikorps stepped in to get rid of the competition for the mercenary line on the government’s budget. It was a profitable opportunity for the extremist militia, but a bad trade for the country. The republicans were just a bunch of ne’er-do-wells. But Reinhard and his crew had bigger plans. Reinhard fulfilled them when he became a Nazi SS Obergruppenführer, the equivalent of a three-star general, during the Second World War. Other Freikorps members became Hitler’s earliest allies.

Passing barbed wire, barricaded bridges, artillery explosions, and suppressing fire, Bell’s taxi made it through to a calm part of town. The reporter exited in front of 5 Haberlandstraße, in a chic part of Berlin.

A thirty-nine-year-old German Jewish physicist opened the door and warmly invited Bell in with a smile, as a friend of mutual friends. Bitte kommen Sie rein. Please come in. The good-natured interviewee’s hair was dark and unkempt. He was not conventionally dressed. His apartment was spacious and comfortable, the furniture solid and modern, with art deco flair.

The two men spent the next hours conspiring to save Germany from horrible death. The country was headed for utter ruin at the speed of light. Only a massive intellectual gravity could bend the light and deflect the blow. Fortunately, Albert Einstein and Winthrop Bell were heavyweights. Could they reveal to the world how mass, energy, time, and space were related in a Germany teetering on the brink of disaster?

Before launching into their work, the two men exchanged news of their Göttingen friends, like Max Born. Then they focused on a problem that was even more difficult than theoretical physics: Germany was starving and had no way out.

The Allies had made their policy obvious. They felt an “it serves them right” pleasure in the idea of German suffering, or what the Germans might call schadenfreude. As the British kept up their blockade, the Freikorps conspired at the Eden Hotel in Berlin, decentralized revolutionary communists conspired throughout the country, and Bell and Einstein conspired at Haberlandstraße. Only the last group had the country’s best interests in mind.

Einstein would soon be one of the most recognized men in the world, but in the spring of 1919, when Bell interviewed him, he could walk almost anywhere, except a physics conference, without attracting attention. At the time of his interview, Einstein had already shown how to prove the existence of atoms, his special theory of relativity had revealed how space and time are related for objects travelling in a straight line at a constant speed, and he’d discovered that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared (E = mc²). But he was not yet internationally famous. His theories still lacked empirical confirmation, even if they were beautiful.

Yet he was on the cusp of international fame, as the empirical confirmation for his beautiful theories was on its way. Two months after he and Bell met, on May 29, 1919, a solar eclipse in Africa let the astronomer and physicist Arthur Eddington, a fellow of the Royal Society, test Einstein’s general theory of relativity and its hypothesis that gravitation bends light in a space-time continuum. Eddington’s observation showed that starlight bends ever so slightly in the sun’s gravitation. The discovery made Einstein the first intellectual superstar of the post-war era.

That was for the future, though. First, he turned his brainpower to helping Bell save Germany from a devastating mass starvation. Where could Germany find food? Einstein, like other brilliant Germans, told Bell with despair in his eyes “that it is true that not to raise rations meant Germany’s collapse; but to raise it was speculating on the possibility of getting food from the Allies before Germany’s collapse.” Salvation could only come from abroad.

Bell was already thinking about how to frame his report. He knew there was little time to rescue Germany from a devastating famine that was shaping up to be one of the worst the world had ever known. He left Haberlandstraße with Einstein’s card, upon which the physicist had written some words of recommendation to Dr. Richard Werner, of Siemens. Werner served as a go-between to the worlds of German industrial wealth and its scientific research. Einstein’s card was the key to the liberally minded big business that stood behind Germany’s many Nobel Prizes.

As Bell walked back to his hotel to the sound of explosions echoing in the distance, he studied Einstein’s card. The great physicist’s signature looked like that of a young child who realizes he is at the end of the page and not all the letters are going to fit. The last three letters, ein, veered off down the side of the card like starlight bending in the sun’s gravitation.

The walk back to the Fürstenhof took Bell thirty-three minutes. He was not usually so precise, but Einstein inspired people to pay attention to the nature of time. It was over four kilometres from Einstein’s to the hotel—a brisk walk through a city at war.

Bell found a telegram waiting for him from the Ritzau press agency in Amsterdam: “reuters request us transmit you their best thanks for your excellent despatches.” He had the scoop on the Berlin civil war, and it was selling newspapers. At the same time, he was informing MI6. He took both his intel and his cover job very seriously. He was constitutionally incapable of doing anything by half measures.

The first time Albert Einstein’s name appeared in the English-language newspapers in 1919, in Bell’s own articles, it wasn’t for his genius in physics but for his science of peace.² It was insufficient, said Einstein and Bell’s other sources, to let Germany buy food. That would simply postpone the inevitable by a few months. Both the food blockade and the economic blockade needed to be lifted. “Germany can only buy food and pay an indemnity by working.” The alternative, as Bell’s source had heard in the food lines, was alarming: “In the last resource, we, at any rate, are all armed.”

When Bell told Einstein and his other best-placed sources that he would give England a “really objective, full report of the situation,” they looked at him “incredulously, as if it is too good to be true,” and responded sadly, “If it is not too late.”

It was not too late for Bell to try. Back at his hotel, he composed his report. “I declare,” he typed, “that if Germany does not get considerable supplies during April there will be literal starvation.” Approximately 750,000 Germans had already died of malnourishment and resultant illness, with 100,000 to 250,000 of the deaths occurring after the Armistice. If food aid did not arrive at once, the situation, Bell warned, would turn cataclysmic. If Britain weren’t informed, millions might perish. How many millions? After the Second World War, he cited an estimate that ten million Germans could starve to death if food aid did not come from abroad. The situation in 1919 was similar.

THE NEXT DAY, March 6, the battle still raged. The government felt so indebted to the Freikorps for their January and March clashes with the Spartacists that they signed an agreement to integrate Reinhard’s troops into the regular army. In June, Reinhard’s militia would become Reichswehr-Brigade 15.

Why did the government, which was paying the salaries of the leftist republicans, invite the Freikorps to fight them? Bell clarified the situation later in the year, noting that the civil war on the streets mirrored the vicious fighting among the various offices in the government. Bell’s source in Germany’s Foreign Office described his workplace as “the biggest muddle there ever was.” He said, “There are cliques here who are in communication with Lenin; others with Denikin [the leader of the antisemitic reactionary forces fighting in Russia and Ukraine], each trying to cut the other’s throat.”

The leftists were still formidable, but the Freikorps foxes now officially guarded the henhouse, and the terrorists were one step closer to controlling Germany. Not all the earliest members of the Freikorps movement were anti-Jewish race warriors, but a substantial number were, and the worst elements were at work rooting out the moderates.

The same day, Bell saw the battle at Alexanderplatz, near the Police Presidency. The pungent sulphur of battle hung in the air; machine guns cracked, and bullets whizzed overhead. Poor, gaunt-cheeked people crouched against walls. The faces of public buildings bore gaping wounds. Heavy howitzers blasted holes “20 feet deep.” One reporter, likely Bell, described how the left-wing troops sent tear gas against the right-wing defenders of the Presidency, while Freikorps airplanes swept overhead to destroy access to the subway, from which enemy reinforcements were arriving.³

Pre-war, Alexanderplatz had displayed German order, education, wealth, beauty, and mobility. The square was the eastern boundary of Berlin’s most important tourist attractions. The train station there, framed by the eighteenth-century Königskolonnaden (King’s Columns), was one of Berlin’s busiest. In better times, visitors leaving the station walked into a large square where travellers waited outside, sitting on their baggage and enjoying the sunlight. Nearby, the religious attended services at St. George Church, while tourists climbed its tower to gain a superior view of King’s Street. On the northwest side was the famous Tietz department store, built by Cremer & Wolffenstein; in front was a colossal copper statue of Berolina, the female personification of Berlin. The teachers’ association and the German school museum anchored the east side. On the south side was the gargantuan police headquarters. (The same building was featured in Babylon Berlin, a fictional 2017 television series about a German police detective who uncovers the secret Nazi plot, circa 1929. The series has some resemblances to the life of A12, except that Bell was real, and he discovered the plot a decade earlier.)

No corner of Berlin had seemed more stable a few days earlier. But now, a reporter, likely Bell, informed English readers: “The Alexanderplatz is battered just like a front-line village in the war . . . The Kaiserstrasse is strewn with the bodies of dead and wounded. Many of the wounded are not even bandaged.”⁴

Just after midnight, agent A12 finished typing his report. “While writing this in the Fürstenhof Hotel,” he wrote, “I have heard distant shots and bells of passing ambulances. It is now midnight. I do not know whether I shall succeed in getting through to the central telegraph office.”⁵

A vicious firefight raged two blocks away from the telegraph office. Both sides wanted to seize it because it meant the power to control information. Millions of lives and the fate of German democracy depended on Bell’s midnight jaunt through a war zone. The risk of being blown up was just one of his concerns—captured prisoners, including civilians, were summarily shot by the Freikorps combatants.

Bell unrolled the last sheet of paper from his typewriter, folded it with the others, and hurriedly put them in his coat pocket. He then put his hat on and rushed out his hotel door. On the other side, he stumbled over two Freikorps guards “posted right outside my ‘enemy alien’ door,” carrying “very efficient rifles.”

Still worse, a large detachment of Colonel Reinhard’s troops occupied the land just outside of the hotel. A whole army, it seemed, was there for just one MI6 agent. But armed with a powerful pass from the Foreign Office, charm, and self-confidence, A12 made it past the guards and was soon out on the street in the pouring rain.

A single taxi still stood in Potsdamer Platz. The driver told him it would be impossible to get to the telegraph office because of barricades. Bell showed him the government pass that would let them go anywhere. The driver was impressed, but he had another compelling argument: he might be shot. He demanded a ridiculous price for the attempt. Bell haggled him down to fifty marks. It was an absurd fare for a one-mile drive. Before the war, the trip would have been less than two marks.

On the way, Bell heard shots in neighbouring streets. When they reached their destination, he heard rapid firing and the sound of hand grenades exploding a couple of blocks away. “An armoured car appeared up the unlighted street. My chauffeur was inquisitive, and ventured out into the roadway. He returned in a hurry. The armoured car dragged a sort of barbed wire entanglement behind it. But fortunately my man escaped with a torn boot and a bad scare.”

As they drove on, Bell saw the battle of Hackescher Markt from a block away. In the spring of 1914, the small market square had been a stopping-off point for tourists to view the attractions on the north side of the old city, like the Wertheim department store, an upscale, modern department store in the fashionable part of town.

But now, Freikorps airplanes swept overhead for reconnaissance, while tanks advanced into the Hackescher Markt. The leftists’ machine-gun bullets dinged off the thick armour. The granite pillars of Wertheim’s were pockmarked from bullets and shrapnel.

Slowly and deliberately, the right-wing troops levelled their opposition with artillery and heavy machine-gun fire. The defenders were surrounded on three sides by the Freikorps and could escape only to the east. Bell saw buildings destroyed by artillery fire. “Feverish crowds” rushed in to plunder the ruins in the middle of the battle. It was, he sadly reported, “typical of Berlin today.” Looters were willing to risk their lives to steal something they could sell for a few marks.

Some soldiers fought hard, but others, on both sides, scarcely cared. They took desultory shots between puffs on their cigarettes when they thought their commanders were looking. They didn’t want to be killed or kill their brothers in arms on the other side of the battle. They also didn’t want to lose their salary.

Bell made it to the telegraph office at 1 a.m. on March 7 and sent his urgent dispatch. Germany was on the brink of mass death by hunger and an extremist takeover. The two disasters were linked. The British military, headquartered at Cologne, relayed the essence of the message: “The attitude of the population is becoming one of despair and the people feel that an end by bullets is preferable to death by starvation.” Food from abroad would help to avoid the worst.

The impact was immediate. A day later, as the historian Margaret MacMillan recounts, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, with the assembled leaders of the Versailles conference before him, waved a telegram he had just received from the British army in Germany “warning that the country was on the edge of a famine.”⁶ Bell’s intel certainly informed the report.

The dramatic appearance of hot-off-the-telegram intelligence forced the French to back down from the blockade they had demanded for months. Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France, had halted an earlier agreement on food shipments, not because he was murderous but because he was greedy. He was worried that money Germany spent on food would not exist to pay reparations. But with the horrors revealed by Bell’s first-hand reporting, the British realized they needed to break France’s intransigence. It brought Britain into alignment with the Americans, who had always urged feeding Germany. Realizing it was now two to one, the French grudgingly relented.

Bell’s story of Germany’s starvation bounced through the government and then ran in the British newspapers on March 13 under a series of bold headlines, as in the Pall Mall Gazette: GERMANY’S LAST MEALS / DESPERATE CONDITIONS OF THE FOOD SUPPLIES / QUESTION OF DAYS ONLY / PITIFUL STORIES OF HUNGER.

The news had an effect. The Gazette reported: “Allied and German delegates are meeting in Brussels to-day, when Admiral Wemyss will present to the enemy representatives the conditions upon which the revictualling of Germany is to be made dependent.”⁷

The Allies lifted the food blockade the next day, six punishing months after Germany had signed the Armistice. That is why March 14, 1919—rather than November 11, 1918—should be considered the real end of the violence of the First World War. It is impossible to know precisely how many lives Bell helped save, but it might have easily been in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions.

Winston Churchill played another vital role in finally ending the war.⁸ Bell supplied the intel and the public relations, while Churchill presented the argument to Parliament. Together they convinced Britain that while punishing German militarists was one thing, slowly killing children was another.

What if Bell had chosen to go home to Halifax rather than return to Germany, or had stayed in his hotel because the civil war was dangerous, or had simply confirmed Britain’s pre-existing biases because it was easiest? Then the English-speaking public would have remained clueless about the mass death that it was causing.

Bell was a journalist, a diplomatic officer, and almost certainly a military officer. The military connection was life insurance, since MI6 was not yet fully independent. The paperwork on his appointment is not clear, but most likely he was a lieutenant like the MI6 agent Sidney Reilly, the “Ace of Spies,” who compared intelligence notes with Bell on the Russian–German situation.

But Bell was also a civil servant, which gave him relative independence to talk to German diplomats and government officials, as well as anyone else he wanted, without depending on orders. It was typical of the curious position that MI6 occupied before and during the war, both quasi-diplomatic and quasi-military.

Bell returned to the Hotel Fürstenhof from the telegraph office in the still-dark morning. After a few hours of sleep, he awoke to a beautiful spring day. He hired an automobile for his next rendezvous, with the journalist Theodor Wolff, and headed through “peaceful streets towards the East.”⁹ For the moment, the shooting had stopped.

As the car drove on, the old city with its charming classical architecture ended. The new city began, full of artless, densely packed districts where industrial workers lived. It was gritty, dirty, hardscrabble urban life, and a centre of leftist activism. The people he saw on the streets looked hungrier and paler than in the central city.

Suddenly, his car “was stopped by a threatening crowd.” The industrial workers could not afford cars, and the sudden appearance of an expensive model inspired suspicions that Bell and his driver were spies for the Freikorps. After a quick turn, Bell’s driver sped away from the immediate danger, but he refused to go on, not for any amount of money. Bell had to continue on foot, but first he arranged to meet the car later at an agreed-upon spot.

As Bell’s lonely footsteps headed east, the atmosphere stayed eerily quiet. He walked towards an intersection but saw it barricaded. Men with rifles and machine guns crouched in battle positions. Some of the barrels were trained on him. He did not flinch or halt. If he’d run away, he would almost certainly have been shot. Instead, he walked up calmly, authoritatively. He was a man on a mission, willing to stare death in the face. As a philosopher, he did not fear death. A soldier advanced towards him. Others kept A12 trained in their rifle sights. Bell spoke first, explaining he was a Reuters agent on his way to a Treffen with Theodor Wolff.

Bell showed the wary man a letter from Reuters and another from the Foreign Office. The soldier took both. Bell waited in the cold breeze. There was no traffic, no gunfire—just the sound of birds that didn’t care that east Berlin was no place for tourists.

The soldier consulted with his comrades and finally waved Bell through the barricades. But Wolff was not at the meeting point. Was he dead, wounded, arrested, or delayed? Bell waited as long as he could, then left to meet his driver. But when he made it to the rendezvous point, the car wasn’t there. Suddenly the air vibrated with explosions. For a fraction of a second, it was pure sensory bewilderment. The phenomena had not yet arranged itself into logos. A moment later, the natural phenomenologist in everyone understood that the battle had started. The Freikorps soldiers had reached republican lines. Both sides opened fire with everything they had.

Civilians ran away in a panic. A12, trained by MI6 in the art of survival, knew that was a mistake. He made the right move by darting from the sidewalk to a doorway and crouching as heavy firing continued. Bullets punched holes in the facades of buildings. Finally, at a lull in the shooting, he took his chance. He hurried down an empty street broken by mortars and past mangled trees. As he put it in his next dispatch, he kept close to the walls, walked past a dead horse, and stuck to side routes to avoid gunfire. He repeatedly showed his special pass from Germany’s Foreign Office to get by sentries and eventually made it to safety past the sound of intermittent firing coming from the Wedding district.

ON FRIDAY, BELL headed to southeast Berlin to clarify a “puzzling” telegram he’d received from MI6’s Dutch headquarters in Rotterdam. He walked along Leipziger Straße, Berlin’s main thoroughfare, which abounded with stately new buildings that now outnumbered the earlier Renaissance style. It was a handsome effect overall. The shops facing the street were high-class affairs, although worse for wear owing to the blockade. Window shoppers crowded the sidewalks, even though a battle raged in the city and the shops were closed.

He continued past the packed Dönhoff Platz and its colonnade, which the architect Carl von Gontard built in 1776 to cover the old defensive moat. As Mozart composed Piano Concerto no. 7 and Germany was at peace, it had seemed Berlin no longer needed moats. It was a premature decision. For just as Bell walked by, invading soldiers crept up on defenders behind the platz. Suddenly, gunfire broke out. Bell found a safe spot that could stop shrapnel and stray bullets.

He was shocked by what he saw next. This time there was no general flight, no desperate running for cover. People just kept doing what they were doing, indifferent to the gunfire. Even families with small children kept to their resolution to enjoy the long strike weekend.

The previous three days of battles hadn’t merited a single exclamation point in Bell’s diary. Yet after he came back late to his hotel, he wrote: “Shots behind Dönhoff Platz—no one cared!” (“Schüsse hinter Dönhoff Platz—niemand kehrte sich daran!”) It was as if Berliners’ fight-or-flight response was dead. Sebastian Haffner, a schoolboy at the time of the fighting, described the city’s descent into madness: “We were soon quite hardened to the sound of ordinary machine guns, light artillery, and even trench fire and got excited only by mortars or heavy artillery.”¹⁰ It became a competitive game for the boys of Berlin to sneak past signs that said: “Halt! Anyone Found Beyond This Point Will Be Shot.”

The phenomenologist-spy Dr. Bell reported to London that the essence of Berlin had changed overnight. Yesterday, people cared about saving their lives. Today, it made no difference. People thought that life and death and everything had become one. It was as if nothing mattered anymore. Something strange was going on in Germany. Something evil.

The next day, Bell wrote an article for the British newspapers in “a light tone.” He was apparently asked to do this in the “puzzling” telegram he received from Rotterdam, Tinsley’s MI6 station. It was so puzzling that Bell headed across the city’s war zone for a meeting to clarify its meaning. His diary doesn’t mention who he met with, but the telegram turned out to mean just what it said—MI6 needed variety to spread the message. Some readers skipped over dire reports because they didn’t want to read upsetting news. They wanted lighter fare, like funny stories, gossip about celebrities, and the comings and goings of royalty. MI6 needed to deliver the message to those readers, too, because they were also voters.

Bell started with the lighter stuff and then slipped in the dire warnings after he had the reader’s attention. He had good material for his opening monologue. Those two Freikorps soldiers standing guard outside his hotel room, the ones he’d literally tripped over? They were surely there by “coincidence.” It was also funny that when his train pulled into Berlin after midnight, people congratulated him that it was “only” five hours late.

Between the comic and the tragic parts, Bell needed a transition. For two days, no newspapers had appeared; the phones were down, and so was the mail. “Very restful: but the lack of them gives me, as correspondent, a feeling strangely akin to a bad conscience.”

And then to the dire part. Bell saw a population so hungry that when a horse fell to a stray bullet, “in half an hour it was only a steaming skeleton.” He watched, in several battles, how desperate people gambled their lives on small chances. Street hustlers set up their stands at the nearest curb to the battle. Berliners were “a people filled with a vague disgust, disillusioned, hungry, ready for anything that can provide diversion.”

Those were the poor people, but even Germany’s well-to-do were “struggling to preserve hope.” People needed food and work, “and at present both are diminishing.” Still worse, terrible inflation had set in. Prices had increased four- to twenty-fold from the end of the war, and little existed at the low end of that range.

Meanwhile, rich war profiteers and militarists were getting still richer in the civil war. They sent some of that money, as donations, to the Freikorps. Germany’s democratic government sent them money, too, for protection from the leftists. It let the proto-Nazis buy more weapons and hire more troops. This further enraged the poor, encouraging them to support the leftist revolutionaries. In turn, the frightened rich people gave the Freikorps more protection money.

Bell quoted an “old German professor” who told him about the “terribly fatalistic” maxim of the masses: “It’s all one now.” Bell painted the scene in the style of Pieter Bruegel’s Triumph of Death. “While Death swings his scythe, and recurring influenza epidemics sweep away the youngest and strongest, the people waste its money in tawdry pleasures, and seeks only distraction. Wild political ideas intoxicate the few of the best that are still left of the youth of the country, with the illusion of a movement of spiritual life.”

He met a reporter from a neutral nation who saw the German situation much like he did. Why didn’t that other reporter publish his view? The reporter responded: “The English press would not take that. I would lose my commission.” Others said, “Papers simply do not print all I’ve sent.”

“Surely,” Bell editorialized, “this is lamentable testimony either to the earnestness of public opinion or the sense of responsibility of the press at one of the most crucial points in human history.”¹¹

Either way, bad information, bias, and cowardice were getting people killed and paving the way for Germany’s takeover by extremists. He urged: “Unless you are going to put the whole German nation to the sword, we have got to get along together in this narrow Europe somehow. We may not need to love one another but we must find a modus vivendi.”¹² His report began on a light note, but ended seriously.

Bell’s journalistic colleague George Young also reported on the March civil war.¹³ While Bell covered the Berlin beat, Young travelled throughout Germany. There was plenty of gunfire to keep both reporters busy. Young, recently of Britain’s “political secret service”¹⁴ (likely meaning MI6), told his readers that if he pulled out the wrong letter of introduction at a checkpoint, he would be killed on the spot.¹⁵ It had happened to someone he knew. Since he regularly travelled over battle lines, he kept the left-wing and right-wing letters in different pockets. He likely shared the tip with Bell.

For a long while, it was virtually impossible for English-speaking readers to gain an accurate idea of what was going on in Germany. They read a combination of proto-Nazi and communist propaganda from within Germany and clueless reports from Paris. Bell and Young gave words of truth against a torrent of lies. It meant facing mortal danger and required as much courage as the bravest soldier on the battlefield. But Bell and Young were unarmed, and often alone.

Young complained about other journalists who stayed in their pleasant hotels and ran stories based on propaganda. For instance, one newspaper report described how the leftists had massacred 150 police.¹⁶ The leftists had done no such thing; the story was meant to conceal the fact that the Freikorps had massacred their perceived enemies en masse.

On Saturday, March 8, Bell reported that the general strike and the fighting were practically over in central Berlin. The Freikorps had won. He still heard “desultory outbursts of shooting and bombing near the Centre.”¹⁷ But the Spartacists were falling back, “street by street,” towards the east.

Bell knew the government’s victory was not real. It “produces an illusory impression of relief which is only temporary.”¹⁸ To the casual observer in London, German democracy had vanquished its communist opponents. In truth, German democracy was dying.

Thousands fell in Berlin’s March battle, but the fight was one-sided in favour of the Freikorps after the first clash, when the battle could have gone either way. As reinforcements poured in, the attacking Freikorps grew more powerful. The left used rifles, machine guns, and even some artillery in defense. But the Freikorps dropped bombs from planes and fired heavy artillery into residential districts, used poison gas and flamethrowers, tortured and executed prisoners, and overwhelmed their enemy. For every invader killed, twenty to forty died on the other side, including many civilians. Seventy-five were killed on the so-called government (Freikorps) side; estimates suggest 1,250 to 3,000 were killed on the other side, many of them non-combatants.

Selections from Bell’s “light” March 7 article ran in newspapers on March 25.¹⁹ Compared to many of his reports about less sensitive matters, it was a long turnaround. This indicated how his cover worked when politically delicate questions were at play. First British intelligence and then its customers in the government (naval and army intelligence, the Foreign Office, and so on) had time to study what he wrote. Then selected parts ran in the newspapers. Some items were too hot to ever run in the press. Other times, the journalistic turnaround was much quicker, and his dispatches were published the same day. The timing hinged on the perceived military, diplomatic, and democratic sensitivity of his intel.

It isn’t possible to know just how censored Bell’s public reports were. In addition to the government, which decided what to classify and what to declassify, local editors who paid for the Reuters wire service made their own decisions before running his reports in their papers. Sometimes, as he protested to the Foreign Office, editors made up quotes and inserted them into his stories. Bell knew that a war could start if dangerously impolitic words were put into the mouth of a foreign leader.

During the battle for Berlin, the Freikorps performed a theatrical spectacle to rival the Nazis’ burning of the Reichstag in 1933. They turned important government buildings into fortresses. Only a thin grey line of well-paid, battle-hardened Freikorps could save democracy from the communists. But who would save democracy from the Freikorps?

Even as the fighting subsided, the right-wing mercenary security apparatus remained. Bell’s meetings with his government contacts now meant negotiating past soldiers, sandbags, barbed wire, and armoured cars. A friend recommended that he speak only English when passing through the checkpoints. The mercenaries would not hesitate to kill him if they suspected he was a leftist German spy.

Bell could see that the political winds had changed. Before the March fighting, the leftists had the upper hand in the struggle with the right. After the fighting, the right-wingers were on top. But the left still had a lot of firepower and troops. It was true that the leftists, lacking officers, were not well coordinated across the country. But they were still far too many for the Freikorps to defeat everywhere at once.

And in a way, Bell knew, it didn’t really matter which group of extremists was on top. The terrorists on both sides, even though they outgunned the government, were still a small minority of the population, and democracy still had public opinion on its side. Some of the extremist officers were ideological and others opportunistic, but their fighting men just wanted bread. German democracy could recover if it were put on life support. But Britain needed to act quickly.

The day after the hottest part of the Berlin battles died down, Bell talked to the liberal Germans. Was it because he had an intuition that with the best troops of Berlin’s leftists defeated by the nationalists, the liberals would be next on the extremists’ hit list?

His next interviews were with a group of centrist liberals, far from extreme leftists, who would soon find themselves on the Nazis’ enemy list. Among them were Dr. Elise Richter, a Jew who was the first female professor in Austria (she would die in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943); Walther Rathenau, a powerful industrialist as the head of AEG, a “man with the tone of a prophet,” as Haffner put it, and the only politician able to rival Hitler for popular influence in the 1920s (he was assassinated in 1922 by right-wing extremists while serving as foreign minister); and Carl Bosch, the future anti-Nazi and Nobel Prize–winning chemist who headed IG Farben (the huge chemical company later appropriated by the führer to produce the poison gas used to murder millions of Jews and other people).

Labour troubles showed no sign of abating. Industry was paralyzed. And the most radical members of the left advocated a policy of blocking Allied food shipments to cause starvation. It seemed strange to inflict such violence on their own people, but it was a means to an end. They thought this would hasten the collapse of capitalism and lead to a dictatorship of the workers. Those in charge weren’t actually interested in the workers as human individuals. They were just looking for the surest way to be in control of everything themselves.

For German industry, strikes and a shortage of materials and exports were bad enough. Still worse was the government’s decree that companies needed to hire workers back to their pre-war positions, even though there was nothing for them to do. Rathenau told Bell that AEG had been paying 50 million marks in wages and salaries before the war. Now, in spring 1919, it was 177 million. Despite the morbid economy, AEG could only respond by drastically raising its prices, further contributing to the nation’s suffocating inflation.

And there was another root of inflation, as Bell warned: “There are all sorts of temporary authorities self-constituted locally in November that are spending money like water. 35 billion in paper money is now in circulation beside municipal issues in smaller denominations. The bankers assure me there is no official scheme yet for reform of this currency.”

And yet the reality remained invisible to the British. Germany’s official statistics showed only minor inflation. It was an illusion. Official price controls did not stand for street-level prices. In fact, the controls pushed more goods to the black market, beyond the realm of taxation.

Still, Bell dug up a nugget of hope: the titans of German industry agreed with him that the financial rescue plan he’d proposed to Borden and Britain in December 1918 would still work. If the Allies were able to arrange raw materials and food, the industrialists could offer good jobs, which would defeat the extremists by starving them of recruits. Even better, it would save democracy, give the country the ability to contribute to the world economy, and eventually make possible the reparations payments.

Bell arrived at his hotel on Wednesday, March 12, to find a telegraph from MI6. It masqueraded as an innocent note from his editor: “would like see you soon as possible believe we shall be able arrange desired interview but trust you will be able return to your post.”

He was needed at HQ in London.

Agent A12 had entered Germany in late February, dodged bullets, evaded executioners, and fooled assassins. He left the country three weeks later with a brilliant map of the turgid situation. It was as good in the realm of intel as Einstein’s theories were in the realm of physics. Bell knew the peaceful solution was elegantly simple: to save liberal democracy, Germany just needed food for workers to eat and raw materials for German industry to work on. It would mean peace and prosperity for Europe.

Bell was repeating a classical philosophical observation updated for a modern context. Business precedes politics, as Socrates put it in Book 2 of Plato’s Republic.

Bell worked until four in the morning on his reports and packing. He slept a few hours before boarding his train to Holland. The ride was miserable—dirty, stinky, and crowded. He was used to it. When he crossed the border and switched to a Dutch train, the change came as a shock. The food in the dining car, hardly the best Holland offered, was much better, and a lot cheaper, than in the best Berlin restaurants.

A12 suddenly saw, as Einstein put it, the “relative motion of things with respect to one another.”

Chapter 8

Loyalty to Loyalty

Loyalty to loyalty involves . . . fair play in sport, chivalrous respect for the adversary in war.

—JOSIAH ROYCE, THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY

Winthrop Bell received a telegram telling him to stay in Holland for further instructions. He was disappointed to wait. His loyalty commanded him to act.

But his reports circulated at the top level of British government, and his bosses wisely gave him time to rest before his next crucial mission. Soon the world’s democratic leaders, gathered in Paris to decide the peace treaty, would discuss A12’s intel.

He slept much of Sunday, March 16, not realizing until then how exhausted he was. On Tuesday, he worked on his “big report” and received his sailing orders for London. Two days later, he was back in England, where he suffered a renewed bout of bronchitis. The air was dreadful in the capital city, as usual.

On March 22, he finished his big report and learned that MI6 was sending him to Paris to deliver it, in person, to the leaders of the British Empire. It was at a crucial moment, as the Versailles negotiations were badly behind schedule. Democratic leaders dithered because it seemed like they had all the time they wanted to bask in their victory. Now A12 arrived with a cataclysmic portrait to stun them back to reality.

Germany’s extremist militias now numbered at least two hundred thousand soldiers. “Sinister elements,” Bell reported, schemed in their midst. The forces were too large for the undersupplied and depressed German military, which was dwindling to a mere hundred thousand troops, to fight.

In central Paris, Bell walked through a city delirious with joy, past flappers wearing the latest boy bobs and hats tightly fashioned with narrow brims. Colourful blooms adorned public parks, flower shops, and window boxes. A reporter for the Westminster Gazette described the scene: “Luxury and excitement are already luring into wild excesses of extravagances a society which is suffering from the reaction of the war.”¹ Only a “dowdy” woman went out to a restaurant without a dress that showed her nude back to the waist. And “the whole city reeks of essences.” The Gazette did not mean phenomenological essences, but garish scents: “Perfumers must be rubbing their hands.” It was a major contrast to staid London, so fully confident in the old ways that it had no desire to change them.

The centre of Bell’s working life in Paris was British diplomatic headquarters spread out over the Astoria and Majestic hotels, near the Arc de Triomphe. As he got closer to the action, the mood grew more serious. Men arrived by car with sombre faces. They knew that however they redrew the political world, people would die in the wars to follow.

Bell mounted the curb and saw officers from Scotland Yard guarding both hotels. It was as hard to enter, a reporter wrote, as “an Englishman’s castle.”² Even the hotel employees were British, to keep out the spies. Bell held the requisite passes and entered without a problem.

Pre-war, a German guidebook described the Astoria and Majestic as “hotels of the highest class.” The kaiser had planned to celebrate his triumphant march into Paris in 1914 at the Astoria. He would not have wanted to do so in 1917, when the hotel served as a military hospital, with doctors performing amputations and saluting dying soldiers on their way to the afterlife. But in March 1919, the wounded and dead were gone, and the Astoria had been cleaned and disinfected. Now well-dressed statesmen gathered around maps laid out on tables, amputating and sewing together nations and empires.

Meanwhile, the Majestic still looked nice, but its standards had fallen. In February, high British officials wore heavy overcoats in their offices and still shivered. The French could have easily arranged heat, but they made sure coal arrived slowly. It was a theatrical touch, wordlessly suggesting to the British delegation that all of France was suffering and Germany needed to pay.

The British warmed themselves on alcohol and dined together in an immense dining hall. There they were as loud as they wanted because they knew enemy spies could not make it past the boys from Scotland Yard.

Robert Borden and Winston Churchill had been warning since December about the grave consequences of dithering. David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, and Georges Clemenceau blew them off. The world’s three most powerful leaders enjoyed the politics of the moment and basked in their great victory. Now MI6 was sending Bell to end the party, with news that Germany’s political situation had turned deadly.

The warning Bell gave in Paris on March 23 was electrifying. The next day, Lloyd George threw his weight behind a proposal to speed up the work by slimming the Council of Ten to the Council of Four: Britain, France, Italy, and the US. (Later, the council would be reduced to the Big Three, given Italy’s marginal status.) The bloodless coup happened at once.

At the same time, the British prime minister pivoted away from a punishing view of reparations towards a merciful justice. His new idea, inspired by Bell (even if it did not go quite as far as Bell would have liked), was that the Allies should balance what Germany owed with its ability to pay. Bell, however, was making an even more drastic argument. He knew the good Germans who had an unstable hand on the government desperately needed material and financial help just to survive, and they needed it immediately. Otherwise, the economy would collapse, the government would fall, the terrorists would take over, and the world would be primed for the next great war.

Bell’s advisor Josiah Royce had pioneered ethical game theory at Harvard.³ There, he argued for a new mode of playing competitive political games. In the old militarism, it seemed that war was a zerosum game, where one side’s gain was the other’s loss. Bell knew that it was actually a negative-sum game, where both sides lost. Royce wrote of the “dangerous dyad” of a resentful defeated nation, yearning for revenge, living next to the temporarily comfortable victor.⁴ In the long run, it worked out well for neither of them. The winning strategy was mutually profitable trade, in the spirit of chivalry. Royce called the positive-sum game “loyalty to loyalty.”⁵ Now Bell pitched the winning game to Lloyd George.

Bell knew that the Allies still had a bit of time to save the situation. Despite everything, German democracy remained enamoured of British democracy, which offered the world’s oldest model. It was Germany’s vanquished militarists, not its democrats, who hated the British. Yet for Britain, this truth was hidden behind a veil of illusion.

On March 26, two days after the first meeting of the Council of Four, Bell walked through a rude wind to one of the most prestigious addresses in Paris: 23 Rue Nitot, opposite President Wilson’s house. He enjoyed a beautiful view of the Eiffel Tower along the way. It was time for an important lunch with Lloyd George, the co-star of Versailles, who was jockeying with Wilson to be the most powerful man in the world.

Bell walked in from the cold through a hive of activity, past “translators, interpreters, stenographers, typists, messengers, motor cars and a security service that was efficient without being too obtrusive.”⁶ He entered an inner chamber and saw the prime minister, a wily Welsh politician with a bushy moustache, sitting next to his closest advisors. Lloyd George had one eyebrow perpetually raised, half amused, half skeptical. It let him keep sight of any opponents. He was ready to eviscerate them with his devastating wit.

Lloyd George greeted Bell with his twinkling eyes and ironical smile. Lunch was served. The significant business at Versailles happened over meals like this one. The prime minister was, as the historian Daniel Larsen writes, the first intelligence prime minister, even as he sometimes subsumed intelligence to political considerations.⁷ Sitting next to Lloyd George were two serious men, Lord Robert Cecil (a principal architect of the war during the fighting and now a principal architect of the League of Nations) and Sir Maurice Hankey (secretary of the War Cabinet and soon secretary to the Council of Four).

The food at Rue Nitot was exquisite, but Bell ignored his plate while he launched into details. First the good news: he found intelligence work to be surprisingly easy. Highly placed sources readily shared their hearts and sensitive political and military details. When he had cautioned them about the danger of revealing so much, they responded: “The sooner the Allies know all there is to know, the better. We are at the point where it is no use to try and cover our nakedness any longer. If the Allies rely for information on their secret service agents, we wish these men would come to our industrial directors, our Government departments, our General Staff. We would open our books and cupboards to them.”

Bell spoke calmly and deliberately, although the facts were uncomfortable. Even though the food part of the blockade had just ended, the economic blockade continued, paralyzing business life. And despite the lifting of the food blockade, the hunger situation hadn’t improved much because Germany didn’t have much money to pay for imports. The three hundred thousand tons of grain and seventy thousand tons of pork now flowing into the country each month only maintained paltry rations, without increasing them. This was a mistake, Bell urged, given that “the population has been seriously underfed for more than two years.” Owing to problems with the harvests, including a great dearth of fertilizers, Germans would by May be “literally starving. Far-reaching political disturbances would then be inevitable.”

Years-long hunger was, he argued, the main cause of the apathy of all classes, as well as “a high degree of nervous excitability.” Germany’s spirit, he continued, was broken: “The feeling is so evident in much of the life of the people that nothing matters any longer now.”

The democrats were facing a nationwide insurgency. “Considerable quantities of arms and ammunition are in the hands of the worst elements of the civil population,” he explained, “as a result of the disorder of the retreat, rapid demobilization and raiding of military magazines in November and later.” The government was too weak to do anything about it. There were people waiting in the wings to take over, but none of them were good.

Lawlessness and corruption were increasing. The industrial situation was “critical,” and the employment situation was “desperate.” Bell reported hundreds of thousands of unemployed men in Berlin alone. Their social security benefits were sufficient to buy meagre rations, but not much else. Meanwhile, Germany had a lot of jobs on offer, but few were willing to take them. Wages hardly outpaced government handouts, and the workers, without enough food, lacked energy to work. As a result, industry was “on the verge of collapse.”

Everyone in Germany was “reckoning with the probability or inevitability of Bolshevism.” Bell urged that regardless of anyone’s judgement about whether communism would ultimately succeed or fail, or whether it was a good or bad idea, it was still important to consider that most Germans thought it would soon take over the country.

Bell’s German sources told him that not even liberal peace terms would stop the insurgency threatening the country. Only actual foreign aid, he knew, could save the situation. Top German business leaders were already reckoning with the inevitable triumph of communism. Yet many officials in Britain thought it was merely a pretend threat, meant to frighten the Allies into concessions.

Such a ruse was, Bell said, unthinkable: “The people I saw were as varied as possible. I took care that, as far as possible, the chance of collusion to give me a pre-arranged impression was eliminated, and I reckoned with such an intention wherever there was ground for suspecting it.”

Everyone influential in Germany was speculating about the emerging possibility of a counter-revolution to overthrow the democratic November Revolution of 1918. Even the young people of the richer classes were seduced by the movement. One source told Bell that “the older boys read nothing but the Extremist press, and are, to his great anxiety, incapable of realizing what these theories would involve in practice.” The theories required that Germany would need to fight a new Great War.

The political situation was moving towards the worst possibilities. Germany’s Independent Socialists, who were close to the communists at an ideological level but had managed to remain closer to the non-violent centre, now endorsed world revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Such revolutionary internationalism, Bell continued, was obviously incompatible with good relations with England.

Germany’s angry masses were radicalizing and coming to realize that power rested with them. When he confronted followers of communism with obvious counterarguments (for instance, that it was foolish to socialize bankrupt businesses, and that the rail service, which had been socialized, was not doing any better than private industry), the men who professed revolution could not respond with reasons. They instead suggested he “go talk to Ernst Däumig!” Däumig was, as Bell put it, Germany’s Lenin. It was a cult of personality where followers abandoned reason.

Still worse, disorder provoked by the political left was inevitably strengthening the reactionary extremists on the right. “There are indications that the Nationalists hope to use disorder as a means of political campaign, by posing as the only party under which a return to ordered conditions is thinkable.”

The Independent Socialists were radicalizing the workers. The middle and upper classes were becoming radicalized by the nationalists. The poor alone seemed to cling, with embarrassing confidence, to the democratic experiment. It was embarrassing for Bell to hear it because he knew that the Western democratic victors didn’t seem to care if it succeeded. They only wanted communism to fail. Germany’s democratic leaders knew more than their supporters, and they were falling into despair. Britain’s friends in Germany were now “keenly disappointed” by London’s attitude. “They say: ‘If you had gone ahead and annihilated Germany in November it would have been an awful but open procedure. To do it by a process of slow attrition and prolonged suffering under the guise of an Armistice and a Peace conference is revolting.’”

Bell’s sources were convinced that Bolshevism would one day burst forth and overwhelm the Continent. That meant “England is directly in danger.” If the militants took over Germany, they would demand war on Britain. It was still twenty-one years before the National Socialists’ 1940 Blitz on Britain, but the intention was already clear.

Was there any way out? The only hope involved “strengthening the position of the present government. A strong pronouncement of the Allies, which would show the German people that they had much to lose by the acceptance of Bolshevism, and which would assure them that with the present Government the Allies are willing to enter into relations and to conclude a peace tolerable to Germany, is literally the only chance of saving the situation. Such a pronouncement must be made within the next few days if it is to be effective.”

It was the “sincere belief of the most reliable people,” Bell concluded, that “only something which would strengthen the popular influence of the democratic and majority-Socialist parties and National Assembly can avert disaster.”

Mere words would not be enough, but words of support for German democracy would buy Britain time for action. “It is no longer a question of what anyone desires or thinks we ought to get from Germany,” Bell said, “but of a last practical possibility of coming to an understanding with the moderate and responsible element there to face a common danger.”

It is one of the essential jobs of the intelligence business to warn against threats to the homeland. Bell had discovered a serious threat. MI6 had arranged the interview he needed to spread the word, with the British prime minister himself. A12 gave Lloyd George his first chance to conceive, on behalf of Britain, the Second World War, and how to avoid it.

Regarding Germany’s capacity for paying reparations, the official British representatives, Lord Sumner and Walter Cunliffe, had suggested the staggering sum of £24 billion. The economist John Maynard Keynes has been lauded for suggesting a moderate payment, amounting to £2 billion to £3 billion. But Bell out-Keynesed Keynes and insisted that expecting any immediate payment was absurd. The country desperately needed help just to survive.

Were Bell’s words effective? That day, Lloyd George attended the Council of Four. It is impossible to know the precise effect of Bell’s words on his psychology, but his wheels were suddenly reversed, and major changes were in the works. In contrast to his 1918 campaign promise that the Huns would pay until they squeaked, the prime minister began working to reduce expectations. On March 25, he declared that reparations demands “must be a settlement which will contain in itself no provocations for future wars, and which will constitute an alternative to Bolshevism.”⁸ It was Bell’s argument, and it was a different emphasis from the way the prime minister had recently talked.

Simultaneously, the British propaganda machine began its work of moderating public expectations. The Daily News of London declared the new economic reality: there was “not the remotest” chance for an enormous indemnity payment from Germany.⁹

Bell dined that evening with Robert Borden at the Majestic. The hotel was a “very lively place,” as Maurice Hankey put it, where “all the most beautiful and well-dressed society ladies appear to have been brought over by the various departments. I do not know how they do their work, but in the evening, they dance and sing and play bridge.”¹⁰ Bell finally found the real London party scene. It was in Paris.

After dinner, Bell walked alone along the Champs-Élysées and under the Arc de Triomphe. It was a rare triumph for a secret agent to lunch with one prime minister and dine with another, all in the same day.

On Friday, March 28, MI6 called Bell back to London. Three days later, his diary records meetings with Colonel William Twiss, head of MI3, military intelligence’s geography division, and “Barty,” likely Colonel William Bartholomew, another key military intel figure. Bell was tasked with his next critical mission: explaining to Parliament what was going on. A12 had already convinced many of Britain’s top elected, civil service, and military leaders of what was needed to save Germany. But Parliament held the power of the purse.

Bell’s “big report” would be sent to Parliament and the War Cabinet on April 10 by Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and Air. Bell wrote incognito as usual, under the byline “British Officer.”¹¹ His warning, issued as the lead article in a command paper, took an urgent tone. If Britain did not act decisively by early April, he wrote, Germany could effectively be in the hands of the extremist socialists within a month. And if not them, the right-wing reactionaries would be in charge. Yet for Londoners, appearances still deceived. It seemed like the democratic German government was firmly in charge. Was it not the case?

No, Bell urged, and far from it. Many Berlin militias had been on the sidelines of the March fighting, watching to see who would win. And they were only a small part of the mercenary strength across the country. German democracy was on its last legs, and the Soviets were at their strongest point yet. A desperate race for supremacy between the leftists and the Freikorps was on.

While the other reports of the military officers in the command paper saw the danger from the left, only Bell’s saw the backlash appearing from the right. The fight between the right and left for supremacy would be settled, A12 predicted, by April 1919. It was not clear which side would win, but it was clear democracy would lose without foreign help.

Bell was bearing unwelcome news, but to the credit of the British Empire, leaders kept reading his reports and acting on them. Borden soon handed another of them to Lloyd George at Rue Nitot on April 21, after Bell had returned to Germany. It was more bad news. The economic situation was graver. The German government was weaker. And the terrorists were growing stronger.

The moment to act to defeat the growing evil in Germany was now, but the chance was slipping. Inspired by Bell’s argument, top British leaders were nearly ready to send aid, but they needed help. They knew they couldn’t do it alone because they were financially exhausted from war expenditures. But would France and the US agree to help Germany? Bell had good arguments, but he was not, after all, their secret agent. And public opinion in the Allied world was still bitter about Germany’s aggression during the war.

Chapter 9

Nazis in Eden

I am in a feverish and distracted land.

—WINTHROP BELL TO MI6 AND REUTERS, APRIL 17, 1919

On April 8, agent A12 travelled once again into Germany from the Netherlands. After a pleasant stay among friends in Göttingen, he was into “distressing” Berlin on April 13 on a train that told a “dumb tale of dilapidation.” Its windows were broken and cushions missing. Anything that could be stolen was gone.

On the twenty-fifth, he met Prince Lichnowsky, the only German diplomat who had warned, in 1914, against provoking the war. He was a dignified man of unusual courage and foresight. Now the prince stood up from his table and began anxiously pacing the room, exclaiming: “The Peace Conference must not suffer a shipwreck! Too much depends on it for the whole world. Allied statesmen must surely realize the limits of possibility for us.”

On the train to Berlin, Bell had sat next to a veteran, lame from a war wound, whose eyes were “raised reverently” to a cardboard box on the luggage rack above his head. He told Bell it held twenty eggs at 1.60 marks each. It was an absurdly high price when, pre-war, the same money would have bought eight dozen eggs. But the man considered himself lucky. His wife, six months after giving birth, still had not recovered from lack of nourishment.

As the train rattled into Berlin in darkness, their conversation turned towards peace. This ordinary man wanted a return to normalcy. Bell was depressed by the thought of how the British papers continued to heap abuse on the supposedly brutish, war-mongering “Huns.”

Through the train windows, Bell saw detachments of troops throughout the city and armoured cars on Wilhelmstraße. The chances of a leftist revolution in Berlin had, for the moment, vanished. Yet Germany was just months away from economic collapse, and it was impossible for even his best-placed sources to know what was to come after that.

His next report to the newspapers was prophetic in its call to moral responsibility. He lambasted anti-German newspaper jingoism as a danger to the world. It had taken thousands of years to build an international cosmopolitan culture, and now the mass media threatened to tear it down in an instant.

He took the subway to meet a source, a German officer. On his way up the stairs, he saw a piteously disfigured ex-soldier begging for coins. Bell dropped some money into his hat and continued walking with a “sense of depression and vague anger.”

At their prearranged meeting place, he found his contact, who was wearing a fine-looking coat. Bell complimented him, but the officer sadly smiled. “It is about half paper-fiber,” he said. It would melt away in rain. It was typical.

Bell then headed to Charlottenburg, one of Berlin’s wealthiest districts, to meet another source at his apartment. He found the outer door of the building locked and rang a bell to gain entrance. A sharp-faced concierge opened the door a crack, sized him up, and demanded to know his purpose. Bell didn’t write down who the source was, which might indicate it involved dangerous information at a time when leftists who had been involved in the March fighting were hunted men. He still didn’t have access to encrypted communications. When Bell left after his interview, the concierge scrutinized him again to make sure he wasn’t taking anything. It wasn’t irrational paranoia. A thief had recently stolen a carpet from the hallway.

At one in the morning, Bell headed back to his hotel through a shabby, dangerous city. Crowds of men in military uniforms stood on street corners, hawking merchandise stolen from the officers’ mess. He passed groups putting up political posters featuring “a monstrous gorilla, its jaw dripping blood, a torch in its hand.” The great ape stood for the Bolsheviks. Later in that summer of 1919, after the Nazis secretly made peace with the Russian communists, the posters made monsters of the Jews.

Bell next headed to Göttingen to work on his agricultural intel report. It would be a working vacation. He met with old friends, including his well-placed intel sources Runge and Courant. Surprisingly, Bell found the nightlife in Göttingen more vibrant than in bigcity Berlin. The electric lights worked, and the food was better, too, because of the proximity to farmland.

But soon he had to leave both his friends and the relative comforts to return to the gritty misery of Berlin. What little industry remained was paralyzed by strikes. Although the strikes had officially ended a few days earlier, workers had plundered factories “literally by basketfuls,”¹ which meant they could hardly get back to production.

Things were getting worse even as the street vendors of the newest propaganda hawked glorious utopias. Their papers promised a golden age with the right panacea or scapegoat. The illusion was that Germany could do something to save itself, but Bell knew that a real solution “can only come if at all from Paris.”

A small piece of good news was that Bell finally enjoyed reliable means of sending secret messages out of the country. The British Military Mission had set up headquarters in Berlin. And their hangout was the luxurious Hotel Esplanade at Potsdamer Platz, a stone’s throw from Bell’s hotel.

With the end of the food blockade, luxury returned to Berlin, albeit only in the black market. As Bell reported: “There is a certain elegant café in Berlin—I won’t mention the name for I want to go there again, and there is no knowing what inquisitive eyes may see this telegraph before it crosses the frontier. You can get ‘Ersatz’ coffee there for 60 pfennigs. But if you take a table a bit apart from other guests, look the waiter straight in the eye and pay 2.50 Marks you can get a cup of the most delicious genuine coffee that an epicure could desire.”

With the right code phrase and seventeen marks, a reporter receiving his salary in British pounds could buy a decent lunch. But where did that leave an employed Berliner, living on a typical salary of twenty marks a day, with a family to support? It was like asking today’s skilled worker to pay $200 for lunch out of $250 in daily wages. Bell’s appetite was also spoiled by knowing that his fellow patrons were typically people who illicitly enriched themselves during the war at the cost of others’ suffering. Their ostentatious spending deepened the smouldering outrage among the mass of German people.

Bell met Captain Thornely Gibson at the Esplanade on the sixteenth for “important announcements!” (“wichtige Mitteilungen!”). The exclamation point in Bell’s diary meant plans for war. Captain Gibson was one of the twelve British intelligence officers sent to Germany to counter Marxism, but he’d quickly figured out that leftist political theory was only one of the country’s innumerable problems. Now he explained to Bell that the Allies were putting the finishing touches on the scheduled invasion of Germany if the country refused to accept the forthcoming peace terms. The two men needed to figure out how to stop the Great War from restarting.

The public didn’t yet know what the peace terms would look like, but Bell knew how the document was developing. It was worse than the most pessimistic Germans were imagining. The chances their leaders would refuse to sign once they learned the details were high. It would mean war.

Bell redoubled his efforts on two fronts. First, he tried to persuade the Allies to soften their demands, to encourage Deutschland to sign. Second, he needed to make the Germans, who hadn’t had a chance to read about their country’s military atrocities during the war, understand why the Allies were so angry with them. Their former enemies had not forgiven the war crimes, even after innocent democracy took over.

Bell knew that “if the peace terms show Germans the possibility of steady work and food under the maintenance of an ordered government many might be less ready to take a leap into the dark of Bolshevism or nationalistic reaction. It’s our only chance of preventing this condition from developing into civil war and a chaos of industrial misery. How we could derive any advantage from the conflagration is hard to see.” The captain agreed.

This time, it would be Gibson heading to Paris to brief Lloyd George, while Bell worked his diplomatic magic to convince Berlin to sign. Bell and Gibson, two intelligence officers with impressive access to national leaders, carried the fate of the world on their shoulders. If they could convince Britain to act, and Britain in turn could convince other nations to help, the two men would soon have hundreds of millions of fellow workers to carry the weight.

Bell’s source Carl Melchior, Germany’s financial expert on the Versailles negotiating team, was committed to achieving peace. A12 advised London that if the Allies strengthened Melchior’s hand with a few well-placed concessions, it would weaken the leader of Berlin’s team, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, who wanted to refuse the treaty. Melchior wasn’t thrilled about a heavy reparations burden, but he hoped that if his government signed, then Western democracies would eventually realize their demands were impossible and reduce them in the future.

On the British side, Bell proposed further easing the pressure on Germany by lifting the blockade on raw materials and granting the country financial credits so its business life could start moving again. It was his plan from back in December, but a growing number of allies in both Britain and Germany were now willing to help with the rescue.

On Wednesday, April 23, Hankey brought Gibson into a meeting with Lloyd George in Paris. The prime minister was quickly convinced by the Berlin dispatch. He soon pitched a plan to the Council of Four to lift the blockade on raw materials and raise financial credits for Germany. He even passed along a note from John Maynard Keynes on how the financing could be done. Without the concessions, Lloyd George warned, “Melchior would not be able to make peace.”² The idea to use financial stimulus to prevent economic depression, while typically credited to Keynes, apparently was Bell’s first, and was transmitted to Keynes as an assignment.

The Americans were sympathetic to Lloyd George’s proposal, and they distributed the Bell-Gibson-Lloyd George-Keynes plan to their forty agents on the Continent.³ With Britain and the US now nearly on board, it was the last easy chance for democracy to kill off Germany’s racist militarists before they became powerful. Only France needed to sign on.

Instead, the French vetoed the proposal. Clemenceau replied to Lloyd George’s entreaty: “The Germans are about to arrive for the purpose of signing peace, and we must not appear to be weakening.”⁴

And that was that. None of the Big Three (France, the US, and Britain) could push through anything on their own, but each owned a de facto veto that could sink anyone else’s plan. Technically, the Americans, who had the funds, could go ahead with granting loans to Germany without French approval. But with the blockade on raw materials staying in place, it would mean they’d never get the money back.

France had the upper hand in negotiations, in large part because the talks happened there, which gave their spies home-field advantage. A month earlier, Bell had quoted a source, a German professor, who saw what France would lose by its seeming victory in dictating crushing terms of peace. “Who would envy France the triumph of her victory? Germany, so recently a cultivated garden, sinking into a poisonous swamp, whose pestilential breath threatens to suffocate Europe.”⁵ As France would soon learn in the next war, there was no profit in living next to such a dangerous neighbour.

The British retaliated against the French with a veto of their own. When the French persisted in demanding enormous reparations as part of the treaty, Lloyd George refused to accede. Since the sides could not agree on an amount, they left the question for the future. It is not clear, however, that Lloyd George’s veto helped the Germans. As Bell warned, their economy could not restart until the terms of reparations were known. Until then, there could be no workable taxation schemes or international loans.

Bell headed back to London to strategize at headquarters with C in between visits to Lord George Curzon (slated to become foreign secretary), Colonel Twiss from military intelligence, and other decision makers. Bell’s formidable new task was to convince Britain that it needed to lead the rescue, even without French help, to save humanity from economic devastation and the next world war.

On Saturday, May 31, Bell realized he was being followed. He apparently picked up the tail at Victoria station just after 3 p.m. MI6 had trained him to notice if a spy was on his case. Bell crossed the street several times and watched as his tail did the same; when he sped up or slowed down, the man did likewise. MI6 had also trained him in how to shake off a pursuer. But first he wanted a visual description. He got it.

Was it a German, a Soviet, or an agent of France’s Deuxième Bureau following him? Later at headquarters, he looked through MI6’s extensive photo library of foreign agents. None was a match.

BACK IN GERMANY several days later, Bell continued to collect sources. An esteemed government minister showed up to his hotel late in the evening, asking for cigarettes. It sounded like something that would happen at a college dormitory, but that was the state of Germany now. It gave Bell a brainstorm. He made a stop at the British Military Mission to arrange “groceries” for his sources. Offering small gifts like food or tobacco, he realized, was the surest way of encouraging talk. Even well-off people accepted little presents, perhaps a few potatoes or a ball of yarn, with effusive gratitude. Before the war, Bell explained, they would have been seen as jokes or insults.

Did Bell pay some of his sources? Not in any regular way, because he gained his best information through friendship and interviews. There are a few payments in his ledger, though, like a thousand marks to Dr. Courant, funds to Herr Josten from the Wolff Telegraphic Bureau, and field hockey sticks to Kurt Hahn (probably to start a British-style sports team at Salem School). The Wolff Telegraphic Bureau, the German equivalent to Reuters, showed him dispatches even when strikes prevented newspapers from publishing. Hahn introduced him to the most powerful liberal politicians in Germany. And Courant gave him the unvarnished inside scoop on what the Social Democrats were thinking as they struggled for survival. Small, subtle gifts no doubt helped to inspire talking.

Bell also began to meet with Rudolf Breitscheid, who had been a member of Germany’s first democratic government and was now an influential newspaperman. He was a key player in the machinations of the Independent Socialists (later he was an opponent of the Nazis, who murdered him at Buchenwald in 1944). During one evening salon at Breitscheid’s place, Bell met America’s first international female spy, Marguerite Harrison, along with the German spymaster Baron von Schenck. It was a romantic era for espionage. The masters of secrets got together to tell stories about recent espionage history, even when they were playing different sides of the deadly game.⁶

Baron von Schenck was a “paunchy, small-eyed spider waiting in the centre” of a “dark web of intrigue,” as the journalist Hugh Martin had described him during the war.⁷ The balding Schenck had a square face with eyes set far apart, and he imbibed his soup with “noisy signs of gusto,” while drinking glass after glass of expensive Fleurs de la Reine wine “after smelling it daintily.” The MI6 officer Compton Mackenzie gave another unflattering portrait. The baron, he said, had “a big nose,” “fleshy neck,” and “pork-like” skin texture.⁸ Yet the man was also suave. Martin implied that the baron had carried on an illicit affair with the Prussian-born Queen Sophia of Greece and engaged in other indiscretions that “could not be talked about in polite society.”

Despite the ridicule in Britain, Schenck commanded fear. With a word, he could have ordered a man killed in Greece during the war, and likely he could have done the same afterwards in Germany. The German legation in Greece hated him, but they were also “all afraid of him,” as one captain put it.⁹ In 1916, a journalist counted forty-two armed “waiters” standing guard at Baron von Schenck’s palatial home in Athens.¹⁰ Those were just the visible ones—more hid in the shadows. As head of Germany’s spy network in Greece during the war, Schenck had thousands of agents scattered throughout the Mediterranean.

The charming, deadly Schenck did not retire at war’s end. A12 would soon discover a world-threatening conspiracy with the baron at its centre.

IN MID-APRIL, BELL arranged the delivery of fifty German newspapers to Cologne, the headquarters of the Allied military occupation west of the Rhine. Then, as now, intelligence analysts learned a lot by carefully reading the news, in a branch of intelligence called OSINT (open-source intelligence). It was just one more job for Bell, who already was doing a lot of them. He did not treat his intelligence work as a nine-to-five job or a paycheque. It was a calling. He needed to take in the bewildering totality of the German situation and put it together in a single portrait.

The Westminster Gazette published Bell’s latest intel coup on Friday, April 25, under the headline “Germany’s Secrets.”¹¹ The article reported that Brockdorff-Rantzau was holding up the treaty. He insisted that his country was not solely to blame for starting the war and demanded that the Allies cut the “war guilt clause” before he would sign. But Bell’s Gazette story showed that Germany was, in fact, the guilty party.

His source was Karl Kautsky, the “well-known Independent Socialist,” who had just finished a survey of secret documents at Germany’s Foreign Office. The papers pointed to the country’s culpability in forcing the Great War. It was at a time in the summer of 1914 when the whole senseless slaughter could have been easily avoided if Germany’s government had wanted a diplomatic solution.

Why did the Germans begin the illegal and immoral war in 1914? It was simple: they thought they could win and seize foreign territory as their reward. Historical opinions have sometimes made the First World War seem like a muddle where everyone was to blame. Kautsky realized that the war really was Germany’s fault in both a legal and a moral sense. Its neighbours were only defending themselves against unjustified aggression.

Two days before his Gazette scoop, Bell met with Kautsky at a crowded café. An orchestra played inside while newsboys shouted the latest headlines on the street. The din made it difficult to eavesdrop. But Kautsky did not care if anyone overheard him. He loved the truth and wasn’t scared of bullies and liars. He animatedly told Herr Bell: “The government has refused me permission to publish these documents. I am very surprised by the government’s attitude. It will have a very bad effect in the Allied countries—perpetuating suspicion of Germany’s good faith by revealing that a revolutionary government is prepared to shield Germany’s old rulers.”

Not only was the government refusing Kautsky permission to publish his discoveries, but key documents had been removed and apparently destroyed. It pointed to a coverup of a crime. Bell’s sources on the German General Staff confirmed that incriminating papers were missing. They will be missing forever because the culprits burned them.

Yet the arson did not appear in Bell’s Reuters story. Britain’s Foreign Office decided it was for official eyes only. The truth would dangerously inflame the British public at a time when many were already calling for German blood.

Outside the café where Bell and Kautsky met, a shabbily dressed man hawked a paper about Germany’s war guilt, a sailor sold a broadsheet about the death of the German navy, and a shrill boy shouted lurid headlines about the French affairs of the ex-crown prince. The scene was a grotesque symptom of life in Germany, Bell wrote, exemplifying the “hysterical hopelessness of the people,” as they “set their hope on the arrival of a golden age through political upheaval.”

Meanwhile in Munich, a German army corporal realized the same thing, but from a quite different angle. Unlike A12, Corporal Adolf Hitler thought that a golden age through political upheaval was a very good idea. Eine sehr gute Idee.

AFTER THE BATTLE for Berlin in March 1919, the casual British newspaper reader could easily have concluded that Germany’s democracy had annihilated the revolutionary Soviets. Now, it seemed, the country’s democratic government could safely be handed its reparations bill.

Yet Bell knew democracy’s chances were worsening by the day. The Freikorps had slaughtered only the hot-headed faction of the Berlin Soviets. Other cells remained intact in Berlin and throughout the country. Their numbers continued to swell. The Soviets were carving a space for themselves by force of arms, as well as by controlling much of German labour. Educated people were also joining them. They saw the Soviet triumph as inevitable and wanted to avoid the fate of those who had stood in the way of the Russian Soviets and ended up tortured and killed.

Bell reported that the Soviet strength in Germany was frankly astounding: “I found the Berlin Soviet occupying as its headquarters the building of the Prussian House of Lords (Herrenhaus)!” It was a beautiful Italianate Renaissance palace that housed the upper house of Prussia’s legislative assembly. The Soviet takeover was akin to communists controlling the US Senate. The propagandistic image of the Soviets as a bunch of half-starved, dirty malcontents was far from the truth. Germany was falling inexorably into the Soviet vortex.

Something worse was coming. Rudolf Breitscheid, the Independent Socialist leader turned newspaperman, told Bell of negotiations between the Freikorps and a mysterious group advocating a government based on “pure socialism”—purified, that is, of democracy. The negotiators met at the Eden Hotel, the Freikorps headquarters in Berlin. The right-wing and the left-wing terrorists were evil before they met at Eden, as manifested in their cruel willingness to murder innocent people. Yet each had proven too weak to defeat the other in nationwide combat, much less to overcome German democracy. Unified, the terrorists would soon be stronger than liberal forces in the country. Next would be vengeance on the world.¹²

Bell asked a “friend with good connections for investigating the matter” (likely Captain Achim von Arnim, but perhaps Runge or Courant) to see if it was true. It was. The proto-Nazis had become the Nazis.¹³ Original sin had happened at Eden once again. The cosmic coincidence is of such magnitude that it’s natural to wonder about the metaphysical implications. But for the moment, A12 had pressing political questions to attend to, like learning the name of the leader of the negotiations. His investigation soon revealed it was none other than the small-eyed spider himself, Baron von Schenck.

Bell’s next MI6 report gave Western intelligence its first warning about the origins of the deadly new beast at the precise moment when nationalism, socialism, and antisemitism merged into a unified plot. It has often seemed that Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party invented the movement in early 1920, but Bell saw the moment when the dangerous movement actually began, a year earlier. When A12 discovered them, they still lacked a name and a leader. They were just a shared purpose, a common cause, a predatory loyalty. Their secrecy was by design: they did not want their enemies to know they existed, because they weren’t strong enough to wage world war—yet. A12 recognized the threat; his reports called them reactionaries, antisemites, and nationalists. Their opponents in the 1920s belittled the party by shortening the form of its German name, calling them, with disdain, "Nazis."

After Bell’s first warnings to British intelligence, but which didn’t appear in newspapers, the group seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the English press for several years. When Hitler’s Nazis were mentioned there circa 1922, they were lumped in with the “Fascists.” The term had the unfortunate effect of associating Hitler with the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, whose brutality was real enough, but very modest compared to Hitler’s.¹⁴

The term “Nazi” became common in English newspapers only around 1930. Many papers, like the June 1930 Yorkshire Evening Post, still used quotation marks around the name, as if Nazis were a curious and rare specimen. The Post reported that although there were fascist organizations in Austria, Hungary, and Germany, the German group was the weakest of the three.¹⁵ The Post was falling for a trick that Bell had seen through over a decade earlier: it benefited the Nazis for their enemies to underestimate their power.

Still, as the 1930 Post correctly noted, “It now seems as if ‘Nazis’ and Communists have come to an arrangement of mutual assistance.” It was the same alliance that Bell had spotted eleven years earlier, in 1919.

And Bell had already seen another fact that the Post and the mainstream British press missed: years later the third essential part of Hitler’s movement was its plan for race war. By late 1930, that news finally began to hit the mainstream. On September 13, for example, the Daily Herald finally reported on the third part of the “Nazi” essence: the party was “fiercely anti-Semitic.”¹⁶ Yet even then the Nazis seemed marginal, just one more curious feature of German political life. The few stories about them were buried in back pages and displayed no awareness that these extremists could actually one day seize hold of Germany and launch a new world war.

Bell knew that before Schenck’s spring 1919 matchmaking, the nationalists and the socialists were less like oil and water that could not mix and more like sodium and water that exploded when they touched. When they had been at each other’s throats, each weakened the other, and German democracy stayed in the driver’s seat. United, the terrorists outgunned the democrats. Yet they were still no match for the Allies, so they kept themselves secret.

Where would bankrupt Germany earn the money to pay for the lavish golden age promises of National Socialism? By “socializing,” seizing the property of Jews and other non-Aryan races. Still the German militarists kept pretending, in the presence of British officers, that their ultimate enemy was communism, not democracy, Jews, and other races. The anti-communist façade was meant to cause the British to miss the true purpose of Germany’s underground military preparations. All the Nazis had to do was convince Britain to make the same mistake twice. As General Denikin had recently showed during his slaughter of Jews in Ukraine, a massacre that was unwittingly funded by Britain, London’s hatred of Lenin meant backing virtually any army that promised to combat Russian communism.

Bell’s warning about the new Nazi–Soviet friendship was borne out. In the early 1920s, the German military defied Versailles restrictions by hiding weapons in communist Russia, beyond the scope of weapons inspectors. And in the 1930s, as the historian Timothy Snyder writes, “Nazi speeches were reprinted in the Soviet press and Nazi officers admired Soviet efficiency in mass deportations.”¹⁷

The Nazis and the Soviets did not love each other, but they shared a love of brutal methods and a common enemy in liberal democracy. Differences separated them, to be certain. Communist theory insisted workers run the world, while wealthy industrialists and landowners funded the Nazis. But with a small adjustment of thinking, it was possible to reconcile the movements. Were not soldiers, after all, workers? As the socialist agitator William Lauer proclaimed, General Ludendorff, early leader of the Nazis, was the “General of the Workers.”¹⁸

Ludendorff’s racist nationalism during the First World War probably intended the racial supremacy of Germany over only its regional rivals. Now he and his henchmen dreamed of a world run by workers. Which workers? It would be the dictatorship of a very particular kind of proletariat: the racist, genocidal faction of the German military.

Bell soon learned their first targets would be the Jews, and the German democracy that protected them.

Chapter 10

The Paris Editor

The situation may prove fatal.

—WINTHROP BELL TO MI6, 1919

In late April, MI6 sent Bell to German Silesia, at Poland’s southwest border. His job was to prevent the outbreak of war. The newspapers said the region was already a violent conflict zone between Polish and German troops. It was just the place A12 needed to be. Berlin had been rather quiet lately.

Hundreds of thousands of German and Polish troops, regulars and irregulars, readied their weapons, prepared to fight to the death over rich industrial land controlled for seven centuries by Germany, but by Poland before that. Whose was it now? It was a question of history, ethnicity, politics, and firepower.

Bell soon informed HQ of preparations on the German side: “It is reported that a considerable quantity of captured Russian war material is stored at Graudenz and Konigsberg, consisting of 400,000 rifles, small arms ammunition, shells, a number of lorries, and several hundred guns.”

Silesia lay on the eastern reaches of Germany’s crumbling empire, covering eleven thousand square kilometres of its richest territory. The Versailles drafters on the Commission on Polish Affairs now urged that the treaty should deliver the territory to the newly re-established Polish state. If that happened, the decision would send hundreds of thousands of Germans, valuable industry, and rich mineral deposits to Germany’s ancient enemies.

Bell knew from his sources that the plan, if implemented, would mean full-scale war. Many German racists detested the Poles. But even for moderate Germans, Silesia was a precious asset worth defending. Its loss would be yet another grievous economic wound to the country, even as the drafters of the peace treaty in Paris still imagined that Germany could pay generous war penalties.

Bell took his dinner at the Fürstenhof. He worked on a report through the night, finishing at 5 a.m., then slept two hours and woke up to prepare for his trip east. He had a lot of ethnological data to review. The draft treaty was set to transfer the territory because 75 percent of the Silesian population was ethnically Polish. But Rudolf Nadolny, a central figure in Germany’s foreign affairs department, told Bell that if he asked the locals, he would find that their political wishes were often different from their ethnicity. Bell had no objection to finding out for himself.

On Tuesday, April 29, he packed his bag in a rush and sprinted through the Charlottenburg train station, where he met his travelling companion to Breslau, the German Jewish philosopher Edith Stein. She was now a promising young politician, a leading member of the Breslau branch of the German Democratic Party.

The train from Berlin was full to bursting. Germany had handed many of its trains over to the Allies as part of the Armistice terms, leading to a desperate shortage of seats. Finally, Bell spotted two places, but the only way to get them was to leap in through the window directly from the platform. He hauled Stein up after him, in a scene made for romance. It seems she already had a bit of a crush on him beforehand. But Bell wasn’t interested in flirting, as there was work to be done. He needed information, and Stein knew a lot.

During the journey, Stein helped Bell understand the situation in the east, where she was from, and updated him on her cousin Richard Courant’s political activities with the Social Democrats. Courant, she told him, was combatting the tendency among the far left of the socialist movement to endorse violent communism.¹

As the decrepit train rattled eastward, Bell questioned Stein on her philosophical research. She had recently written the first book on empathy (Einfühlung),² opening a middle way between the isolated atomism of British liberalism on the one hand and the block universe of German idealism on the other. In empathy, Stein urged, we experience individuality, sociality, and their mutually transformative relation all at once. Bell translated the lesson to politics. Silesia, Poland, and Germany all needed respect. It would be challenging to honour everyone, but it was the only way to avoid war.

The next day, he boarded a train from Breslau, where Stein was staying, to Silesia. He expected to enter a war zone, given the newspaper reports, but he arrived to find the situation was calm but tense. It was not the last time the media got the story wrong.

Bell’s train hobbled into Kattowitz, an area of enormous industry, but quite unlike the concentrated, smoky-black industry in other parts of Europe. It was green. Carefully cultivated fields lay between mines and steelworks, and some of the biggest factories rested in forests. It was perhaps the first place in the world to profit from heavy industry without making it ugly.

But now that German industry was shattered, Silesia was a place of quiet desperation. Bell saw how “every day there is a pitiful assembly of half famished children outside the barracks of the local detachment of the frontier guards, waiting for any food remains.” Most schoolchildren were shirtless. Even parents with good salaries knew that the stores were empty.

He began conducting extensive interviews with the locals. Following his pattern in Berlin, he spoke to politicians, journalists, business owners, union leaders, military personnel, and people selected at random. Some back in London were concerned that a conspiracy might be trying to trick him into advising the Allies to make treaty concessions, but he explained that the miserable reality was so all-encompassing that such an illusion was impossible.

On the streets, he listened in on conversations that were going on before he arrived. He also visited shops with Polish names in the windows, chosen at random. The “proprietors practically all assured me they did not regard themselves as Poles nor desire annexation to Poland.” They were ethnically Polish, but most spoke only German, like their ancestors had done for centuries. They had no reason to lie to a man who identified himself as a British correspondent and was alone, without a German handler by his side.

His experience suggested that giving this region to Poland would be an enormous mistake. The lived reality on the ground “brings many a surprise to one whose previous knowledge was drawn from an ethnographical chart. The land has been an undisputed part of Germany for many centuries, with its industrial development due entirely to German capital and enterprise. It is questionable whether a doctrinaire application of Wilson’s 14 Points is here compatible with the principle of self-determination.” He advised that only a plebiscite—a series of local regional votes—would show the truth. This accorded with a lesson of phenomenology: the value of the first-person subjective perspective should not be subsumed to data sets, like ethnographical data. For phenomenology, data is valuable, but it requires personal purposes and sustained attention to exist.

A12 first heard the idea for a plebiscite from a Polish priest. Although Bell was a Protestant Methodist, not a Catholic, he was no bigot, and he knew a promising idea when he saw it. The answer to whether the various parts of Silesia would join with Poland or Germany should belong to the local people.

The delighted representatives of the German government took Bell out for dinner. He was working hard to strike a balance between conflicting forces to avoid war, and his grateful German hosts knew it. A12 had performed a rare diplomatic hat trick: three nations (Canada and the UK were the other two) bought him meals as honoraria for his intelligence.

While the fringe militants wanted war, local German and Polish leaders were trying to secure a peace acceptable to both sides. In Silesia, unlike Berlin, military and political authorities were still working together in harmony. Bell met over wine with reasonable men like Captain Rangen, a leader of the border guards, and Otto Hörsing, the Social Democratic state commissioner, who ruled Silesia justly but used an iron fist against terrorism. (Hörsing was later an opponent of the Nazis, who punished him for his defiance by cutting off his pension.)

Bell then met with the noble and wealthy Von Donnersmarck family, who owned a large stake in Silesian industry. The interview happened at their homestead, Neudeck Castle. Sitting on seventy thousand acres of land, it had been a favourite hunting lodge for Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last leader of the Second Reich. Bell’s conversation with the family solidified his belief that it would be a mistake to steal these factories from the Germans who had created them and knew how to run them. While rich Silesia might seem like a feather in the cap of the new Poland, it would come at the cost of disorder and war.

MI6 rushed Bell back to London for debriefing before he continued to Paris to meet the British drafters of the peace treaty. The Silesian question was next on their docket. A12’s information would, once again, be the best hope for preventing war.

Yet Silesia was not Bell’s only German problem. On April 12, another rainy day, the communists declared a Bavarian Soviet Republic in Germany’s southern state. Corporal Adolf Hitler represented the Munich Soviets in his first elected position. Hitler, who adored uniforms, surely wore a red armband like the rest of his comrades. Even as Germany’s future führer, he remained a devotee of a weaponized Marx, a strange irony given that Marx was ethnically Jewish.³

Soon after the Munich Soviet experiment began, it came under fire. The German government authorized the Freikorps to crush the communists, as they had in Berlin. They’d succeeded in their bloody task by early May. The militarists killed thousands, many as captives. Just as they had in Berlin, some Freikorps mercenaries fell into a berserker rage and massacred ordinary citizens.

Hitler was spared execution. Captain Karl Mayr, who later oversaw Hitler’s indoctrination into the German secret service, wrote that the corporal “was like a tired stray dog looking for a master.”⁴ The stray dog turned informant and gained his new master. The military rewarded him with a promotion to a unit that hunted members of the Red Republic. The traitor Hitler kept his paycheque while other leftist soldiers fell to Freikorps executioners’ bullets.

DEMOCRATIC GERMANS WERE falling into a dark depression. The “best-informed,” Bell reported, said that “the leaders of the Allies are struck with blindness. They must know by this time how matters stand here. But they fail to realize that they themselves and the entire European civilization are jeopardized.”

Meanwhile, British newspapers, particularly Lord Northcliffe’s Times, paranoically invented nefarious German schemes and demanded punishment. The Times told its readers of reports that German children were starving because of the blockade. So what? For the Times, Britain needed to “bring home to Germany the impotence to which it has degraded her, and for this purpose the blockade is our necessary instrument until she has signed the peace.”⁵

Before he was Alfred Lord Northcliffe, wealthy newspaper baron, Alfred’s surname was Harmsworth, appropriate for a man who found worth in causing harm. The nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described the function of the yellow press as tearing people down to make readers who had not accomplished anything feel superior. Harmsworth was an expert in the trade. It was, Bell warned, “the highest time for this attitude to be dropped.” Otherwise, “the situation may prove fatal.”

Bell saw the growing resentment of the German masses, who felt “that we British are murdering women and children by starvation.” The Times was incorrect in thinking that they would placidly accept their “impotence.” Some already advocated fiery revenge against “foreigners,” and the idea was gaining recruits. Popular histories that emphasize the Treaty of Versailles as the cause of Nazism neglect how racist radicalization was underway before the agreement came into effect.

Bell was back in Berlin in time for the presentation of the draft treaty to the Germans on the first Wednesday in May. He saw how drastically the country’s cultural life had changed. Before the First World War, Germany’s musical entertainment was romantic and pastoral—“freckled maidens played guitars in the woods,” as the Evening Mail put it.⁶ Now Berlin’s nightclubs featured mind-jarring jazz, convulsive dancing, cocaine, prostitutes, and electric light. Some of the electricity in the air owed to the thrill of making it past the street robbers alive, but the drunken return trip home had worse odds of survival.

Berlin had the makings of the best reckless party scene of all time. By February 1919, over sixty all-night spots catered to rollicking crowds. The nightclubs did brisk business selling bottles of champagne for 130 marks, more than most Berliners earned in a week. The Bystander described the scene: “Berlin sometimes sulks and pouts till nine in the evening, and then, in the sharp contrasting way first analysed by the philosopher Hegel, it goes into wild paroxysms of roaring, chuckling, cavorting, galloping, guzzling.”⁷

Bell didn’t see any philosophical wisdom in it. “I cannot better describe the dominant psychical note,” he wrote, “than by calling it a sort of mental slow-fever. One of its results is the desire for distraction at any cost. The anomalous outburst of dancing and reckless extravagance in other amusements is connected with this.”⁸

People were partying and spending wildly, not because they were rich and happy, but because they “go about in hopeless horror of something that is coming.” They drank and danced to forget their impending doom.

A day before the presentation of the draft treaty, Germans held out hope that a Wilsonian peace based on the Fourteen Points would prevail. They imagined that their country would join the League of Nations, reparations would be manageable, national borders would remain as they were, and they would be able to look forward to a prosperous democratic future. But the draft treaty was a series of hard slaps that jolted them from their happy dream. Germany would pay dearly in land and treasure, and stay ostracized from the community of nations.

Bell saw the despair in the eyes of his democratic German friends. Most were too stunned to protest the devastation the draft treaty had in store for them. On the surface, life seemed to go on as usual. People lacked energy to stop or change routines. “The orchestras play the same tunes in the restaurants. Men go to business as usual. But if one speaks to them, one finds they are paralyzed by the prospect of the peace terms.”

The British negotiators at Paris were also shocked when they saw the draft treaty, even as they helped author it. But as James Headlam-Morley of the Foreign Office recounted, the draft was pieced together from the result of committees working on single issues. Each thought it was in the right when it judged against Germany, without considering that all other committees were doing the same. Even though no one intended it, the whole amounted to utter devastation, not only for Germany but for the possibility of peace.

The draft dictated that Germany would lose 13 percent of its territory and 10 percent of its population, including the rich Saar Basin on the French border, as well as Posen, West Prussia, and Upper Silesia. At the same time, the Allies expected Germany to pay reparations, although a precise figure had not yet been arrived at. But Bell knew that Germany was functionally bankrupt even with all its territory in place and before reparations had begun.

Any German who put pen to parchment on an unrevised treaty would be signing the death warrant for the country’s democracy. Germany would become, Bell warned, the “perpetual pariah” of Europe.⁹ The Allies could hardly be comfortable living next to such a dangerous neighbour. Early in the Great War, Bell’s Harvard professor Josiah Royce had urged the coming need for a post-war triadic interpreter who understood both sides of the conflict and communicated between them. His student was now that interpreter, with life-or-death consequences. For A12, it meant more all-nighters, with a few hours’ sleep in between.

The best-informed Germans told Bell they were vibrating between accepting and rejecting the treaty. They also knew it made no difference which option they ultimately chose. Repeatedly, he heard, “I see no possibility of Germany living either way.” More than ever, the workmen were “demoralized and are filled with the idea of an easy time to be attained through revolution.”¹⁰

The government was on the edge of falling. But now a desperate saving idea appeared in the Prussian Assembly. The leftist Independent Socialist Adolf Hoffmann, whom Bell called a “mob-orator,” declared that the government should affix a worthless signature to the unfair treaty and then wait for a coming world revolution to nullify it. (Hitler later adopted the idea. When he seized control of Germany in 1933, the country stopped paying reparations.)

Bell realized the impossible situation: “Unless we are willing to make enormous concessions that we are unwilling to make to the present government it will probably mean an unstable regime as the brief prelude to utter collapse.”¹¹ The only way to stop it would be to revise the draft. He now turned into a top editor for the Versailles treaty, encouraging an idea later formulated by Hemingway: “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”

On May 9, Bell warned that the Soviet position had advanced from the fringes to the centre of German political life. Influential figures like Prince Max now advocated the idea. The centrists hadn’t suddenly turned into leftists, but now it seemed the only way to tame Bolshevism, before it conquered the country and repeated the Russian massacres, would be for leading centrists to throw in their lot with the Soviet movement and help control it within “certain limits,” as Bell put it. Meanwhile, the further-left socialists were speaking in violent terms about the “capitalistic and imperialistic governments.” It was not a positive sign, Bell warned, that this group was the only one ready to sign the treaty—because they predicted a war that would sweep aside the “imperialists” and make their signature worthless.

A week later, Bell finished his Russian report and dictated a letter to his assistant. It was almost certainly the one he sent to Maurice Hankey by the evening’s final post. Hankey, one of Lloyd George’s closest advisors, was typically one of only five men in the room when the Big Three met in Paris to dictate the terms of the peace. A12 wrote him, “I feel I must write to someone among the really decisive people in Paris,” to tell him that he was “genuinely perturbed” by the peace terms presented to Germany. They were “impossible.”

Britain, Bell warned, was attacking the illusion of a rich and prosperous Germany that needed punishment to reform its warlike attitude. That is what the decadent Berlin cabarets and restaurants full of black market delicacies communicated to visitors from abroad. But the “surface appearance is deceptive,” he wrote, and the draft terms, especially those referring to the size of immediate payments, “cannot be fulfilled.”

Germany could pay reparations only if it was “able to produce a surplus over and above what is necessary for a bare living.”¹² And “only if the population can see a prospect of food and endurable livelihood under the conditions imposed, can we count on internal peace and ordered production here.”

Germans who best understood their country’s financial situation, like the prominent international financier Dr. Paul von Schwabach, the Jewish Christian banker to the government who had been knighted by the former kaiser, told Bell: “The terms regarding compensations are never meant to be carried out. They are intended as the means of crushing Germany, decimating her population, and reducing her to the rank of an agrarian state. The Allies are thoroughly informed. They know with what trouble we gathered the means of payment for the relatively small quantities of food we have been allowed to import. Foreign securities are practically all called in. The gold we have left would be a drop in the bucket and would withdraw the last support from our currency. Under these conditions the demands for payments are grotesque, unless their purpose is to have a lever with which to crush the life out of the country altogether.” It was why both sides needed an interpreter: Germany misunderstood Britain, and Britain misunderstood Germany. Bell understood both.

Bell’s advice to Hankey was to restore Germany to the community of nations, feed the people, grant plebiscites to districts in Silesia, reduce the first reparations payments to a manageable level, and deliver financial credits to restore the country’s economic life. It was the political version of the business principle that a creditor shouldn’t kill an insolvent debtor. Instead, “if he believes him capable of recovering solvency, he finds him credit or capital to reorganize his business (perhaps under sharp control). In the end it is to the creditor’s own benefit.”

A CIGARETTE WAS a substitute for anything, including sleep. On Monday, May 19, a whole packet of Bell’s cigarettes was “lost,” stolen. It was not the only time. He bought more and got to work refuting accounts from Paris that Germany would refuse to sign the treaty. Bell’s sources informed him that the country’s leaders had in fact come to the sullen decision to sign. They didn’t want to, but they knew that if the Allies reinstituted the blockade, it would cause an epidemic of death, likely followed by an invasion.

But just as the leftists had earlier announced, signing the treaty was different from “accepting” it. The new German debate, Bell wrote, was between those who advocated a “worthless signature” and those who would refuse to sign.¹³ Meanwhile, the right-wing nationalists were “howling” about the bad faith of the Allies, and A12 warned that the “present situation is undoubtedly strengthening the nationalist reaction.” If the worst of the draft peace terms happened, there would be spontaneous outbursts of violence against Poles. That would be the push down a steep and slippery slope that could quickly become a new world war.

How could the situation be saved? For one, Bell knew that he needed help. One interpreter was not enough. He insisted that the leaders of the free world should talk to the Germans. Since the Armistice, the country had received the silent treatment while the Allies meandered to Paris and luxuriated over maps of the forthcoming new world. He chastised the victors as if they were petty schoolchildren: “I cannot see why the Allies should fear oral discussion with the German delegates.”

General Neill Malcolm, head of the Berlin Military Mission, advanced Bell’s case for diplomatic representation to General Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff. In turn, Sir Wilson sent the note to Lord Balfour. Britain started moving on the proposal. Once again, the process moved slowly, but it moved. (Finally, Lord Victor Kilmarnock, described by the New York Times as a man of “charm and tact,” became Britain’s first post-war chargé d’affaires in January 1920, just after Bell briefed him on the German situation.)¹⁴

Bell worked until 3 a.m. on a cool, rainy Monday morning, May 19, 1919. A few hours later, he was awakened by a knock from Rudolf Breitscheid, recently the Prussian interior minister. He wanted Bell to bring Britain in on a leftist coup.

Breitscheid was a serious independent thinker. He did not look used to smiling. He was currently a journalist but remained well connected to the communists, Independent Socialists, and Social Democrats. It gave him a range of connections virtually unparalleled in German political life. And now he posed urgent questions to Bell, showing that he knew the Canadian worked for Britain and not just Reuters.

Herr Bell, Breitscheid asked, “Are the Allies really anxious to see the peace conditions accepted by Germany, or would they welcome an excuse for non-ratification of the treaty in order to occupy parts of Germany, like the Ruhr district?”

“From what I heard from Paris,” Bell assured him, “the Allies do want to see the peace signed and ratified.”

Breitscheid nodded gratefully and lowered his voice. What he was about to tell Bell had to be communicated in the greatest confidence.¹⁵ “German troops are not unanimously ready to fight the Allies if the government refuses to sign the treaty. The troops make no secret of their indisposition to fight in such a hopeless case.”

Bell nodded. It confirmed what he knew.

Breitscheid went on, “In case the Independents secured the government by coup, or otherwise, it is quite possible that the troops would remain at least neutral.” Would the Allies be willing to let the coup succeed?

The problem was that the Soviet Councils, would-be governing bodies comprised of workers, needed to be included for the coup to work, and official Britain detested communism (for many reasons, including that the Reds had killed many of Britain’s White Russian allies, and that London feared Marxist plans to redistribute property in Great Britain and throughout the empire).

Bell looked at him skeptically. “But the Councils have had their power greatly reduced, and in certain parts of the country have practically ceased to exist?”

Breitscheid agreed. “The desire to reinstate the Councils is one of the principal reasons why the extremists would be willing to risk a coup if they thought they had any chance of its results being confirmed by the Allies. Immediate and radical socialization is the only possibility of raising the sums necessary to maintain reparations payments for even a few years. If this socialization were undertaken, the workmen would begin again really to work, instead of carrying on ‘passive sabotage’ as at present.”

Bell was not convinced. “The workmen expect a sort of heaven-upon-earth as the result of socialization, but the entire profit of their labour would go to satisfying the reparations claims. The condition of the workmen could not be sensibly improved and one must expect a rapid relapse into the present condition.”

Breitscheid insisted that Bell was underestimating the power of hope. Socialization would give workers enough hope to wait patiently for the complete fulfilment of their expectations. “Of course we too regard the peace terms as ridiculous and would not expect to have to continue to fulfill them for more than a few years. Therefore we are forced to work harder than ever for the World Revolution.”

Bell objected. “For anyone who knows England and America,” he said, “the idea of this revolution coming soon enough to relieve Germany seems a rather forlorn hope.”

“Perhaps not in two but certainly in five years,” Breitscheid responded. “We, too, have our information. In France everything is ripe. The demobilization will be followed by surprising popular movements.”

Breitscheid, Bell knew, was one of the more reasonable and calm men on the left. Yet he was now trying to pull off the virtually impossible. Only a fantastic series of lucky turns could make such a coup succeed.

Bell dutifully communicated the plot to HQ, but he counselled against accepting it: “It would be a very uncertain speculation.” Still, the proposal was worth taking seriously as evidence of the dangerous instability that the draft peace treaty had introduced. Calm, foresightful men like Breitscheid were now willing to risk their lives on nearly impossible chances. It made sense to them to try, as it seemed better than doing nothing at all and being doomed to failure.

Bell asked Hankey if the Allies really wanted a “peace” such that “guarantees for the fulfillment of the conditions would be practically worthless, and the prospect of a peaceable course of the further internal German political development would be greatly diminished.”

“A WONDERFULLY BEAUTIFUL day,” Tuesday, May 27, A12’s ship docked in England. He headed to MI6 headquarters for urgent consultations. There was still some time to edit the draft treaty, but it was running short.

C looked up from his papers and grinned at Bell from beneath a gold-rimmed monocle. The captain lifted the lid of a wooden cigarette case and offered it to his agent. His most pressing question was, Would the Germans sign the treaty? Or did he need to prepare Britain for war?

Bell responded, “I do not think the German government is bluffing when it says it cannot accept the peace terms in the present form.” And yet they were leaning towards signing to prevent worse consequences. It was like a hostage telling a kidnapper anything just to stay alive.

Cumming wondered, Was Germany ready for war? No, Bell said. At least “not in the West, facing France or Belgium. Numbers of troops would refuse to fight.” But the situation in the east, he continued, was volatile. The hardest part for Germany to accept were the territorial concessions to Poland. “Without at least a plebiscite it is feared there will be spontaneous fatal outbursts in the east against the Poles.”

Cumming nodded. Where did Germany’s reactionary nationalists stand in this? A few months earlier, when the democrats were firmly in charge, Bell’s sources had mocked the possibility of a right-wing coup. But now no one was smiling. “The present situation is undoubtedly strengthening the Reaction, along with the extreme left,” he explained. “The Nationalists are advancing the dishonest argument that revolutionary agitation in the army was responsible for defeat, and urged that Revolution and democracy have brought Germany harder terms. If the government accepts the terms, it will further strengthen the Reaction.”

The leftist German political theorist Karl Kautsky was right. He had told Bell that “if the Allies were fully informed, they would realize that the present terms are not even in their own best interest.”¹⁶

By the time Bell and Cumming had reached the end of their conversation, MI6 was clearly on the same page. C told Bell his next mission was in Paris, where he needed to convince the world’s most powerful statesmen to change their minds.

A12 checked into his new accommodations, a beautiful suite in Westminster Mansions, less than two kilometres away from headquarters. The place had a nice library, and he spent the evening reading in a comfortable chair.

The next day, he talked with “Barty,” likely William Bartholomew of military intelligence, and then had lunch with May Cumming, C’s wife, at the Cummings’ apartment at Whitehall, attached to MI6 headquarters. Suddenly, a messenger entered and announced that Dr. Bell was needed immediately. He rushed through his meal, and a driver took him to Royal Air Force Station Kenley, twenty-five kilometres to the south. He was given a pair of goggles and strapped into a two-seater airplane. He was still in formal attire. It was two and a half hours to France, at five thousand feet. The beauty was “unforgettable.” But he paid a price, arriving “deaf.” The military science bureau at Orfordness had not yet figured out how to muffle the noise.

After tea, he visited the base casino. His clothes were flecked with oil splattered during the flight, but he was not poorly dressed for the occasion. The flecks were a mark of distinction, letting the airmen know at once that he was a very important person. He was needed in Paris in a hurry.

A car brought Bell to the capital, where he briefed General Thwaites, director of military intelligence, and General Radcliffe, director of military operations. If a new world war broke out with Germany, they would be the men leading the fight. Bell helped them with their calculations. Better yet, he showed them how the war could be avoided.

The eastern areas of Germany, he explained, featured the most virulent Freikorps troops. The situation there had devolved into military anarchy. Roving militias advertised their ironical patriotism while stealing from the locals. The early secret Nazis, just like the later public ones, were a band of robbers.

The British military, including General Malcolm and the leadership at Cologne, joined Bell in trying to soften Britain’s anger towards the Germans. The top brass knew a dreary fact that didn’t make the newspapers: British soldiers in the Allied occupied zone of Germany, west of the Rhine, were sharing their rations with hungry children who came begging at the barracks. It was demoralizing. If the politicians told the generals to order a march on Berlin, it was far from certain that their soldiers would obey.

Bell continued his discussions over lunch with William Dudley Ward and Claude Guillebaud. The serene but seriously overworked Ward of the treasury department was John Maynard Keynes’s chief of staff at Paris and an Olympic sailing medallist; the receptive Guillebaud helped lead the Supreme Economic Council.

A few weeks before meeting Bell, Guillebaud wrote of his visit to Germany: “The food of the poor is monotonous and unpalatable to a high degree, but it is at least sufficient to maintain life for the healthy adult who is neither old nor constitutionally liable to disease.”¹⁷ But after he met Bell, Guillebaud changed his mind. He co-authored a White Paper that described deaths by “slow starvation.” For Germans, “no change, even death itself, can be worse.” In the time between the two reports, Bell had pointed out to Guillebaud how to spot the signs of long-term emaciation.

Guillebaud’s proposal to create peace resembled Bell’s so closely that A12 was likely the ghost writer of parts. First, food was necessary, Guillebaud’s White Paper urged, but next, “if the Allies supply the necessary working capital to restart the German machines, they will acquire a measure of control which they could obtain in no other way, and a certainty of a steady contribution to the expenses and damages of the war.”¹⁸ Without preliminary aid, reparations were impossible.

Britain’s treaty authors heard their Paris editor’s message and worked on revisions. But Bell wasn’t America’s or France’s editor, and the final document still needed an agreement.

Chapter 11

The Polish Plan

Danzig, with its old patrician architecture, its gates and towers make it one of the most charming of the Germany cities.

—WINTHROP BELL, 1919

Beautiful Danzig, on the eastern fringe of the German Empire, suddenly became the most foreboding city in Central Europe. It was the place where the next great international war was most likely to begin. MI6 ordered Winthrop Bell there to stop it from happening. But first, he had to wait for German travel visas. Eastern Germany was under martial lockdown. Democratic authorities in Berlin pulled strings for him, and finally the passes came through.

As usual, he took time to admire beauty as his train rolled east. Hours later, Danzig came into view, arrayed like fine jewels. Yet he knew its beauty would be destroyed by artillery if Germany and Poland went to war.

Unlike most big German cities, Danzig had remained orderly since the November Revolution. The drafters of the Versailles treaty had first decided to reassign it to Poland, even though Germany had built the city over centuries. David Lloyd George then convinced France and America to reverse that decision and declare Danzig independent, but the local Germans still thought the city would be handed over to Poland in the final version of the treaty. That false belief, Bell knew, could start a war. Armed forces on both sides were preparing. It seemed a smart bet. After all, if Poland won Danzig there would be war, and if Germany kept Danzig there would be war. Bell’s secret diplomacy was needed once again to prevent massive bloodshed. It was up to A12 to communicate the neutrality plan to Danzig, which had not yet met with a British official.

Since his first appointment wasn’t until the next day, and it was sweltering, he headed to the community swimming pool for laps. On the surface he looked the picture of health, but in reality, he was in mortal danger. He came out of the water exhausted and began to cough blood. Doctors examined him with the new X-ray technology but couldn’t figure out what was wrong. (His symptoms tended to worsen when he was near industry. Today doctors would likely diagnose him with asthma, prescribe him with corticosteroids, and tell him to stop smoking and avoid industrial pollution. At the time, he was prescribed medicinal cigarettes.)

His health was something like the condition of Danzig, which looked fine on the surface, with its pretty seaside buildings, flowers in bloom, and attractive harbour. But the hidden reality was possibly fatal. The districts surrounding the city were, Bell wrote, at “fever heat.”¹ At Thorn and Graudenz, two Prussian cities to the south of Danzig, Freikorps militias insisted they would not recognize the new arrangement and would yield only to force. The Poles were willing to accept the challenge. Everything was set for the next great war.

On the morning of June 24, the chances for a “wild political and military action against the Peace” were extremely high. But Bell, even though he was still seriously ill, completed his mission. He met with Danzig’s towering mayor, Dr. Heinrich Sahm (slated to become the world’s tallest president once Danzig was independent), to negotiate peace. Afterwards, Sahm issued a proclamation that Danzigers should take no part in any fighting. The stormy conditions calmed down at once.

Bell had explained to Sahm that neither the Germans nor the Poles would own the region. It was not so much desire for Danzig that would provoke war as jealousy that the other side might get it. Neutrality solved the problem. In the days before Bell’s visit to Sahm, secret wires flew back and forth from the Continent to London describing German military preparations for imminent attack. But on July 4, after Bell’s Danzig visit, Lord Balfour wrote to Warsaw, “German position on Polish front seems to be less warlike.”²

Bell reported Sahm’s declaration: “My city is sorrowful at its parting from Germany, but I hope that the citizens will preserve a calm determination in the construction of a new order . . . I have confidence in the declaration of the Allies that the free city of Danzig shall be autonomous and in no way subject to Poland.”

Bell’s report to the British high command was more detailed than the one that ran in the press, and far more sensitive. For instance, his secret report described how the Danzigers preferred a foreign administrator picked from a neutral nation or Britain. A French appointee, however, would be refused, given France’s pro-Polish stance. Sahm’s words would have been extremely provocative if they had appeared in newspapers. But diplomacy prevailed, and when the administrator finally arrived, he was British, just as the Danzigers demanded.

The Nazis were tremendously disappointed by the peaceful turn of events. They now shifted to the idea of seizing Germany itself. On July 5, Colonel Max Bauer, General Ludendorff’s Jew-hating assistant, approached Colonel Rupert Ryan, representing the British military government in Cologne, to see if London would agree to sit on the sidelines during a planned nationalist coup led by his boss.³ Bauer explained that the heavily armed Freikorps would start the coup, supported by a robust propaganda campaign and martial law. They were prepared to strike in August. A military dictatorship would follow, led by General Ludendorff, ostensibly to be replaced in the longer run by a new democracy.⁴ It is extremely doubtful that any such democratization would have occurred. Everything was in place for the Nazi takeover of Germany, except for Britain’s permission.

Bauer had also been involved in the militarists’ alliance with Soviet Russia. The flirtation with both Britain and the Soviets gives the superficial impression that Ludendorff and Bauer were willing to be friends with everyone. It was the furthest thing from the truth. Feigned friendship was a means to their end: a war of revenge.

Colonel Ryan, shockingly, was in favour of Ludendorff’s proposal. The duped Ryan had full confidence that a military coup deposing Germany’s democratic government would somehow lead to democracy. Unlike Bell with Breitscheid, Ryan did not try to talk the plotters out of the coup. Instead, he was giddy about the prospect, which seemed to promise one more victory against the leftists. When the British Foreign Office learned of the plot, they said the idea was absurd, “in view of Ludendorff’s past record,” and instructed Ryan not to respond.⁵

Would the Nazis give up? Given their fixation on revenge, it was impossible. Bauer tried again later in the month, this time with a higher-ranking officer, General Neill Malcolm in Berlin, who dutifully sent the offer up the chain of command. At that point, General Thwaites, the director of military intelligence, realized the silent treatment was no longer enough. He told Malcolm to discourage the coup.

WITH DANZIG AT peace, Silesia once again became the hottest spot in the German Empire. The situation was dangerous and growing worse. To stop war, Bell launched his pre-emptive peace strike on May 5, with articles published in several British newspapers. He argued that handing over Silesia to the Poles would violate the “fundamental principle of self-determination.”⁶ Woodrow Wilson’s demand for an independent Poland needed balancing with that liberal principle. Bell had convinced British politicians at Versailles, but now he was tasked with convincing the public, the ultimate supervisors of the politicians. He put on his Reuters hat once again.

In regions with mixed German and Polish populations, Bell’s articles urged, a plebiscite should decide which country they would belong to. It alone would show the true nature of democratic feeling. But that didn’t mean it would be easy. “It would, perhaps, be hard to find a region where it would be more difficult to secure satisfactory conditions for such a referendum.”⁷

He knew that reckless adventurers were willing to risk lives to claim Silesia in an all-or-nothing game. But a vote promised a different game. The areas that were Polish-leaning would go to Poland and the German parts to Germany. Bell now used Royce’s novel game theory on the world stage to show how concept and practice are interrelated.

The moment for action was now. Rational people were still in charge on both the German and the Polish sides. They were negotiating and making progress. Yet just outside the warm glow of the parlour fires, the army was decommissioning hundreds of thousands of German soldiers into a poor, hungry, angry world. Many of them would be glad to earn a generous wage, and a purpose, in the vengeful Freikorps.

In addition to suggesting a Silesian vote, Bell’s articles also urged against onerous reparations payments and called for Germany to be admitted to the League of Nations. It was tantamount to asking a battleship to make a 180-degree turn in a hurry.

But Lloyd George heard the message and understood the danger. At an emergency meeting with the British Dominions on June 1, he announced that he “had an interview with a British officer at Versailles, who was formerly at Berlin, and had already furnished most useful information to the British authorities.”⁸ He repeated Bell’s point that the two top priorities of the German delegation were the Silesian question and securing admission to the League of Nations. Once again, Bell stood just off stage, directing Britain’s course in world history as it was being written at Versailles.

With unanimous agreement among the national members of the British Empire, Lloyd George shocked France and the United States in a meeting of the Big Three the next day. Either the Allies would edit the draft treaty to make it friendlier to Germany, he declared, or the British side would refuse to join in an invasion if Germany refused to sign.

The British prime minister confidently declared Bell’s arguments to his wide-eyed American and French colleagues. “We cannot determine the fate of the Upper Silesia without a plebiscite, since this region has not been part of Poland for several centuries. If the population itself decides by a vote to unite with Poland, it cannot later on be a question of revenge . . . Concerning reparation, everyone agrees that we are asking of Germany more than she can ever pay . . . Concerning the League of Nations . . . Germany should be admitted into the League of Nations as soon as possible.”⁹

The Big Three relented on the Silesian vote, but only after spectacular objections from the French side. Lloyd George then put James Headlam-Morley (assistant director of the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office and a key behind-the-scenes player at the Versailles negotiations) to work convincing the peace treaty’s Polish commission. As he recounted, “I went to the Prime Minister in order to ask him whether it would be inconvenient to him that I should be in a minority of one on the report presented. He said that he was in a very difficult position; he wanted to get the Germans to sign; he insisted on the definite point of a plebiscite in Upper Silesia.”¹⁰

It was uncomfortable, but Headlam-Morley was glad it happened. “There is no reasonable doubt that if [Silesia] had been handed straight over to Poland without a plebiscite, there would have been a violent explosion in a part of Europe where it is very difficult for us to exercise military authority.” And, he added, “it would, as people who come straight back from Warsaw tell me, have been the final blow which would have made it almost impossible for Poland to recover.”

But the compromises contributed to the coming of the Second World War. Bell had warned of the danger of war and the great urgency needed to prevent it with a quick vote. Headlam-Morley heard him and urged that the plebiscite happen in six months. The other side countered with a vote in two to three years. Lloyd George “threw me over completely,” as Headlam-Morley put it, and agreed to the dangerously longer time span.¹¹ Meanwhile, Bell asked for peacekeeping troops in Silesia, but they did not come quickly enough. The delay would prove fatal.

In mid-August, German terroristic attacks on the Silesian Poles began. German guards massacred ten civilians, including women, at Myslowitz. By the time Allied peacekeepers showed up in force, a bitter cycle of violence spiralled out of control. Three Silesian uprisings—in August 1919, August 1920, and spring-summer 1921—turned resentment into hatred. It was no coincidence that the Second World War started on the Polish–German border two decades later.

The Polish plan was only one part of Bell’s and Lloyd George’s advice to the Big Three. The prime minister also urged, just as Bell had suggested, that Germany be admitted into the League of Nations, that reparations payments be limited, and that unemployed German labourers be hired to repair war damage in France and Belgium. But as Lloyd George later recounted, “Clemenceau was annoyed and President Wilson was righteously indignant. He had come to terms with the French as to the conditions of peace.”

Yet Britain had reduced the amount of demanded reparations in the Allies’ imagination. When the amount was finally agreed to in 1921, the Allies reduced them in fact as well, to £6.6 billion (approximately $300 billion today), rather than the much greater sum of £20 billion envisioned in early 1919.¹² Bell had advised rejecting fantastic amounts, and Lloyd George agreed, on the grounds that demanding too much would bring Germany to resentful slavery.

Defeating proposals for astronomical reparations payments and securing the agreement to hold the Silesian vote meant two wins for Britain. But the French rejected Britain’s proposal to let Germans rebuild France and insisted that Germany remain excluded from the League of Nations. Two wins for France. The fifth match, the timing for deciding the reparations total, was a tie: when it became clear that the Big Three could not immediately agree on a sum, they assigned that work to a future commission. The deferral amounted to asking Germany to sign the peace treaty and attach a blank cheque. It didn’t bode well for the future.

THE SITUATION IN Paris seemed calm during the eleventh-hour edits. But Silesia remained, Bell wrote, “on a thin crust over bubbling lava.”¹³ There are thousands of books about the Second World War, which began at the Polish–German border in 1939. There is not one about the war that did not start at the Polish–German border in 1919. It is proof that a good spy can prevent a war so quietly that hardly anyone realizes it.

On Wednesday, June 25, A12 walked through a heavy downpour on his way to visit the German military’s high command in the east. They were loyal allies of Berlin’s democratic government, for richer or poorer. Now the marriage was very poor indeed.

The officers at the high command told Bell that their control of the local situation was slipping because of the rapid demobilization. As the official military became weaker, the terrorist forces grew stronger. Soon the same thing would happen to the government forces in Silesia as had happened in Berlin: the extremists would hopelessly outgun democratic forces.

Later that day, Bell wrote that the Silesian situation had badly degraded since his last visit. Now roving German soldiers, organized as robber bands, terrorized the land. The pro-democratic forces could not mount a defence. Only the Allies would be strong enough to resist. Bell again urgently asked for peacekeeping troops to secure the forthcoming plebiscite. The locals, both German and Polish, would welcome them.

As heavy rains continued in the east, Germany signed the peace treaty on Saturday, June 28, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Mass protests broke out on German streets against the heavy Allied demands. The Nazis enjoyed grand success in recruiting. An angry crowd descended on the Berlin hotel where members of the British Military Mission were staying. Soldiers held them off with pointed machine guns. Their mere appearance was impressive enough that no shots needed to be fired. Meanwhile, Bell wrote dispatches through the night and brought them to the telegraph office in the darkness.

The Treaty of Versailles has become shorthand for the cause of the Second World War. Against this, Margaret MacMillan has argued that the treaty terms were fair and reasonable.¹⁴ A12’s intelligence reports reveal something between these two positions. The final treaty terms were much less severe than in the first draft, largely because of Bell’s revisions. But he also knew that the formulation of the final draft, which punished Germany less, was unlikely to calm the waters. Because of the devastation of the war itself, followed by the Armistice and the blockade, German democracy needed foreign help just to survive. It was foolish to refuse aid. Germany’s government, which wanted friendship with Britain, was deathly ill, and the terrorists who hated Britain were nearing a position to take power. If they succeeded, the danger would threaten more countries than just Germany.

BELL LEARNED “ASTONISHING” news about a Freikorps plot on a rainy Wednesday, July 2. The next day, he sent an urgent report by courier to Paris. Five days later, news ran in British papers of Germany’s anti-Jewish pogroms. “Soldiers and well-dressed youth” engaged in “brutal cudgelling” of Jews on Berlin streets. There was nothing spontaneous or organic about it. Their brutal work had the support of an “anti-Jew propaganda” that was “exceedingly active” and “well-furnished with funds.”¹⁵ The newspaper reports were almost certainly linked to A12’s discovery of the astonishing Freikorps plot.

Earlier in the year, anti-Jewish violence was limited to eastern Europe, and Jews peacefully walked the streets of Germany. But now the Nazis opened the spigots of violence near to home—just a trickle, to show their sponsors what the campaign looked like up close. They could turn the cruelty on and off at will. A torrent in Ukraine killed tens of thousands, while a dribble in Berlin meant a few were seriously injured. The high degree of organization clearly points to the fact that it was the same plot the Jüdische Rundschau had warned about in 1917. Ludendorff and his allies had decided, in 1915, to begin the Second World War with a surprise attack against the Jews as soon as the First World War ended. Now events proved these were not just empty words. In 1919, the violent part of the war against the Jews had begun in Germany, subtly at first, but with the promise of greater pain to come. If Bell had not been there, the attacks might have gone entirely unnoticed outside the country.

The Nazis carefully read the Versailles treaty and knew they could attack Jews with impunity, so long as they did it within their own borders. Jews had fought hard at Paris for the protection of minority rights as a part of the treaty, but it didn’t go through. The British were worried that any protections given to Jews could also be used by minorities within their dominions, like the Irish. Colonialism still seemed like a good idea to many powerful Britons.

On another cold and rainy day in Germany, Wednesday, August 13, a dispatch from Berlin ran in British newspapers: “Some Jews took exception to a newsboy who displayed a placard bearing the words ‘Opponents of the Jews, read the Deutsche Wochenblatt!’”¹⁶ It was a newspaper that had sprung up during the well-funded plot to attack Germany’s Jews. Shots were fired, and several people were injured.

The next day, the Nazis plundered Jewish businesses in Dortmund. The coordination of the anti-Jewish attacks throughout Germany, and their polished character, showed the long hand of the plot’s military intelligence as it fought the first secret battle of the next Great War.

Kristallnacht, the Nazis’ anti-Jewish vandalism campaign of November 1938, is infamous. But its forgotten prelude happened in broad daylight in July and August of 1919, before the Nazis had even heard of Hitler. Once again, the later führer only copied what others created.

Meanwhile in Berlin, Bell wrote that the post-Versailles political atmosphere was “supercharged with disclosures and recriminations.” Germany had signed an impossible peace. Now it was a question of blame. Whose fault was it? The democracy that signed the treaty, as the militarists claimed? Or the military that provoked the war, lost, and then lied about it, as the democrats claimed?

The historical truth was one fact. The force of arms was another. A Nazi coup could take place, Bell warned, by summer. Freikorps militias already occupied official buildings and flew the old Prussian royal war flag, which featured a hungry black eagle spoiling for its next kill. The flag said it all: the mercenaries were loyal to themselves, the military, not to democracy, and they were looking forward to the next war. Preparations for their coup were already in motion. Who was strong enough to drive the vengeful racists from the buildings they had seized? In Germany, no one.

Meanwhile, German democrats and militarists waged a high-scandal campaign, each levying accusations and counter-accusations. The left uncovered evidence that Westphalian steel magnates had manipulated supplies to increase the prices of weapons during the war. Had the greed of these merchants of death undermined German confidence and led to the country’s defeat?

The magnates sent more money to the Nazis to make sure no one ever found out. The industrialists had accumulated huge profits in the Great War. They now used some of the proceeds to fund the Freikorps, run an anti-Jewish propaganda campaign, and provoke the next war. It was a small investment in enormous future profits.

Bell knew that only a small minority of Germans realized their own country was genuinely at fault for starting the war, and then for committing war crimes after it began. If they had time, Bell urged, the truth party would be able to convince others. But the Nazis worked hard to make sure that awareness never happened. On 1 a.m. on Tuesday, August 19, Bell sent a dispatch about “a ludicrously rabid antisemitic agitation that throws the blame for all Germany’s trouble on the Jews.”¹⁷

The scapegoating was a sham. But that did not prevent it from being effective, as Bell knew the bloodthirsty cult saw easy chances for gaining converts. Germany’s pride was suddenly and badly shamed. The people couldn’t think properly because of years-long malnutrition. Blaming the Jews meant Germans could be the humiliators, rather than the humiliated.

Later that day, the latest dispatch from Berlin ran in the Leicester Daily Post. “The agitation from the Right is gaining an almost desperate character,” it read. “Especially evil is its anti-Semitic side,” including a “pogrom propaganda” calling for murder of the Jews.¹⁸

The Nazis were brazenly confident they would win their coming race war by keeping their plot secret and striking first. They saw nothing standing in their way. But they forgot to check their tail. Britain’s best secret agent was on the case.

Chapter 12

The Trusted Men

The chief qualifications necessary to make a successful agent: intelligence of a high order, absolute discretion, patience, perseverance, and constant attention to duty.

—MI6, ROTTERDAM BUREAU¹

It was fall 1919. A heavy rain fell on Berlin, adding to one of the darkest glooms the world has ever known. It was about to get a lot worse. An ominous Nazi cloud descended over the country.

Several months later, in early 1920, the Nazis would announce their existence to Germany with the Kapp Putsch, an attempt to take over the country, and with the unveiling of Adolf Hitler’s renamed political organization in Munich, the National Socialists. But in fall 1919, the highly organized anti-Jewish war plot was still a carefully guarded secret—albeit one that two spies had uncovered. One, an Austrian-German later code-named Wolf,² plotted to lead the Nazis. The other, a Canadian-Briton code-named A12, worked to destroy them.

Winthrop Bell walked under an umbrella past imposing grey Prussian buildings pockmarked from the March battles. He cut through a blighted urban park, treading over soggy yellow leaves. He had learned from a source about a peculiar meeting taking place at a pub, a Kneipe, nearby. He was going to listen in as the clandestine Nazis planned their next attacks.

Bell already knew about Nazi schemes from his highly placed sources in the German government and military. But some of the higher-ups in Britain’s Foreign Office were skeptical because they detested leftists, and many of Bell’s top sources were leftists. That meant he needed to quote the terrorists themselves.

It was risky journalism. If the revolutionaries learned he was a British agent, he was a dead man.

Bell opened an ornate oak door, a symbol of pre-war prosperity. The pub was once quite handsome, but now it was grungy. Money was short to properly light or heat the place. But the angry men who’d gathered there took no notice. They were fired up by alcohol and hatred.

A thick cloud of tobacco smoke enveloped him, mingled with the smell of stale beer and the odour of people who could not afford soap. A far worse moral stink filled the air. The place was teeming with mass murderers who had killed leftists and innocent civilians throughout the year.

Bell looked at the prices on the menu: fifty pfennigs for a beer, thirty-five for a cigarette. It was theft compared to pre-war. He settled into the dank, dark room and fit in. It was easy. He knew how to order like a German, smoke like a German, and pay attention, or no attention, like a German.

A speaker thundered: “Hass! Rache! Ewige Feindschaft!”³ “Revenge!” Elated applause. “Down with the Jews’ Government!”⁴ Tumultuous cries. “The war and Bolshevism are merely moves in a Jewish plot!”⁵ Delirious shouts of approval.

Bell did not cheer. It didn’t make him stand out, as the bar was full of locals sipping their beer without the faintest interest in politics. A12 was unarmed except for his training and his wits. His accent was Hochdeutsch, the most generic German accent. He sounded like a normal German to speakers of the Berlin dialect, even though they could tell he wasn’t a native Berliner. But that wasn’t unusual, as Germans from all parts of the country were in Berlin.

He drank moderately. He’d learned in MI6 training that getting drunk could be useful on rare occasions to loosen up an otherwise reticent source, but only if strictly necessary. Back then, the standard advice given to agents was to start with a surreptitious shot of olive oil to slow down alcohol absorption and prevent drunkenness. He didn’t need that tonight, though, as he slowly sipped his beer. It was to his advantage to stay sober while his enemies slipped into dark, angry drunkenness.

Another speaker read the latest creation in black propaganda: “Who made and paid for the revolution? We Jews. Who made your daughters and sisters prostitutes and slaves? We Jews. Who pocketed war profits by the billions and now will pay no war costs? We Jews.”⁶

Another pamphlet encouraged the boycott of Jewish businesses. Before the war, Germany had banned such publications, but now hateful screeds were appearing with regularity. Reuters soon reported an even more insidious poster to its readers across the world: “Kill the Jews!”⁷

The speakers finished, but the festivities were just beginning. A group of German officers from Mitau—a Latvian city fought over by Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Latvians—talked at a table about their plans for Eastern Europe. Bell pretended to read a newspaper, but his attention arced in their direction.

The officers, he learned, were disappointed that they had been thwarted twice in their attempts to go to war with Poland. They would surely have been astounded if they had learned that the man who’d thwarted them was now listening in on their next plot. But they took no notice and kept on plotting.

Bell soon realized the schemers were already moving on to next chances. Their new goal was to take Riga, Latvia’s most important city. If Riga fell, they correctly reasoned, then they could soon take the three Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Everything was ready for their attack: poison gas, experienced troops, airplanes, heavy artillery, armoured trains, and money.

If A12 could sound the warning in time, the Royal Navy might be able to help stop them. Convinced he’d heard enough, he left the pub, opened his umbrella, and stepped back into the heavy rain. No one followed him outside. He had been inconspicuous.

He walked past rat-infested alleys back to the Hotel Fürstenhof and got his key at the front desk, making some friendly chit-chat about stock prices with the night clerk. The stock market was the topic du jour. Germans right down to the shoeshine boy brimmed with tips. Stock speculation seemed the only way to keep money safe from the ravages of inflation.

Bell walked up the stairs to his room and sat at his travelling typewriter. His next report would be a beauty.

Back during his March stay at the Fürstenhof, Bell had received a mangled telegram in which the hotel name was misspelled as Innerstenhof. The misspelling was serendipitous. Innerstenhof. The inmost court. In a temple, it is where the priest or priestess makes the sacred offering. No such hotel existed in Berlin, but an efficient clerk had figured out how to send the telegraph to its intended destination. And now an intelligence prophet sat in his room at the Fürstenhof, typing that the German extremists were about to strike Latvia.

If Bell lived to file the dispatch, he could thwart their race war for the third time.

MOST OF THE early Nazis hated the Jews even before the war. But now their hatred curdled into a murderous plot with active support among powerful figures in the military and industry, as well as unwitting support from leaders of the democratic government, who trusted the Freikorps to defend the country. Much of official Britain also believed the lie.

The Nazis were a conspiracy, not the official government. It was a crucial distinction. The coup leaders blinded their actual boss, Gustav Noske, Germany’s minister of defence, to their intrigue. The extremist officers “hung together like bees.” But the unofficial actions of these plotters in moving large numbers of troops to the Polish border and into Latvia were of such a stunning size that the Allies could easily mistake the illegal plots as being the German government’s position.

Whether it was an official or unofficial plot wasn’t just a moral quibble or an objection about the fine distinctions of law. It made all the difference between whether Britain would, after the extremists’ coming strike, mistakenly attack German democracy or correctly attack the Nazi fringe.

The Nazis’ power was already astounding. At the end of 1919, Bell reported that they could already take over the country any day they wanted—if they wanted. But the smarter terrorists knew they shouldn’t move—yet. The country was in such bad shape that it would be a mistake to take over and become responsible for the mess.

As a compromise, they hit upon a strategy of passive aggression. They needed to be just aggressive enough to keep their funders motivated, but not so aggressive that they would take over the bankrupt country. They kept their eyes on the future and would take over when Germany was recovering. “A new war,” Bell wrote, “is not considered, so much as the creation of a new balance of power which would enable Germany more or less to defy the Allies unless the latter were willing to undertake another war.”

Bell could not know the precise date of the Nazis’ surprise attack on Poland that would begin the Second World War. But he knew that the cooler heads among the extremists expected their next world war to begin in a “generation.” Twenty years or so—meaning around 1939.

He also didn’t know their troop numbers yet, but he was working on learning these details. He soon made an appointment with his well-placed source Achim von Arnim to learn more about the force assembling to attack Latvia. He was also curious to see the terrorists’ military training with his own eyes, but that needed to wait until colder weather. He passed a note to the British Military Mission in Berlin: the forests were impassable until a hard frost. For now, the heavy rains made them into mudlands. Once the frost came, he could hike once again, and use his high-tech MI6-supplied binoculars to see for himself how the secret armies were being trained.

He didn’t intend, however, to just wait for the weather to turn better. He slogged through the rainy, dirty Berlin streets, teeming with Nazi killers, to his interviews. The political killers were in plain clothes, just like everyone else. If someone stepped out of the darkness to shoot him dead, it would have been virtually impossible for the police to say whether the culprit was a robber, a madman, or an assassin.

A SECOND SPY had also discovered the Nazis. Unlike Bell, he was delighted. September 12, 1919, was a brutally hot day in Munich. A ragtag group of extremists sweltered in a poorly lit, smoky back room in a beer hall, the Sterneckerbräu. A thirty-year-old spy watched them. He was a V-Mann, from the German Vertrauensmann, “trusted man.” Weeks earlier, his virulent antisemitic speeches, made during his work in the propaganda department, under intelligence director Karl Mayr, had attracted the attention of his superiors. They were impressed and promoted him to spy.

Captain Mayr organized the infiltration of fifty-odd political groups in Munich. One of the small groups, the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP, or German Workers’ Party), was fervently antisemitic. Mayr knew just who to send. One of his V-Männer hated the Jews. He would fit right in.

Mayr’s new agent had hypnotic greyish-blue eyes. They sent women, and even some men, into raptures. (The future Sturmabteilung—SA—leader Ernst Röhm, a noted homosexual, is rumoured to have fallen for him.) The spy’s hair was dark, his skin pale. His broad moustache was neatly trimmed. He had not yet cut it into a severe small rectangle just below his nose, his future style. He was undercover in plain clothes, rather than his military uniform.

The beer hall group consisted of several dozen mostly lower- and middle-class drunks with angry, impotent ideas. The V-Mann was likely the only customer in the beer hall who was perfectly sober. He detested alcohol. He was a man who loved control, and he didn’t want to lose it by drinking.

Although the DAP praised workers, its members were rabid nationalists, quite unlike the Marxist internationalists. The DAP hated Marxism and international capitalism, and blamed both on the Jews. For the militant Nazis, the DAP could be the perfect grass-roots political cover.

The spy watched as one member, a high school teacher named Adalbert Baumann, stood to advocate Bavarian separatism. Bavaria, he urged, should secede from Germany and join Austria, forming a new nation.⁸ It was a popular idea in Bavaria, which resented Prussian dominance.

The infiltrator could not take it quietly. His military intel employers were none other than the Prussian dominators themselves. He rose and launched into a furious denunciation of Baumann’s proposal. The fatherland will not be divided, he said. The Vaterland will carve up the world. His voice was commanding and furious. The sound was unearthly, like the essence of anger put into words. The biographer Konrad Heiden attributes this in part to throat and lung damage caused by British mustard gas, which struck the man down in October 1918, when the German Western Front crumbled around him.⁹ The poison changed his shouting from something human into a hypnotic, demonic roar.

The bizarre sound emphasized the power of a strange belief: Germany would still win, he insisted, if traitors and cowards got out of the way.

Anton Drexler, the sickly chairman of the DAP, was amazed by this young man’s fiery speech—not just his explosive, angry words but his fanatical blue eyes, flying hair, swelling chest, and flailing arms thrusting and retracting like rapid-fire artillery guns.

Sweat pouring from his brow, the secret agent sat down again, proudly satisfied with his own words. Towards the end of the meeting, when the orator headed for the exit, Drexler hurried to stop him before he was lost to the busy Munich streets. Could this fanatical man help to build up the party?

The V-Mann was confident in front of a crowd but shifty and nervous during personal interactions. Awakened from his reverie by Drexler’s sudden presence, he became awkward, like a student caught daydreaming in class. The chairman offered him an antisemitic pamphlet he’d authored, My Political Awakening. Drexler learned the intense man’s name, Corporal Adolf Hitler. He also learned his address, List Regiment Barracks, Munich. An active-duty soldier? For Drexler, it seemed too good to be true.

Soon an invitation to join the DAP arrived at Hitler’s barracks. He pondered it as he watched hungry mice eat crumbs off the floor. He sympathized with their plight, given the abject poverty he had known in Vienna before the war. He soon gained his superior’s permission to burrow into the DAP by joining it as member no. 55.

It is clear from Mein Kampf that Hitler was contemptuous of the DAP’s organizational skills. But at the same time, he was delighted to find them. He was not an agent spying on an enemy but a man digging up a treasure. He just needed to buff it to make it shine.

At that time, a new reactionary political organization needed more members, money, and intimidating bodyguards. Hitler’s new friends in right-wing German military intelligence could supply all three. The DAP, which had until then been insignificant, could provide a front. The Austrian saw it as his big chance. The well-organized antisemitic military branch needed a political façade, and the poorly organized antisemitic politicians needed military strength. He could be the middleman. Neither group could do much on its own. Together, they would be a devastating force.

The timing, for Hitler, was perfect. As the military tumbled in size owing to the Versailles restrictions, its Nazi wing became empowered. The officers, Bell warned in the fall, “who are with few exceptions strongly reactionary, may be calculated upon to do the combing out . . . with great care!” It was paradoxical but true: the German army was becoming vastly more dangerous as it diminished in size. It is why Hitler’s first anti-Jewish genocidal report for military intelligence, in mid-September 1919, got him promoted, rather than fired or arrested.

While other reactionary conspirators spoke obliquely about the Jewish problem, Hitler boldly leapt to the implied conclusion. His report, later called the Gemlich letter, advocated the “uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether”—the ultimate goal of what he called “rational antisemitism.”¹⁰ Hitler was not afraid to type and sign his name to what other Nazis only quietly suggested. He had nothing to lose: no home, parents, wife, or children.

Germany, Hitler urged in his Gemlich letter, needed to become a dictatorship to rid the country of the Jewish “racial tuberculosis.” Several years later, in Mein Kampf, he compared Jews to “bacteria” and suggested Nazism as an antibiotic. The supposedly medical language was part of his code for mass murder. Once again, Hitler was not being original. Talaat Pasha had spoken in the same way during the Ottoman genocides, when mass killings were referred to as sanitation. The beginning of Hitler’s political career was like his impoverished pre-war career as a painter in Vienna, when he dutifully painted cityscapes without any spark of creativity. The difference was that while his paintings didn’t find many buyers, his anti-Jewish attacks hit a deep-pocketed market.

Karl Mayr realized too late the monstrous nature of the “trusted man” he’d helped to create. He tried to stop his renegade agent’s ascent in the early 1930s and fingered General Ludendorff as having given the order for Hitler to infiltrate the DAP. The first Ludendorff–Hitler meeting is still shrouded in mystery, but perhaps the men bonded during Hitler’s time as a wartime regimental runner over their hatred of Jews and other races.

After the 1933 Nazi takeover in Germany, Mayr fled to France. It wasn’t far enough. In 1940, France fell to the Wehrmacht. Mayr was arrested and later murdered at Buchenwald. He learned too late that he’d hired the wrong spy.

But in the fall of 1919, Captain Mayr, ignorant of the future, was delighted by his new secret agent. It meant that Hitler now worked the same intel beat as Bell. Two trusted men knew the tightly guarded plan for Deutschland’s next world war. It would be a race war, and its threat extended far beyond Germany’s borders.

Chapter 13

The Baltic Adventure

The whole Baltic adventure is being supported by German Military elements behind the back and against the will of the German Government. The latter has been helpless.

—AGENT A12 TO MI6, OCTOBER 3, 1919

October 28, 1919, was a fine day for an outing near Kaunas, Lithuania, a thousand kilometres east of Berlin. It was a long way to travel in a region at war, but not too far for the wings of Nazi intrigue.

Golden hayfields stretched as far as the eye could see. It was quiet on the bank of the Neman River, except for the friendly chit-chat of a small group of picnickers. It was an odd assembly: armed Lithuanian guards minding two well-dressed Turkish men, one fat and the other thin. They sat together, enjoying fine liquor and delicious chocolates, gifts of the prisoners.

The drone of an engine overhead interrupted their conversation. The curious picnickers looked up, shading their eyes from the sun. They watched as an airplane, marked with the Lithuanian flag, appeared in distress. It descended in choppy, looping circles but landed safely not far away.

Two weeks earlier, the Lithuanians and their British allies had captured the Turks when their German plane, the Annelise, made an emergency landing behind Lithuanian lines. Forged passports concealed the Turks’ true identities.¹ Their plane was among the world’s most advanced. It was the first with an all-metal body, and it flew higher than any other in the world. But it ran into mechanical troubles (other accounts suggest a storm brought it down) and had to set down in a hurry. The two Turks, along with others on board, were soon under arrest.

The Turks’ cover story was that they were a doctor and a chemist working for the Red Crescent charity, on their way to help victims of the war. Their captors suspected they might be spies and asked Paris to identify their photos. But it would take a while for the answer to arrive by mail. It was a long way to France, and there was a war going on throughout eastern Europe.

Until the end of the Great War, major parts of the continent had been owned by the German, Austrian, and Russian empires. Now the German and Russian elements fought to regain what they had lost—and take over some new pieces they had long coveted. Shattered Austria stayed out of the fight. Meanwhile, native populations in places like the newly democratic Baltic states, craving independence from the empires that had once controlled them, fought back. The Allied countries had a vested interest in extending the realm of democracy, but the demobilizing British, French, and American militaries were stretched thin and hard-pressed to help.

The jailers were suspicious of the Turks, but not suspicious enough. They let the prisoners move freely around Kaunas, so long as they were under guard. Now they stood up from their picnic and strode towards the plane, feigning curiosity and surprise. The guards rose to follow, but the ground swayed under their feet. The Turks had spiked the chocolates with morphine. The German pilot of the stolen plane slipped pistols to the two Turks. When the dizzy guards finally caught up, they became the captives. The trio disarmed the inebriated Lithuanians, who groggily watched as the escapees hopped on the plane. The fat Turk tried to fasten his seat belt, but it wasn’t big enough. The plane took off, and the escapees headed west to the safety of German lines.

The prisoners’ photos soon arrived in Paris. The Allies were stunned to learn who had slipped through their fingers. The thin man was Enver Pasha, the fat one Bahaeddin Şakir. They were two of the world’s most wanted war criminals. The blood of a million murdered Armenian, Greek, and Jewish civilians was on their hands.

Meanwhile, the mastermind of the operation waited patiently in Berlin. He was another Turk, Talaat Pasha, aka the Grand Vizier. As wartime leader of the Ottoman government headed by the Young Turks, allied with Germany during the war, he was the principal architect of the genocides. Before the war, the Young Turks cooperated with the Ottoman Empire’s ethnic Armenians in politics. But by the spring of 1915, Talaat had decided to destroy the Armenians, along with Greek Christians who lived in Anatolia. He also began an attack on the Jews. But he could not have pulled off the murders without the help of Enver, his war minister, and Bahaeddin, his propaganda chief. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War, the three fled under threat of execution. In the fall of 1918, their German military allies helped them escape justice and gave them sanctuary.

The wartime genocides had been advertised to Turkey’s allies as a battle stratagem. The Young Turks said they wanted to remove supposedly pro-Western elements who could attack them from the rear. In reality, Talaat, the main architect of the genocide, wanted a racially pure homeland. After the war, the idea for race war made Talaat and his allies useful men for the German reactionaries, who wanted a pure homeland. In service of that goal, a nearly inconceivable alliance between the Nazis and the Soviets was now in the works, with the Young Turks as the middlemen.

The medium, Annelise, was a message. The high-tech airplane was meant to show Lenin and Russia what German industry, controlled by militarist socialism, could mean for communism on the world stage. It was also a demonstration of the Nazis’ plan to defy the Versailles treaty. They would simply move weaponry to Russia, far beyond the prying eyes of the Allies.

When the Allies’ search of the Annelise uncovered secret military maps and a letter showing a Russian mission, it was obvious that something bizarre was happening. But the captors could not have imagined that the real purpose of the flight was to deliver two genocidal Turks to Lenin to formalize a Nazi–Soviet–Young Turk partnership in service of the next world war.

Meanwhile, Britain was still convinced that the German nationalists and the Soviets hated each other. Deep down the hatred was real, but that would not prevent a marriage of convenience to destroy their mutual enemy, liberal democracy. Why, the two opposed terroristic extremes asked themselves, should they be fighting each other? They shared a lot in common. They both believed the military should control everything. Both were gladly willing to use violence, including against innocents, to prevail against democracy.

They could settle their other differences later.

A YEAR EARLIER, German troops had been in the Baltic, with Allied permission, to fight communist intrusions from the east. But in the fall of 1919, Winthrop Bell reported that the troops were despoiling the Baltic nations, not fighting communism. Why were they still pretending to keep up the fight?

Finally, in late September 1919, the Allies demanded the occupiers leave the Baltics, and the German government asked their wayward troops to come home. But then many of those troops declared that they were now Russians, not Germans. It seemed absurd, but it had its reasons. Calling themselves Russians camouflaged their true nature, but the name also symbolized what Russo-German cooperation could do to defy the Allies. And it was a sign that the attackers wouldn’t obey the orders of the German government in Berlin. Like the ancient Germanic Visigoths, they would ransack where they pleased.

The reactionaries really did mean to settle in Russian territory, reforming it as German territory in a doctrine Hitler later called Lebensraum. It should have given the Germans’ new Russian communist friends a moment of pause. But the Reds were optimistic about the coming world socialist revolution, and they didn’t perform due diligence about their new allies. The oversight came back to haunt them two decades later, when the Russians were surprised by the Nazi invasion of their homeland on June 22, 1941. It meant the death of twenty-seven million Soviets by the end of the Second World War.

But that betrayal was still two decades in the future, and in 1919, the Baltic David needed to fight two Goliaths who pretended to fight each other: the Germans in the west and the Russians in the east. In the fall of 1919, the real story remained hints and mystery to the Allies, and Bell needed to decode the puzzle. The key was the men who fell from the sky over Lithuania and their leader back in Berlin, Talaat.

For the Grand Vizier Talaat, his genocide was meant to create a racially and religiously pure Turkish homeland. Like many racists of his day, including General Ludendorff, he fell under the sway of a bastardized Darwinism advocating the survival of the fittest race.²

Some German officials were shocked, in the summer of 1915, when they first learned of the slaughter of the innocents by their Ottoman allies. They saw the evidence with their own eyes as masses of bodies and body parts floated down the Tigris River. The place was a “perfect hell,” as a June 1, 1915, newspaper described it.³

Talaat, having anticipated his allies’ objections, hadn’t let Germany know about his planned murders in advance. But once the massacre began and the Germans learned the facts, they remained silent. They needed the Ottomans’ help to win the war. But other Germans moved beyond mere complicity to advocacy. The ironically named Hans Humann, Germany’s naval attaché to the Ottoman Empire, a tall, cultured man with a ready smile, thought the Turks’ massacres were an innovative idea for winning a war. And the German military had already used race murder in Namibia in 1904, albeit on a smaller scale.

After the First World War, Humann became the director of Germany’s Naval Intelligence Bureau and promoted Talaat’s activities in Berlin. He later supported the reactionaries’ Kapp Putsch in 1920. When the coup failed, he lost his intelligence job and became a propagandist for genocide as publisher of the racist newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. He urged that Germany’s next wars should be fought in the Turkish style, a euphemism for genocide. It was a template for younger Nazi leaders, like Hitler.⁴ Without influential men like Humann, it is virtually unimaginable that Hitler, a mere corporal, could have reached the first rungs in his ascent to power.

AS TALAAT’S DEPUTIES Enver and Bahaeddin raced about cultivating allies, the deposed dictator remained comfortably ensconced in his home on tony Hardenbergstraße in Berlin, near the Zoological Garden.

MI6 wanted to know why he was in Germany. They had strange reports from several stations about a budding German-Russian-Turkish plot. On October 25, a grey, rainy day, Bell prepared to host the world’s most notorious mass murderer for lunch at his Berlin hotel, the Fürstenhof. It isn’t possible to know precisely what was said between them, but Reuters soon exposed the Grand Vizier’s new role in promoting an alliance with Bolshevism. It seems that the genocidal dictator underestimated Bell, the friendly Canadian reporter, and said too much. But Bell still had a lot of pieces left to puzzle out. He made an appointment with Achim von Arnim, his source on Germany’s General Staff, the military’s internal governing body, to find out more.⁵

Genocidal Turks acting as middlemen between the Nazis and the Soviets was bad enough, but it was not A12’s only October crisis. On Friday, October 3, around one hundred thousand reactionary troops sharpened their bayonets and prepared poison gas shells, high explosives, airplanes, and trench mortars.⁶ They were readying for a sneak attack on Riga, the most important city in the Baltics. If Riga fell, it was hard to see how Baltic democracy could survive.

Meanwhile in Berlin, Bell sat in the parlour of a handsome apartment off Berlin’s posh Pariser Platz, having a “very interesting talk” about the Baltic situation with Arnim. If the extremists had known what Arnim was revealing, the two men would have been next on their hit list.

Arnim was a patriotic hero of the First World War, but he now stood for a class of noblemen who loved Germany, and thus detested the Nazis and wanted to destroy them. But the anti-Nazis needed to act quietly because they were also trying to protect an institution. Military decorum prevented them from shooting their fellow officers, even if they were terrorists. But it was fair game for the British to do the dirty work.

Arnim lived just off Pariser Platz, the heart of Germany’s military establishment as the home of the most prestigious unit, the 1st Foot Guard. Pariser Platz was also the Arnim family’s own ancestral neighbourhood, featuring an impressive manor they had built.

Arnim’s fashionable apartment was behind the casino, which was no gaudy place designed for tourists but one of the world’s most elite military clubs. It featured a beautiful courtyard, reading rooms, dining rooms, a ballroom, and well-appointed game rooms discreetly tucked towards the back. To be a Prussian officer before the Versailles treaty offered pleasures usually reserved for the wealthy. But Allied demands took away a lot of benefits.

That helps explain why some German officers plotted a revolution. They were protecting their vanishing privileges. In 1913, the year before the war began, the German army commanded eight hundred thousand men. The officers occupied an esteemed place in German political life, forming the backbone of the landed Junker class that governed Prussia under the kaiser. During the war, the army swelled to millions and took political power over the whole of Germany. But the Versailles treaty required those forces be cut to a toothless one hundred thousand. In early October 1919, the army stood at four hundred thousand and was rapidly diminishing.

Noblemen like Arnim continued to live in luxury. But for other officers who lacked an aristocratic heritage, their army salary was all they had. Losing it could mean homelessness. Arnim knew that his fellow officers were suffering, and that many had begun subscribing to outlandish anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. Such beliefs were a prerequisite to joining the well-funded reactionary militias. For officers on the brink of poverty, it was a tempting offer.

Bell took note of the splendid quality of the food and wine at Arnim’s cozy apartment. The two men, budding friends, talked over dinner and late into the evening. Meanwhile, Bell gathered Germany’s most important military secrets. He had no need to surreptitiously take papers from Arnim’s safe, because the captain freely gave the information. He had every reason to stop the Nazis.⁷ He was a member of a proud, powerful, and ancient noble family that valued prosperous stability. He knew that the plotters were rocking the boat of state and threatening to swamp it. Worst of all, their Baltic schemes invited the return of the ruinous blockade. It would mean mass death for Germany.

The democratic government and their allied military officers desperately wanted to stop it from happening, which meant showing the British government, through agent A12, all their secrets. It was laughable, as Bell soon wrote, that new British spies were now trying to steal Germany’s military plans. Arnim, who knew everything about the German military, gladly handed over the information voluntarily.

A12 arrived back at his hotel that evening “very late,” as he wrote in his diary. Typing his warning for next-day delivery meant another all-nighter. He couldn’t afford the luxury of sleep. If he convinced Britain to act, then eastern European democracy could be saved. If it fell, the Ukrainian massacres had foreshadowed what would happen to the millions of Jews who lived in the region.

Bell usually signed off with his surname and that of his Reuters editor, William Moloney. But this time, he rolled the first sheet into the typewriter and signed it at the top: “From A.12.”

It meant it was an emergency.

A12’S REPORTS PIECED together a bewildering jigsaw: anti-Jewish propaganda in Berlin, agitation at the Polish border, attacks on Baltic democracy, alliances with anti-Jewish militias in Ukraine, and negotiations with genocidal Turks and murderous Russian communists. At first glance, it seemed like a self-contradictory muddle. But viewed from the proper distance, the true nature of the plot emerged. The Nazis were already fighting the next world war, but subtly. They didn’t want the democratic powers to find out what they were doing and destroy them.

It isn’t certain that Arnim gave Bell his first warning of the coming attack on Riga, since Bell had many sources, but as a member of the General Staff, he would have been in a position to reveal many of the details. Without this shared knowledge, the coming Nazi attack seemed destined to succeed, no matter the outcome. If they won, they would gain vast new territory in the east and then proudly tell the German public, as Bell put it, “See! It is as we have said; we need not have knuckled under to the Allies in the peace terms.” But even if the Nazis lost, they thought they would strengthen themselves by weakening the German government. When the Allies saw “Germans” attacking Riga, without realizing the fringe nature of the aggressors, Britain would surely reinstate the murderous blockade. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Germans could die, as had happened under the 1914–19 blockade. For the Nazis, such a humanitarian disaster would be a double advantage, by destroying German democracy and inflaming the public’s hatred of foreigners. Next, the reactionaries would appear as saviours to rescue the people from the disaster the militarists themselves had created.

One man knew enough to foil their foolproof plans. The Nazis, Bell warned Britain, were preparing to take Riga within days and then use it as a strong point to take the Baltics. Meanwhile, the Baltic troops lacked basic materials, he warned, and saw themselves “as left with little effective supply or support from the Allies.” They needed immediate reinforcements to fight back.

Still worse, Bell knew another storm gathered on the eastern horizon. Two of his sources (a Latvian officer and a German Baltic baron) told him that negotiators were being ferried back and forth between leaders of the Freikorps and the Russian Bolshevists, over what were once battle lines.

Talaat was at the centre of the scheme, but he wouldn’t live to see the fruits of his diplomacy. On March 15, 1921, he left his home on Berlin’s Hardenbergstraße for the last time, on his way to buy gloves. An Armenian patriot, Soghomon Tehlirian, waited outside his door with a concealed Luger P08 pistol. The Young Turks had killed Tehlirian’s family in the wartime genocide. Now he avenged them with a bullet to the base of Talaat’s neck. The Grand Vizier was dead.

Talaat’s body was buried, but the ghost of his genocidal idea lived on. In August 1939, a month before the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler declared to his closest advisors: “I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus [can we gain] the living space [Lebensraum] that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?”⁸ Hitler was the one speaking about it.

In 1943, the führer ordered Talaat’s remains returned to Turkey for a hero’s funeral. Meanwhile, Hitler had adopted the Turk’s clever genocide trick as his own: the Nazi cover story for murdering the Jews was “deportation.” Victims showed up at the train station, valuables in hand, rather than fighting or fleeing. It made the thieves’ and killers’ work easy.

IN FALL 1919, Bell could not yet know Hitler’s plan for worldwide genocide. But he was sure the extremists’ union of nationalism and socialism would not be in line with “the famous Eltzbacher programme,” as he put it with a bit of irony—the plan was “famous” in MI6 thanks to Bell’s reports. The scheme is one of the virtually unknown ideas that changed history. Paul Eltzbacher was a German Jewish professor who wrote a book called Bolshevism and Germany’s Future (Der Bolschewismus und die deutsche Zukunft). It appeared in spring 1919 and proposed a national socialism to counter fears that Russian socialism would take over Germany. Eltzbacher’s modest proposal: German socialists would lead the German movement, Russian socialists would lead the Russian movement, and so on, in an anarchic, peaceful world commune.

Other than the peaceful part, the idea was attractive to right-wing German nationalists. Eltzbacher’s idea resolved a terrible conundrum for the racists: If radical socialism was destined to take over Germany, which now was inevitable, and they hated the idea that socialism was dominated by Russians, why not just make a German version that they would control? Eltzbacher’s national socialism wasn’t antisemitic, but the parasitical Nazi version added the dangerous new feature to what would have otherwise been a footnote to Marx.

The plot was growing in strength. Bell reported that an agent of the communists, Karl Moor (a principal intermediary between Ludendorff and Lenin in the takedown of the Russian tsar at the end of the First World War), was recently in Berlin for a long talk with General Ludendorff, leader of the racist militarists. For the German-Russian-Austrian-Swiss spy Moor, it could mean another big payday, and he needed it. His addiction was women, and they were addicted to expensive baubles. Moor needed four spy salaries to pay the bills.

Moor was well positioned to help men like Ludendorff and Lenin—later succeeded by Hitler and Stalin—establish a new socialist world order. It was the kind of team that could destroy liberal democracy and rule the world. Joseph Stalin, secretary general of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, was pleased with Moor’s work and signed his birthday card in 1926.⁹

At 4 a.m. on the morning after his meeting with Arnim, Bell pounded away on his typewriter in his hotel room, describing Nazi weaknesses that could be exploited on the cusp of their invasion of Riga. For all its firepower, Bell wrote, right-wing extremism was not popular. Most of its troops were pure mercenaries. They would just as soon fight for the leftist Spartacists, depending on who offered the most money. In the face of concerted opposition, the reactionary troops would evaporate from the battlefield because a paycheque was not worth dying for.

He also described their strengths. The reactionaries were well armed, funded, and schooled in warfare. They could easily win the coming war for the Baltic if the Allies did not act quickly to stop them. A12 explained that a whole series of British blunders had brought the Baltic situation to near the point of ruin. The Allies’ demand that Germany’s army rapidly demobilize had given the Nazis a huge supply of former soldiers to hire. But still worse was Britain’s decision to abandon Riga the previous year and let German troops take over. It was a gambit to stop the communists, but a foolish one since the reactionaries were hardly an improvement.

And yet, Bell continued, the situation was still not lost. The courageous Balts were willing to fight back. But they needed help from Britain to combat overwhelming firepower.

At 6:30 a.m., an hour before sunrise, he wrote the closing words of his report: “For the moment we have the turning of the key; if we go about it the right way.” Despite his exhaustion, he walked quickly through an unseasonably warm and rainy morning to the British Military Mission to deliver the message. He knew that minutes could make the difference between victory and defeat.

His dispatch was encoded and transmitted to London. Once again, millions of lives hung in the balance.

Britain heeded A12’s warning. The military command issued orders to load weapons on their fastest ships. Battle-hardened Baltic volunteers who’d been fighting communists in northern Russia also boarded Allied ships to defend their homeland.

The German attack on Riga began four days after Bell’s warning, at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 8. German airplanes roared overhead, strafing Latvian positions. An artillery barrage from armoured trains and trench mortars dropped poisonous gas and high explosives. Armoured cars advanced towards the Daugava River with machine guns blazing. Lines of soldiers, experienced in stormtrooper tactics (the German military had created the elite Sturmabteilung units in 1915), advanced in well-trained formations. Simultaneously, the Nazis back in Berlin launched their attack on the country’s free press. They banned the newspaper Freiheit, which had warned the public about their schemes.

Everything seemed to have been planned perfectly, but the Nazis were surprised that their attack did not slice through Riga as they had expected. Still outside of the city, the defenders greeted the Germans with a stifling wall of defensive fire. Owing to Bell’s superb intelligence and early warning, the attackers had lost the element of surprise.

A few hours after the attack began, Hugo Haase, a leading Independent Socialist in the German parliament and a rumoured source for British intelligence, knew it was time to act.¹⁰ Powerful governmental collaborators in Berlin had illegally supported the Baltic invasion, and he would expose it. Just before 1 p.m., Haase strode towards the Reichstag building, the seat of German democracy, ready to announce the plot. He never made it to the podium. At the corner of Simeonstraße and Sommerstraße, just outside the Reichstag, a well-dressed man, Johann Voss, pulled a revolver and fired six shots. Three bullets struck, piercing Haase’s abdomen, arm, and leg. The German communists said it was a nationalist hit.

While Haase lay bleeding, Latvian troops blew up bridges over the Daugava River to slow the German advance and assumed defensive positions at the bridgeheads. The two sides exchanged fire across the river. Many of the Latvian dead were civilians.

The Germans attacked through the night, “in overwhelming numerical superiority and armed with all modern technical weapons,” as a reporter wrote.¹¹ Meanwhile, the Latvians lacked good equipment, and some were even barefoot. But what they lacked in material, they made up in pluck and home-field advantage. When the Germans broke through the first line, the second line—“Riga schoolboys of 16, handling rifles for the first time in their lives”¹²—held firm.

Latvian sharpshooters picked off German troops from the cover of thick woods. The defenders, badly outnumbered, tried to hold on until reinforcements could arrive. Help was on the way. The German forces were superior on land, but the British controlled the seas. By Saturday, fifty thousand Baltic troops who’d fought with the British and French at Archangel in northern Russia began arriving by British steamship. Estonian and Lithuanian soldiers also came to help fight. They knew that if their neighbour fell, their own countries would be next. British ships began firing on Nazi positions. German artillery returned fire. On October 17, HMS Dragon took three shells from the shore batteries. Nine sailors died. It was a distraction for the German artillery to need to fire towards land and sea, and they lost more momentum.

Riga’s ports were in ruin. The old city, near the waterfront, was heavily damaged. But Riga itself held on. Latvian volunteers rushed to join the defences. Adoring citizens threw flowers at new soldiers on their way to the front.

On Saturday, November 8, the British general Alfred Burt, stationed in Riga, proudly announced: “To-day’s operations concluded the second battle of Riga . . . The German Iron Division was defeated and thrown back in disorder to Olai midway between Riga and Mitau having abandoned three heavy and eight field guns, numerous trench mortars and machine guns. Town now free from German bombardment, demonstrations taking place in front of Allied Missions.”¹³ The demonstrators were “heartily thanking” the British navy for their “magnificent work.”

They could not, however, thank Bell. His contribution was secret, as usual. But without his intelligence, the Baltic democracies would have surely fallen to armies of mass murderers. A12’s information gathering and urgent report helped the initially outnumbered defenders defeat the powerful Nazis and Soviets, both at once.

The two Goliaths did not forgive their humiliation.

Chapter 14

Terrorism and Communism

Bolshevik terrorism begins with the abolition of all freedom of the press and culminates in a system of mass shootings.

—KARL KAUTSKY, TERRORISMUS UND KOMMUNISMUS

Britain had an urgent question for A12 to answer. How could a hundred thousand heavily armed German troops blast Riga with artillery fire and blanket its suburbs with poison gas?

If official Germany were responsible, it would mean war. That the government was behind the atrocities seemed an obvious conclusion, given the complicated logistics involved in moving and supplying an invading army. But Bell advised that this interpretation was wrong. The Baltic invasion, he wrote to HQ, was supported by “German Military elements behind the back and against the will of the Government.” That meant the Allies should target the rebellious faction and leave the German nation alone.

As it turned out, Bell held an intercepted letter that could change the course of history. It was six days after he filed his first Baltic report. Britain was leaning towards blaming Germany for the attacks and restarting the paused Great War. But the letter was dramatic evidence exonerating the country from guilt. It was a private note from a German officer in the Baltic, informing his family back home that his forces were attacking without their government’s permission.

Bell’s story ran in the newspapers the next day.¹ The essence of phenomenology is evidence, and the letter was evidence of the essence of Germany’s innocence. Bell’s pro bono work as democracy’s defence attorney succeeded, and his client was declared not guilty by the Allied powers. The alternative was the death penalty: a resumption of the blockade would have killed many innocent Germans.

Instead of attacking Germany itself, the Allies realized they should conduct a surgical strike against the reactionaries in eastern Europe.² It was the opposite of what the Nazis expected. They thought the Allies would attack Germany and leave them alone to continue marauding in the east.

Bell’s argument about Germany’s innocence became an editorial line of British newspapers by Monday, October 13. The punishment needed to fit the crime. A new blockade on the entire country was too enormous. But official Germany, Bell urged, needed to take responsibility for cracking down on the rebels. The next day, the reactionaries fell back before the Baltic counterattack.

The Nazis, Bell explained, were not deceiving just the German government. Their troop movements from Germany to the Baltic were happening right under the noses of the Allied armies, even in the occupied Rhineland. It was urgent to learn how it was happening. Were Allied officers clueless? Or were some complicit? And if complicit, then why?

The Baltic invasion had required impressive organization. A hundred thousand German troops needed food, money, weapons, ammunition, and travel passes. The attack was even more impressive for happening in almost complete secrecy. Bell reported on October 3, before the fighting started, that large military detachments were passing through German army depots—for example, at Graudenz, where trainloads of arms and ammunition headed east. The ministry in Berlin was clueless about it until Bell told them. As soon as they learned what was happening, they worked to shut down the flow.

Bell’s pragmatism meant solving problems, not just describing them. All the government parties, Bell knew, were “extremely apprehensive” about Allied reprisals falling on the whole of Germany as punishment for the actions of a few, and that meant they were keen to help Bell cut the flow of money, without which the mercenaries would wither. With the aid of his intel, one of his well-placed sources, an undersecretary in Deutschland’s Foreign Office, began uncovering the sources of funding for Pavel Bermont (sometimes spelled Bermondt-Avalov), a White Russian who was the titular head of the army invading Riga.³ That a Russian mercenary was chosen as leader of largely German troops seemed part of the ruse to distract from the real nature of the attack.

Meanwhile, rebel German troops led by racist nationalists bent on a war of revenge crossed through Insterburg and Memel with leave passes signed by their commanders. The only way to stop reinforcements from reaching the Baltic, Bell advised, was to temporarily suspend all leave. General Malcolm picked up on the suggestion and advanced it to the Foreign Office in mid-October. Preventing German mercenaries from heading to the front by refusing them travel passes meant the main force would lack reinforcements to keep up the fight.

Nazi recruiting had gone on for months without the Allies or official Germany noticing. The surreptitious preparation of a secret army was enabled, Bell explained, by the residual power of the old regime. On paper, democracy had deposed the kaiser’s government in the November Revolution. But a year later, Germany’s democratic government was impoverished and ineffectual. The country still included many little military fiefdoms. If the local political-military chief was a reactionary, he could easily recruit soldiers for the Baltic adventure by word of mouth.

The German police had discovered one Baltic recruiting organization, run out of the Hotel de Russie in Berlin, and reported it to the War Office. There, Bell explained, it was “hushed up,” apparently by warmongers. Noske, the minister of defence, and Albert Grzesinski, under-secretary of state in the Prussian War Ministry, were “completely hoodwinked by their officers in everything pertaining to Reactionary movements.”

On October 2, six days before their attack on Riga began, the plotters finally abandoned secrecy and recruited troops in the open. It was a desperate race to rush troops to the front lines for the coming battle. The scheme of the Baltic armies was, Bell warned, “complete occupation of these lands as the basis for a victorious advance of the Reaction in Germany and Russia with a final Alliance of the two into which it was hoped to draw Japan, etc.” Riga was just the opening act for the next Great War, and the Nazis had already largely settled on the team they would use to fight it.

While British military officials worked on their plan to thwart the invaders at Riga with shells and bullets, Bell worked on a plan to disrupt the larger plot. He knew that money was essential to the militarists’ functioning. If their funding ended, the rebellion would die. Mercenary troops would refuse to advance on enemy gunfire for free. A12 reported to MI6 that he had “succeeded in arousing the serious concerns of people” in Berlin about the sources of Bermont’s funding. German democracy was smart enough to listen to Bell’s advice.

On October 10, Bell reported that the extremists’ so-called West Russian Army carried a year’s worth of ammunition for the fight in the Baltic, and enough money to last a few months. A German officer involved in the transfer, who then quit in disgust, told him that “officers in charge of military magazines in Germany have been sending military supplies of all kinds to the Baltic forces.”

Bell learned that German industrialists were another source of Bermont’s funds. They gave money in greedy anticipation of stealing Baltic industry for themselves. The Freikorps had raised the enormous sum of 200 million marks from German heavy industry. A source with a prominent position in the Steel Syndicate, likely industrialist Hugo Stinnes, was Bell’s informant. In 1919 he offered to support, through Bell, an alliance between German democracy and Britain. And if Britain didn’t respond to his offer? His fellow industrialists could find profitable friends among the reactionaries.

Bermont also had other revenue streams for his Baltic adventure. German Baltic nobles gave support totalling in the “many millions.” They wanted their old power back again. Rebel officers surreptitiously overbilled their government when their presence in the Baltic was still an officially sanctioned mission. And White Russians, numbering approximately fifty thousand in Berlin, provided further support through the Russian Committee, located at 16 In den Zelten in Berlin, next door to Ernest Brain of the London Times.

Bell’s efforts helped to dry up the rebels’ easy money. He let his government sources in Berlin know, and their attention to the illegal transactions began to freeze them up. Soon, Bermont’s desperation for funds led his agents to fall for a ludicrous swindle. The trickster was a man masquerading as a representative of J.P. Morgan, the American financier. According to the swindle, Morgan promised the invaders 300 million marks to capture the Baltic countries. The collateral was none other than the Baltics themselves. After the reactionaries signed the paperwork, the confidence man revealed the details of the negotiations to Germany’s Independent Socialists.

Bell sat coughing at his typewriter in his unheated hotel room. It wasn’t a cheap place, but heat couldn’t be taken for granted in Berlin. After a while, he took a break from writing his latest dispatch to read the new book by his source Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism. Kautsky was the clearest-eyed socialist since Marx himself. His book indicted the German Social Democrats and the Russian Bolsheviks for turning to terrorism early in their rule. Both groups were willing to indiscriminately kill non-combatants to defend themselves and the “Revolution,” Kautsky asserted. It was far from Marx’s hope for peaceful transfer of power.

Kautsky was smart enough to see a lot, even though Bell suspected that Marxism would not work even under peaceful conditions, because it suppressed the motivation for individuals to take risks and work hard, and put non-expert bureaucrats in control of highly specialized businesses. But he also knew that Kautsky, almost uniquely among Germany’s population, understood that his country was the primary author of the First World War.

Bell ensured that Kautsky’s reports circulated in the British press. They showed the English-speaking world an emergent German willingness to confront the truth. But Bell also knew that the more the extremists grew in strength, the less people like Kautsky could make a difference.

ON OCTOBER 18, Bell’s diary records a trip to the Foreign Office about travel passes. This likely meant that he was advising them to shut down the passes that soldiers were using to travel to participate in the Baltic fighting. Later he went to the new British embassy, where he dined with General Malcolm and other officers, along with several of his fellow newspapermen. That day he also met Gerald Hamilton, journalist and British spy, at the Adlon Hotel.

The new British embassy, whose creation Bell had earlier demanded, was finally set up. Bell himself proudly reported it in the October 23 Pall Mall Gazette.⁴ Soon after opening, the embassy hosted his new living, breathing life insurance policy: Achim von Arnim. If A12 were killed in action, then his information could live on through Arnim, who could tell the British whatever they needed to know to keep track of the reactionary plots.

As for the situation in Russia, Bell reported bad news and good. The bad news was that it looked like the communists would win there. The British newspapers, by contrast, reported that the communists were failing. But Bell knew that whoever gave the Russian peasants land, and the means to work it, “is tomorrow master of Russia.” Lenin figured out the magic formula, but the Allies did not.

There could be no time for mourning Russia’s loss. Intel pragmatism meant moving on to next chances. The good news was that the Allies could now reallocate troops from the lost Russian cause to defending the Baltic democracies against predators.⁵

The Baltics were, Bell’s winning argument went, an excellent chance. While countries around the world struggled to throw off Britain’s imperial yoke, the richly forested Baltic lands wanted to enter an alliance because the British offered much better terms than the Nazis and Soviets. The partnership, Bell added, would make sense for the British too. A stable London–Riga line would influence the future reconstruction of Russia, as well as defeat the “Eyes East” policy of the reactionaries. It would also mean lucrative opportunities for British finance.

The German government was just as eager for collaboration with the Allies. “It is hardly too much to say that we have the chance, by effective support of the present Government, to make Germany our Satellite.” The democrats detested France, but they still reflected upon any course of action with the question: “What will England’s attitude be?” Even as the Nazi shadow government was negotiating with the Soviets, Germany’s official government genuinely loved British democracy. Bell offered to arrange the marriage. He knew Germans in high-ranking positions, “anxious for good relations with England, who could be relied on for information.”

The only way to begin the courtship would be for Britain to take the initiative, “by getting together a conference of Allied financiers with German financial and industrial leaders for a candid review of the situation.” The opportunity would not last for long. The longer Britain distrusted and undermined democratic Germany, the more the antisemitic reactionaries strengthened. “The chance that we have now to consolidate our leadership in Central and Eastern Europe seems to me unique. The opportunity will not last.”

Every day the reactionaries grew stronger. After Bell’s six-week absence from Germany, he was shocked, upon his return, to see how much the militarists had grown in power. They were once a laughingstock. Now it was easy to spot them by their walk. Others slouched, but the Nazis walked jauntily, their chests puffed out and chins upturned. They strutted like members of ancient Rome’s Praetorian Guard, the power behind the throne. Within Germany, no one could oppose them. The country’s democracy urgently needed British help “to overcome the growing danger of an extreme reaction towards the ‘Right.’” If the extremists won, it would mean a government of mass murderers, and anyone in Europe might be their next victims.

Bell had thwarted the racist army in Silesia, Danzig, and the Baltics. But the terrorists would never stop trying until they won or were utterly defeated. The fight needed to enter Berlin to beat them for the final time.

As usual, A12 had a plan.

Chapter 15

The One Hope for the World

Doctor Bell, behind your present work must be found the one hope for the world. Garvin says if this fails the world will be such a place that it will be better not to be born into it.

—MAY S. CUMMING, FIRST LADY OF MI6, 1919¹

A decrepit night train rattled out of Aachen station towards Brussels. It was November 4, 1919. Agent A12 was on board, watching the dirty smoke of poor-quality coal thicken the rainy night air. Soon they were away from the city lights, and everything merged into darkness. He sat in the corridor on his luggage. Germans were escaping a hungry and brutal country for a better life abroad, which meant all the seats were taken. Exhausted, and with nothing else to do for a while, he went to sleep.

Nazi assassins were picking off their German opponents one by one and preparing their takeover of the government. Yet Winthrop Bell didn’t seem worried that these killers might have followed him onto the train. His diary records that he dozed that night on his bags. Though he seemed vulnerable, his cover was well-played. A great spy is not easily noticed.

Bell had discovered the reactionaries’ secret. They were now fighting the next stage of the Great War, the nakedly racial part. He knew their weaknesses, and how to destroy them. The only things that could stop him were a Nazi assassin or British government indifference to MI6’s latest intelligence coup.

In the middle of the night, Bell awoke from his agitated sleep. He stared out the train’s window into the darkness. He thought about how to convince the British to act. If they did, the speeding train of the German state would arrive at peaceful co-existence with its democratic neighbours. And if they did not, Europe would soon be a fiery wreck.

His job as an intelligence agent was to point out the tendencies and possibilities anonymously, and let the voters and politicians take public credit for action. A democratic Germany that became rich through British start-up aid would enrich Britain as well. A desperate and vengeful Germany would be another matter.

A12 knew about the antisemitic evil lurking in Germany’s shadows, and he had informed the Secret Intelligence Service about the danger. But that MI6 knew did not mean all of Britain and the democratic world knew. He had been allowed to give some details of the threat to the press, but the full description was still top secret. Bell wanted his evidence declassified so that the public could understand the great danger—and how to defeat it. He was planning to write a book that would warn the public about the anti-Jewish hidden army whose aim was “reaction” in Deutschland and “vengeance” abroad.² He would also show the free world how to defeat the plot before it had a chance to leave Germany.

But persuading the British government to declassify the warning would prove to be an even greater challenge than unmasking the Nazis had been. Prime Minister David Lloyd George would not publish Bell’s report without a sign-off from the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office, in turn, was not of a single mind. Influential people like Hankey and Headlam-Morley were convinced by Bell’s arguments. Others defended the status quo. And still others wanted Germany’s right-wing militarists to grow stronger because they thought it would weaken communism.

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of Britons were now travelling to Germany. They tended to stay in central Berlin, with its boisterous nightclub scene and fine restaurants supplied from the black market. From their perspective, Germany could seem like the best place ever. The capital was decadent, drug-fuelled, and giddy. Only a philosophical visitor could see that it was actually a nightmare. The frenzy gave Britain the illusion of an immoral prosperity, stoking visions of heavy reparations payments that would serve the Huns right. But Bell knew the reality just beyond the garish nightlife, where infants were malnourished and mercenaries sharpened their bayonets for revenge.

Germany’s civil war continued like a low-grade fever. Agricultural regions threatened to withhold food from the cities because the government mandated fixed prices far below farmers’ costs. But the city folk demanded food, or else. Raiding parties from urban areas, Bell reported, attacked agricultural regions; at Stettin, marauders high-jacked a train filled with food and brought it back to the city. At the same time, the coal-mining regions were in a “state of siege,” with machine-gun towers at the entrances to villages.

The country was on the brink of even worse violence. German regions did not just vote differently; they hated each other. The reactionary strength was strongest in the north and east of the country, and weakest in the west, centre, and south. (In the 1933 election, when the Nazis became the governing party, their vote totals were highest in the north and east.) Some militias, Bell knew, were fighting in self-defence, but others were predators. Britain quickly needed to learn the difference. London also needed to know about the plotters who blamed everything on the Jews and called for their murder.

Soon Bell was on a luxury steamship from Ostend, Belgium, to England. The miserable night train seemed to belong to a different world. His diary noted his astonishment at the frivolity of the Americans in the first-class section, shamelessly carrying on with their Belgian mistresses. At war’s end, a centuries-old rigid code of stiff-collared propriety had suddenly gone out of fashion. Now the modern world seemed to take its cues from the delirious excitement of defeated Berlin. It meant imitating a mirage.

On Thursday, November 6, his ship reached Dover, and he boarded a comfortable Pullman train. That night, he checked into London’s centrally located Charing Cross Hotel, room 297. He awoke to rough and cloudy weather. He began his morning rounds at the Nova Scotia Bureau, which represented the province’s interests in London and served as a natural conduit for Bell’s intel to his sponsors in Ottawa. He then continued to MI6 headquarters at Whitehall, where he met Colonel Stewart Menzies, deputy of MI6 (and its future chief during the Second World War), for a long talk. Later he met with Maurice Hankey.

Soon he would be at politicians’ offices to make the pitch to declassify and publish his planned book. It was the phenomenal story of the secret Nazi plot to win a race war. It also gave instructions for how to destroy them, in two steps.

MI6 did not hold the power to declassify his plan. It was up to the Foreign Office, which housed the secret service, and then to the prime minister. But Lloyd George would not move without Foreign Office approval. If someone powerful vetoed it, the document would not get to Lloyd George’s desk for a signature.

In the evenings, exhausted after his many meetings, A12 walked back to his hotel under bright Sirius, “whose burning breath,” as Homer said, “taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death.”

Bell’s job had now changed from collecting secret intelligence abroad to communicating it at home. He needed to unite the government, non-governmental organizations, public intellectuals, financiers, and the media. The effort made his schedule diverse. Some days he visited Sir Maurice Bonham-Carter (grandfather of the actress Helena Bonham Carter and also a relative of the actor Laurence Olivier), who in turn introduced Bell to friends such as the famous intellectuals Graham Wallas and Baron Sidney Webb (who, along with George Bernard Shaw, turned the Fabian Society into the premier leftist think tank in England). Another day he lunched with two leaders of the British pacifists, Catherine Marshall and the influential philosopher Bertrand Russell. Then Marshall drove Bell to meet the future Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Angell, who argued that genuine conquest by war is an illusion. Angell also knew that since some countries believed in the illusion, their neighbours needed militaries for self-defence.

Bell also met at MI6 headquarters with Sir Desmond Morton, who was named head of the Foreign Intelligence Service in 1919 (and who would serve as Winston Churchill’s liaison to MI6 during the Second World War), and with Sir Robert Nathan, head of the Political Section. Owing to Bell’s intel, the future heads of MI6 and military intelligence—the ones who would lead the intelligence fight in the next world war—now heard alarming details about the growing Nazi threat.

Day after day, Bell came back to the Charing Cross Hotel “very late,” when London’s streets, at the heart of the world’s greatest empire, were deserted. It was a strange sight after the non-stop hustle and vibrant nightlife of Berlin. A visitor to the two cities, naive about the actual outcome of the Great War, might have wrongly guessed the winner. London looked like it was in mourning, while the Berliners in the cabarets seemed to be celebrating.

Bell was much too busy to party, even if he had wanted to. His nights were full of diplomatic meetings and fact-finding missions. Then, despite his exhaustion, he still couldn’t sleep once he got back to the hotel. Instead, he sat in front of his typewriter, writing his manuscript until the early hours of the morning. He was still writing on spec because his discoveries would remain top secret until the government said otherwise.

His friends had connections to the influential publisher Stanley Unwin, but Bell knew just as well as Unwin did that the book could be published only if was declassified first. If the Foreign Office signed off on it, his book could become an international bestseller. Otherwise, it would end up as the rarest kind of new book, found only in a secret service library.

Either way, he had a tight deadline, and his workload seemed suicidal. Earlier in the year, Husserl worried that his former student was killing himself with overwork. Now, back in London, Bell typically slept only two or three hours, sometimes waking up draped over his desk.

One evening, his diary reported, “Very cold. Very late. Heart troubles.” It was an open question whether he would live long enough to finish typing his magnum opus, which was due in December. He needed to write his whole manuscript in a month. His diary doesn’t offer a reason for the tight deadline, but it may simply have been self-imposed. He knew the moment for London to act was slipping away.

His bronchitis caused him more problems. His heart kept beating, even though London’s dirty industrial air was not helping his inflammation. But at least he could do something about that with an escape to the English countryside. He accepted an invitation from Michael Pease, his friend from Ruhleben, to stay at the family’s compound in Limpsfield. It was far enough from the city for fresh, clean air, but close enough to get back for urgent meetings.

Bell set up his typewriter in the guest room and got to work. He kept warm in front of a fire with the Peases through a “big storm” on the second of December and a “violent storm” on the fourth. And then he went back to his room and typed.

He knew he couldn’t begin his book with the Nazis. Who would believe him? Without context, they would come across as a big joke. So first, he needed to set the stage of Germany’s misery. Only then could the antisemitic villains make their entrance.

His manuscript began by describing the atmosphere in Germany. The once-orderly country was now grimy, hungry, and crime-ridden. Most people could not afford soap or clothes, and even if they could, there was little to be bought. Armed men roamed the streets, ransacked farmlands, and shot each other dead to steal what they needed to feed their families.

Even German schoolchildren, Bell wrote, knew what was coming. Liberal democracy, which had protected the Jews, was first on the Nazis’ hit list. “The son of an independent democratic publicist (himself a nobleman, who has ably and fearlessly exposed hypocrisy in all circles) tells that his school comrades say to him: ‘This winter there will be renewed Spartacist uprisings. The government can not do anything. The military will quell them. Then comes the Reaction; and then your father will be hung.’”

The first stage to beating the Nazis was the easy part. To save democracy, Britain needed to demand that Germany disarm the extremist militias. Bell’s intel could help. The reactionaries were the strongest force in Germany, but many of their troops would melt away in a moment if the Allies firmly showed their support for democracy. Even the extremists knew “their hour had not yet come.” They knew only war and preparation for war. They weren’t ready for war yet, so they prepared. They “know very well that without adequate artillery, and with their resources in the present state, armed action against the Allies is a madness quite out of the question for decades to come.”

One remaining crucial advantage for the free world, Bell reported, was that the revolutionaries still needed a “figure-head and a leader.” He couldn’t know yet, nor could the Nazis, how effective a leader they’d soon find in Adolf Hitler, who thought like the terrorist officers but had the credential of being an ordinary enlisted man. At a time when resentment of Germany’s leadership was running high, a mere corporal like Hitler could be a more effective chief for the movement than a powerful figure like Ludendorff.

As for morale among the reactionaries, Bell wrote, it was insufficient to take over the country immediately. “At present the officers might perhaps count on their troops for a week or two.” The leaders had no regard for enemy life, but they also knew enough about the morality of the soldiers under their command to realize that they wouldn’t fire into unarmed crowds of their fellow citizens for very long.

Once again, A12 was right. Several months after his warning, on March 12, 1920, a group of reactionaries, the Freikorps Ehrhardt Brigade, “who were already good Nazis in all but name,” as Sebastian Haffner put it, marched under the Brandenburg Gate and seized control of government offices in Berlin.³ Their symbol was the swastika, and their message was “Jews Out!”⁴

During the coup, the Munich Nazis sent Adolf Hitler by airplane to Berlin to establish communications with the leaders. But by the time Hitler made it to the city, the terrorists had already failed in their attempt. On March 18, their troops retreated from Berlin, firing machine guns on the way. Just as Bell had predicted in the fall, Nazi strength was sufficient to briefly seize the country, not to control it.

But despite the failures, the reactionaries kept up their other preparations, like using militias to train Germany’s young people as fighters for their future war. As Bell wrote in late 1919, the country’s current fighting-aged population was sick of war. Thus, “the Reaction is bending all its energies toward captivating the imagination of the next generation.” They needed to cultivate young people who would be their future stormtroopers and train them to fire into unarmed crowds as long as it took to win. Bell was warning about the first green shoots of the movement that Hitler renamed, in 1926, the Hitler Youth. It was one more idea that the führer popularized under his own name, without creating it.

For all the future danger, Bell realized that the clandestine Nazis of 1919 weren’t just waiting for tomorrow. They knew “an armed force might not come amiss at the crucial moment” and were hard at work building their secret army. Therefore, A12’s plan urged disbanding the extremist militias. But that was the easy part of his two-part plan to destroy the reactionaries forever.

The second—and harder—part was for Britain to arrange financial aid to democratic Germany to restore its factories to production and employ its citizens. Otherwise, the terrorist organizations would disband only to recreate themselves under new names. But if the German economy were humming, young men would prefer stable jobs that did not involve mortal risk.

This part of Bell’s plan was more difficult because economic orthodoxy held that the British government needed to drastically reduce expenditures after accumulating enormous debts fighting the war. Now Bell added economist to his impressive list of job responsibilities. He argued for an exception to that orthodoxy: Britain should temporarily increase spending, he advised, despite deficits, to allow an important trading partner to function again. Germany’s reparations could then be paid from future profits, and Britain would benefit from having a friendly trading partner in an innovative industrial state.

Bell’s plan advanced to the next stage. Headlam-Morley, his ally on the Silesian negotiations in Paris, asked him to co-lead the Foreign Office’s effort to rescue Germany from ruin. Bell’s job was to drum up support in private finance, while Headlam-Morley lobbied the government.

Bell knew that Britain was not rich enough to act alone. But it had the knowledge and the connections to lead the international effort. Private financiers would provide funding, while governments guaranteed against losses. Democratic Germany, Bell insisted, would leap towards salvation. The success of the endeavour was certain. Germany had idle factories, highly skilled workers, and many of the world’s most brilliant researchers. The country just needed money to start producing again.

Meanwhile, the German government would eagerly agree to any reasonable reforms to rescue the country. The gratitude of the people, Bell urged, would be enormous and lasting. The alternative—continuing with the status quo—would mean “a temporary and grudging show of pacification under our dictates.” That, in turn, would punish Germany’s democracy, empower its extremists, and form the prelude to war.

The moment was already slipping towards the worse possibility. The educated classes were inching towards the reactionaries and their promise to restore order. Soon “no belated evidence of a willingness to live and let live would alter the trend of political sentiment.”

Prime Minister Robert Borden had supported Bell’s peace plan since December 1918. And over time, A12 had convinced a growing group of people, apparently including C. (Bell wrote to Headlam-Morley about the approval of an unnamed man who had just won a “signal honour” for naval intelligence. This was likely code for Cumming, who had recently been appointed Knight Commander.)

Bell worked harder than ever to fulfill his commission to save Germany and Europe from destruction. Surrounded by blank pages, his journal entry on Monday, December 8, 1919, reads simply: “DESPERATE WORK.” He had made detailed entries in his diary even during the brutal springtime civil war in Berlin.

His proposal for the financial reconstruction of Germany and Europe appeared in the press on January 16, 1920, in a coordinated release. Bell saved the Daily Telegraph’s version among his personal papers. Its headline: “EUROPE’S PERIL: GRAVE DANGERS OF THE FINANCIAL SITUATION.” The Globe was as serious: “ON VERGE OF CATASTROPHE.” The Daily News reported: “GREAT WORLD DANGER.”

The bold headlines could seem like a perplexing mismatch with the stories that followed. Isn’t war interesting and finance boring? Now Bell proposed a heroic turn for the investment classes. They would be the leaders of the new chivalry, giving a helping hand to defeated adversaries, rather than plundering them. But for private finance to do anything required government backing, because Germany’s desperate situation could be resolved only with the strength of a public–private partnership.

Lord Robert Cecil of the Foreign Office was on board with Bell’s plan. His Lordship wrote to the press and to the British government with a proposal to create an international financial commission to save Europe from doom. It was the last, best hope to avoid the Second World War. The UK signatories were exceptionally influential men, among them Herbert Asquith, the former British prime minister; Sir Donald Maclean, leader of the opposition Labour Party; the railway union leader J.H. Thomas; and chairmen, directors, and partners of the Bank of England, Lloyds, and Barclays.

Meanwhile, British guns were only one battery in the full-scale assault. Powerful men in the US (including Herbert Hoover and J.P. Morgan⁵), France, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway signed on. It was the moral equivalent of war. Cecil’s joint letter declared: “The outlook at present is dark . . . Only if we recognize that the time has now come when all countries must help one another can we look forward to the restoration of normal conditions and to the end of our present evil . . . [N]o time must be lost if catastrophes are to be prevented.” As the Daily News summarized, “For the sake of their creditors and of the world, Germany and Austria must not be rendered bankrupt.”⁶

And if a British-led financial rescue did not happen? Then there would be “dark . . . catastrophes” and “evil” would abound.

The Second World War and its seventy-five million dead proved the prediction was no exaggeration.

Chapter 16

Lord No and Sir No

Rather depressed.

—WINTHROP BELL’S DIARY, JANUARY 23, 1920

On January 8, 1920, Winthrop Bell received an answer to his request to declassify his manuscript so that it could be published as a book.

No.

Harold Russell of the Foreign Office’s Political Intelligence Department passed on the bad news. Bell appealed the decision, but two weeks later, he heard a second definitive no. He now faced an agony common to intelligence agents throughout history: he knew important secrets, but they needed to stay hidden, even if secrecy was a devastating mistake.

It was not all bad tidings, though. He couldn’t publish the whole manuscript under his own name, but he was given permission to publish excerpts anonymously, provided that the Foreign Office signed off first. What came out in the press was some, but not all, of the story. For instance, the Foreign Office let Bell name Germany’s “secret army.” But he couldn’t publicly name its antisemitic character or reveal its plans to fight a new world war. And without the Nazis standing in the “or else” column, it could easily look as if he were promoting an expensive campaign to be nice to Germany while Britain was facing serious post-war budgetary difficulties.

Why was Bell’s springtime 1919 report on the blockade and the German food situation declassified and sent to Parliament, while his December 1919 report received the freezing touch of top-secret classification? One important reason was that Prime Minister Borden was now back in Canada, having left Paris on May 11. When he lived in Europe, he simply handed Bell’s reports to anyone he liked, including prime ministers and powerful statesmen. Borden outranked Britain’s Foreign Office. Bell, as a secret agent, did not.

Villainy and incompetence were also at play, with Lord Arthur Hardinge and Sir Lancelot Oliphant the chief villains or incompetents. On one occasion, Headlam-Morley innocently gave the two men, influential figures in the Foreign Office, a clue about what was coming next from Bell. Lord No and Sir No quickly got to work shooting it down. Hardinge wrote: “I have no knowledge of Mr. Winthrop Bell,” even though he had reviewed Bell’s Silesian reports. Then the lord flippantly added, “It is so easy to write that the figure-heads in the Foreign Office will not move,” but what can be done “beyond uttering platitudes of friendly intentions towards a regenerated Germany?”¹

It was absurd. Bell urged financial and political support, not platitudes. But Hardinge didn’t care to find out the details. Was it because of his secret sympathies with the Nazis? The historical record shows that he was later among the earliest champions of the policy of appeasing the Fascists, urging in a 1935 speech to the House of Lords that Britain do nothing substantive to oppose Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. London’s decision to sit on the sidelines then provided the architecture for the appeasement of Hitler’s aggression towards Czechoslovakia. And in 1938, at a time when Hitler belligerently threatened Germany’s neighbours, Hardinge signed on to a letter declaring that “real friendship and co-operation between Great Britain and Germany are essential to the establishment of enduring peace.”² Most of the signatories to the letter were openly pro-Nazi.

If Hardinge’s sabotage of Bell’s plan has a possibly sinister air, the scheme of tall, dome-headed Sir Lancelot Oliphant—named Lancelot for the man who betrayed King Arthur and destroyed the Round Table—looks merely bumbling by comparison. Oliphant wrote that he was “inclined to doubt the desirability of encouraging Mr. Winthrop Bell in the sense he suggests.”³

Oliphant was, as the historian Simon Tate puts it, a man who sometimes betrayed a lack of originality and insight.⁴ He made his reputation by avoiding action and is most famous today as “the diplomat who said ‘No’ to Saudi oil,” turning down the Saudis’ offer to Britain to prospect for oil in their homeland. (The Saudis next went to the Americans, who said yes and hit it big.) Oliphant ignored Soviet attempts at rapprochement in 1934, issuing a “juvenile” reply, as the historian Mark Kuss put it, to the Soviets’ invitation to a luncheon. Oliphant was worried about the expense of the food. It was an unforced blunder at a time when the Soviets were not entirely comfortable with the Nazis and a Soviet–British reconciliation was still possible.

But the most formidable opponent of Bell’s plan was not Hardinge or Oliphant, or even all the Nazis put together. Rather, as Bell knew, it was Britain’s “disinclination to ‘helping’ a recent enemy state.” That is why Bell’s manuscript insisted that helping Germany was not charity but enlightened self-interest. Avoiding a second world war was just one advantage. Preventing an economic depression was another. Britain was owed billions by its allies, and in turn, it owed billions to the United States. But Britain would not be able to repay America if neutral nations like Switzerland, Denmark, and the Netherlands could not repay Britain, and the neutrals could not pay Britain if Germany did not pay them first. The world’s financial system was like a row of dominoes. If Germany fell, the others would fall too; but if Germany remained upright, it would save the world economy from collapse.

Other nefarious factors may have been at play in efforts to censor Bell’s manuscript and block his financial rescue plan. Bell showed that some British officers were profiting from the illegal German import-export business (he knew the signs from watching the side hustles of his guards at Ruhleben). Meanwhile, the clever Nazi counter-intel ruse of claiming self-defence against communism fooled other British officers and politicians.

Did the anti-Jewish nature of Germany’s secret Nazi army play a role in the top-secret classification of parts of his intel? When sanitized portions of A12’s manuscript ran in the British press in January, Germany’s hidden army remained, but its anti-Jewish character disappeared. Why? Perhaps some were worried about stirring up further anti-Jewish violence in Europe at a time when tens of thousands had already been slaughtered. Others took the militia leaders at their word and believed they wanted to defeat communism. And some influential Britons harboured antisemitic sentiments of their own (even as Bell thought British racism was less virulent than the Nazi variety).

Another likely factor in the classification of Bell’s work was the December 1919 publication of John Maynard Keynes’s book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, an undiplomatic attack on the peace treaty and its authors. Its gossipy fervour, in the style of a high-brow scandal sheet, helped to propel the book to enormous sales. Yet it sabotaged the positive message, which was, as Bell had earlier proposed, a financial rescue scheme for Europe. The difference was that while Bell suggested in a measured diplomatic tone that Britain lead the effort, the Briton Keynes suggested that America do it. But that was just after Keynes had undiplomatically insulted President Wilson as an uncultured man who looked like a tragicomic “puppet”⁵ with “insensitive”⁶ hands. It was a stunningly foolish way to preface a request for a huge American loan.

Keynes is sometimes hailed as a prophet, but the world might have been a better place if Bell’s book had appeared and Keynes’s had remained unpublished. His embarrassing bestseller decisively pushed Britain’s government away from Lloyd George’s tendency to interpret the peace treaty terms with mercy. An anti-Keynes backlash led to a harsh, inflexible defence of the Versailles status quo. No doubt Keynes thought he was doing a good thing, but his book was an unwitting gift to the Nazis, for whom further British liberalization could have been fatal.

And Britain’s response to Lord Cecil and the world leaders who were ready to build the financial rescue package? Also no. Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Austen Chamberlain, a sternly monocled conservative (and half-brother to Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister who would champion appeasement of the Nazis in 1938), issued the British government’s reply to Lord Cecil and the world’s powerbrokers who signed on to his letter. The government, Chamberlain replied, would perhaps join a conference to talk about the financial rescue scheme. But it would be just talk. They knew in advance that they would not pay a shilling.

Chamberlain’s list of poverty-related excuses for the no culminated in what was probably the real reason: “His Majesty’s Government would not support or take a share in any scheme which involved an addition to the liabilities of the United Kingdom for expenditure in America.”⁷ The US, the upstart little brother to Great Britain, now boasted an intolerably larger economy, and it was clear that any German financial revival would involve buying exports from America. It was a jealous pang to Britain’s imperial conscience.⁸

Despite the setbacks, Bell kept pushing into early 1920 to make the rescue happen. Since he now realized that London’s statesmen would not move without public support, he redoubled his efforts to inform the public through the press. In late January, he met with Baron Clifford Allen’s Daily Herald. An editorial ran in the newspaper the next day, calling for a “reorganization which shall save the world from collapse.”⁹ Wealth, the Herald argued on behalf of the world, was lying idle, unspent. If British money got to work in Germany, it would create new wealth. The effect would soon mean new jobs in Britain because Germans would buy British goods for import.

Bell’s argument preceded John Maynard Keynes’s 1930s arguments for spending to prevent economic disasters in two senses. First, against the orthodox conservative position that state expenditure cannot create new employment, Bell held that in special circumstances, it can. And second, he insisted that spending creates a multiplier effect, where the expenditure of state money to create employment can, when the situation is right, result in spending that creates further employment.¹⁰

Alternatively, the 1920 Herald continued, Germany could continue in its despondency. Then soon enough, given the interconnection of the world, its weakness would “boomerang” and hit England. In fact, Bell knew about two boomerangs. One was the Great Depression, the other the Nazis.

Meanwhile, the economist George Paish, a confidant to Lloyd George, wrote to Bell that he was going on a mission to Wall Street, hosted by the great financier J.P. Morgan, to raise American funds for a rescue of Europe. But while Paish was on his way across the Atlantic, the British government issued press releases strenuously denying any official association with his mission. It was an insult not only to Paish but also to the Americans, telling them that if they wanted to help Germany, they would do it on their own.

The Allies were scarcely allied any more. Having lost Germany as their shared wartime enemy, the French, British, and Americans returned to defending their own narrow claims. Yet Bell knew that playing at realpolitik sabotaged their genuine interests. Only friendship could succeed.

BELL’S RESIGNATION FROM his government work was an amicable parting. He had done everything he could to explain the situation to those with ears to hear. As for the insensible men in powerful positions, like Hardinge and Oliphant, they would retire one day.

The Foreign Office made it clear that they valued Bell’s book, the Report on the Condition in Germany, and would use it in the future.¹¹ It was top-secret reading, rather than an international bestseller, but in 1932, the year the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag, the Foreign Office bound the book in a fine new red cover. In the meantime, A12’s warnings of Deutschland’s “hidden army” were in the press in early 1920, alerting millions of readers around the world to the danger. Some intrepid readers might have even thought to connect it to Reuters’ summer 1919 reports about anti-Jewish violence.

Bell said his farewells at MI6’s new headquarters, a red-brick mansion on Melbury Road. It was a cheaper location than the first HQ at Whitehall Court. The downsizing symbolized adherence to post-war austerity budgets. Bell enjoyed last office visits with the Chief and with top intel leaders like Colonel Stewart Menzies, military liaison with MI6; Sir Robert Nathan, who headed Political Section V; agent Ernest Boyce, a “silver-haired lieutenant with considerable experience in military sabotage”;¹² and Sir Desmond Morton, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. Mrs. Cumming hosted a farewell tea. It was all “very pleasant.”

Bell had offered Britain’s government a choice between lucrative peace or disorder and war. The ruling faction made the wrong choice. But A12 knew that Britain’s intelligence leaders heard his Nazi warning at the highest level. They could keep up the fight after he left.

THE LAST DAYS of February 1920 set an early high-water mark of terroristic socialism. The Soviet army effectively completed its conquest of northern Russia. Nothing stood in their way of taking the whole country and ruling by gulag, purges, and eventually murdering millions of innocents throughout eastern Europe. Then, later that month, Hitler’s party renamed itself the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and published its twenty-five-point program. It called for the socialization of property and attacks on the Jews, which amounted to the same thing. Socialism was their new name for pogroms and theft.

The Nazis’ luckiest break of all? Agent A12, the spy who knew their deadliest secrets and their greatest weaknesses, left Europe by steamship for an academic career in North America.

How could Bell quit a thrilling, well-paid job that gave him privileged access to the world’s most powerful leaders? His political and intel connections were superb. His superiors praised his intelligence acumen. He had a gleaming political future if he wanted it. Yet the trappings of the glamorous life of international espionage meant nothing to him. He wanted the job only if he could use it to defeat the Nazis and save German democracy. But he had no interest in seeing the victorious Allies kick Germany’s newborn democracy around while gleeful Nazis waited in the shadows to finish off the victim. It would be too terrible to watch.

Back in London, officials tussled over what kind of membership in the Order of the British Empire to award him. Would it be the military Commander or the civilian Officer? Finally, Edward Shortt, the monocled home secretary, offered Bell the civilian OBE, “in view of the service you have rendered on work connected with the war.”

The OBE was a notable calling card that recipients proudly listed after their names for the rest of the lives. But Bell refused the honour. Why? It might have been because he was disgusted that crucial parts of his Nazi warnings were censored. He would have preferred official Britain help Germany, or at least publish his book. Another likely possibility was that he didn’t want to blow his cover and endanger his sources, since newspapers published the names of OBE recipients.¹³

It would also wreck his chances to travel to Germany on future intelligence missions, after the Nazis took over. He knew that they were nearly ready to seize control, and that they were planning for international war in a generation. He wanted to be ready to fight them when they tried.

On February 27, 1920, after Bell’s ship, the SS Royal George, passed the safe ports of Ireland, a gale hit. Bell watched from up close: “Fine spray over bow—watched it for hours from in front of Charthouse—occasionally ducking behind railings as the sea flew over.”

His words serve as a self-portrait from 1919 to 1939. He patiently watched the coming Nazi storm, close enough to feel the spray but careful to avoid being swept out to sea.

After three days in the gale, the Royal George broke through and entered peaceful waters. Bell continued westward towards his philosophy appointments at Harvard and the University of Toronto. Academia promised respite from the ancient curse of the spy, secrecy.

Britain’s Foreign Office had an exclusive contract on everything A12 had thus far discovered about the Nazis. But when Dr. Bell cracked the Nazis’ newest secret codes as a private citizen, he would own the copyright.

Chapter 17

Afterlife

So Germany’s secret army has not been a myth!

—DUNDEE COURIER, JANUARY 2, 1920

MI6 reimbursed Winthrop Bell’s final expenses. Reuters gave him a cash bonus and offered to renew his “acquaintance” if he ever came back to London.

What did the investment in A12’s intelligence buy Britain, democracy, and the emergent liberal world order? If the Nazi plotters had stayed hidden for longer, they would have been much more powerful, and perhaps too strong to defeat. It is true that Britain fumbled the chance Bell gave them to entirely defeat the Nazis in 1919. But he had access to London’s future leaders, including Winston Churchill and Stewart Menzies. They weren’t at the pinnacle of power yet, but they would be during the next world war.

The fact that Bell had sounded the warning for those with ears to hear was a crucial advantage for the nations that would soon fight the Nazis in the Second World War. During his rise to power, Hitler was able to fool many into thinking the Nazis were a peaceful group. That he did not fool more owed a lot to Bell. The people he warned were not an insignificant group, and Britain was the first to draw a line in the sand at Munich, in September 1938, telling Hitler not to cross it. Among Bell’s contacts were current and future prime ministers, as well as key intelligence and government figures like Mansfield Cumming, Neill Malcolm, Maurice Hankey, Robert Cecil, and Stewart Menzies. The group he influenced also included Winston Churchill, who pushed Britain to re-arm against the Nazi threat in the 1930s, and who rallied his country and the free world after Germany’s blitzkrieg conquest of much of Europe at the opening of the Second World War.¹ And with Bell’s manuscript in the Foreign Office library, his warning continued to have an effect on future MI6 operatives.

It was far from the end of his influence. Bell, through his newspaper connections, had access to countless thousands of readers who were among the voting members of the democratic British Empire, the ultimate bosses of the government. A censored but still revelatory version of Bell’s military report ran in British newspapers as a coordinated release on January 2, 1920. As the Evening Mail headline blared, evidence indicated a “great German army,” with “over a million men.”² The Dundee Courier warned that the secret force was “armed with modern weapons, and specially trained for street and house-to-house fighting.”³

The newspapers called the news “semi-official.” Their conclusions about the strength of Germany’s secret army were based upon Bell’s earlier intel to the Foreign Office. A month earlier, the Foreign Office had noted, “Mr. Winthrop Bell, who has recently been sending in excellent reports from Berlin, stated the other day in conversation that a total number of 400,000 Sicherheitspolizei is contemplated.”⁴ That these men were police (Polizei) was a sheer ruse. As Bell’s report showed, the “police” were “police with howitzers,” mortars, machine guns, airplanes, and flamethrowers.

“It is interesting,” the Evening Mail article said, “to compare these German forces with the numbers of the British Army.” Churchill declared, before the House of Commons, that the British force was slated to fall to 229,000 men. If nothing changed and a new world war broke out, the Nazis would outnumber the British five to one. Bell’s early warning helps explain why the British were not entirely wrong-footed when the surprise Nazi attack came two decades later.

Wariness about Germany’s secret army was not the only afterlife of Bell’s report. After the Second World War, the Allies adopted a plan for post-war reconstruction that included substantial loans to Germany, just as Bell had proposed in his 1918–20 intelligence reports. America’s post-war Marshall Plan, celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2023, has secured strong and stable western European democracies ever since. It’s often called the “Keynesean economic stimulus” that created a post–Second World War boom, in contrast to the post–First World War thrift that led to the Great Depression. But Bell first had the idea that the end of war required government-supported spending to restore destroyed wealth.

That the 1947 Marshall Plan so closely resembles Bell’s 1918 plan is likely more than mere coincidence. Francis Deák, a central figure in the US State Department and the secret intelligence agency called the Pond, a predecessor organization to the CIA, was a friend of Bell’s and knew about his plan. Deák had ready access to General George Marshall’s ear.

It was crucial, Bell advised Deák, to help Germany’s economy work again after the war. Otherwise, the democratic countries would repeat the mistake of the post–First World War peace: “To introduce rather pushingly the mechanisms of ‘democratic’ political procedures under such circumstances is even a bit dangerous. The resultant officials come to be associated merely with presiding over an impasse.”

Bell knew that local terroristic racists would once again offer themselves to clean up the ugly democratic mess with their iron-fisted, Jew-baiting ways. A heavily armed fringe minority could once again take over the nation. It would mean a third world war.

Strangely, in the wars fought since the Second World War, victorious powers have not repeated the Bell–Marshall plan. Few are speaking now, for instance, of post-war financial aid to a future liberally democratic Russia. That is why it has been virtually impossible to win peace. But Bell’s financial plan shows a practical way to win democratic stability for the eastern reaches of Europe. His century-old intelligence is just as relevant today—and perhaps even more so, because now there are nuclear weapons.

But what did his work do at the time? Bell’s report certainly wasn’t the instant happy ending he had first proposed, where German democracy kicked the Nazis off stage right and the Soviets off stage left, and became close friends with Britain. Yet the twentieth century was not merely a tragedy either. The Nazis fooled a lot of people, but they didn’t fool everyone. If A12 hadn’t warned key British officials and the public about the new danger in Germany, it is easily possible the Nazis would have won the war.

Chapter 18

The Philosopher

For the man of complete candour and one who will not stoop to intrigue, a political life is today practically impossible.

—WINTHROP BELL, FROM A FIND-THE-FALLACY LOGIC PROBLEM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, 1920S

In February 1920, thirty-five-year-old Winthrop Bell was a retired spy. He did pro bono work informing politicians and the public about the German situation. But for his salary, he returned to his long-deferred academic work. Despite the years-long pause in his philosophy scholarship, his career sparkled. A bidding war broke out between the University of Toronto and Harvard for his services.

It owed something to the fact that his dissertation advisor, Edmund Husserl, was now one of the most famous philosophers in the world, and his recommendation of the Canadian was superlative: “A word of warmest recommendation. In fact no word is strong enough. I proudly count him among my friends, and thank the good fortune that sent him to me. I know him very well, and vouch for these words: He is one of the most noble and distinguished personalities that I have had the chance to meet, a person who has renewed my faith in humanity. And not only just his personality—as a philosopher, he is proficient, sound, diverse and well-grounded. His tremendous strengths would work wonders for your students.”¹

The bidding started with Harvard offering US$325 per year in 1920. Toronto countered with C$1,500 (which landed him for the 1921–22 academic year). The next year, Bell earned over $2,000 at Harvard, whose deep pockets meant it could outbid anyone when it wanted. He’d have to work his way up to full professor, but Harvard demonstrated they would clear the way for him to do it.

Universities offered him perks like part-time teaching, research support, the pick of graduate students, membership in prestigious clubs, and famous colleagues. In addition to his skills in phenomenology, Bell’s diplomatic skills were also attractive. Toronto, for instance, hoped that he would use some of his free time (as they put it in their offer letter) to “interpret the University to the people. We are making great efforts to enlighten the province on the functions of education and university work.” The university surely wouldn’t have known that he was an MI6 agent, but they would have known that he was connected to powerful men like Robert Borden.

Bell spent 1922 to 1927 teaching at Harvard, where he spread Husserl’s phenomenological method to the English-speaking world. As Bell explained in The Argosy, modern dualistic philosophy since Descartes had divided the world into two different, untouching realms, with free thought on one side and mechanistically determined nature on the other. But Husserl found the middle term that united mind and matter, in the meaningful search of our ideas to know the world.

Bell eagerly joined the project of describing a world in the making. It meant late nights and early mornings toiling away in the academic intelligence business. The experience was rather like his hard-working government career, except without the secrecy and mortal danger.

Phenomenology is today one of the most substantial movements in English-language philosophy, and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy is the largest special-topic philosophical organization in North America. Bell’s hard work set up phenomenology’s auspicious beginnings.

HAZEL DEINSTADT, the sister of Bell’s brother’s wife and a fellow Mount Allison alum, was a beautiful, charming, strong, intelligent woman. She played hockey and basketball at Mount Allison, and served as a nurse during the war in France at Arc-en-Barrois, sixty-five kilometres from the front. It was close enough to hear the artillery explosions like thunder. Seeing so many young men die in her care contributed to lifelong episodes of depression, which usually seemed to strike when she was not with Winthrop.

In a letter during their long-distance courtship (Winthrop was at Harvard while Hazel was home in Nova Scotia), she called him her “Peter Pan.” It was a keen description. Her future husband lived in a phenomenological Neverland of pure essences that never grew old. He also looked youthful, and there was a dimension of innocence too. His years at Ruhleben had guarded him from the physical and emotional scarring that afflicted the soldiers in the trenches.

On October 7, 1925, Hazel and Winthrop wed at a low-key affair held at the Bell family home, Boulderwood, in Halifax. Their marriage was a happy one. His only complaint was that since they shared their leisure time, he never had private enjoyments anymore. An introvert, he needed to get used to it. But it clearly didn’t bother him too much, as he often tried to cut short his business trips so that he could be home sooner. Winthrop and Hazel were very close friends, and they enjoyed spending time together.

IN 1927, BELL left Harvard and professional academia. For those who see academia as Shangri-La and Harvard as among its most splendid temples, his decision is almost unthinkable.

Did he leave because the spy needs to, from time to time, drop smoke and disappear? Bell’s letters don’t clearly explain why he left, but a constellation of factors likely contributed to his decision. He missed the beauty of coastal Nova Scotia. Hazel needed major surgery. A student committed suicide. And his brother, Ralph, a wealthy and powerful Nova Scotia businessman, wanted to bring him into the family business. His high salary would mean the prospect of retirement before fifty. Not even Harvard could compete with that.

Bell retired from the family’s fishery business in 1933 at forty-eight years old and moved with Hazel to Chester, Nova Scotia, by the sea. He named his house Drumnaha, after the ancestral family farm in Ireland. At Drumnaha, as he wrote to a friend, “one can hear, distantly, little sounds from across the harbour and hear the lapping of the ripple on the shore at the foot of the hill.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Nazis were making big noises. Bell’s idyll was about to end.

Chapter 19

The Sabotage Game

The Battle of Britain might never have been won . . . if it were not for the radar.

—SIR WILLIAM DOUGLAS, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF BRITAIN’S FIGHTER COMMAND¹

July 26, 1934, was a warm and sunny Thursday morning in Antwerp, Belgium. A fifty-year-old retired businessman, professor, and spy enjoyed his last hours of vacation in Europe’s free zone with his wife. Later that afternoon, after a train ride into Nazi Germany, Winthrop Bell was coming out of retirement to play the espionage game once again. His itinerary included meeting with his top source, the man who could destroy the Nazis from within. This time it was a mission for two, as Hazel was coming with him.

The Bells walked together through the picturesque old city filled with azaleas and begonias in full bloom, talking and pointing. Winthrop set up his camera for a photograph. Clouds rolled in, ruining his shot. Fortunately, Antwerp featured many attractive indoor options. The Bells headed to the Museum Plantin-Moretus, where they saw a Gutenberg Bible and a first edition of the Index of Prohibited Books, and from there to the art gallery, where they viewed Hals’s Fisher Boy, a “fine Rembrandt portrait,” and Memling’s Altar of Christ.

Germany, Bell knew, had become a lot more dangerous in fifteen years. It was hardly risk-free for A12 to spy there in 1919, when Nazi assassins stalked their enemies throughout the country. But in 1934, the danger had grown exponentially greater. The Nazis now controlled the whole efficient machinery of the state, with bullets, torture chambers, and concentration camps for anyone who disagreed with them.

How did Bell come out of retirement? The same kind of paper trail as in late 1918 apparently no longer exists. But it is likely that his brother, Ralph, well connected to the Canadian and American governments, helped arrange the cover through his Lockeport fishery company. Once again, as with Reuters in 1919, it wasn’t just a cover for Bell—he did the work. Winthrop would seem like an ordinary businessman while asking probing questions at some of Germany’s most important cities and ports. He would be utterly convincing. He knew the fishing business inside and out, which made him different than some other spies who didn’t know real-life details about their cover jobs. It has often been a fatal error.

PASSENGERS PACKED THE Brussels–Cologne train to bursting. It was very different than fifteen years earlier, when people wanted out of Germany, not in. The only way to enter the country that day was third class to Liège, followed by a change in Aachen, then finally, to Cologne. Bell bought the bad tickets anyway. It was important to arrive in Germany, not to do it comfortably.

As the Bells’ train headed east, dark clouds rolled in and the wind picked up. A heavy storm was coming. They reached Cologne before it struck, disembarking into a well-kept city packed with tourists, including four hundred in a single Cook’s tour group. Crowds wanted a glimpse of Hitler’s famous new Germany, which seemed rich while the rest of the world was mired in the Great Depression. It was an illusion of prosperity built on theft from the Jews and spending in preparation for the next war. But for the moment, it was believable to millions around the world.

The Bells checked into the Fürstenhof Hotel, the same name as his old Berlin haunt. Perhaps Winthrop was nostalgic, or perhaps it was just a good deal. For 3.50 marks, it promised a “beautiful view” and “all comforts.” They ate an “excellent” dinner on the Hohe Straße with “nice Mosel wine.” Good dining in Germany? And now the trains ran on time. It was vastly different from 1919.

The Bells’ hotel was steps to the massive cathedral, the Dom. There they admired the solid-gold and jewel-bedecked reliquary holding the bones of the magi who visited Jesus just before the paranoid King Herod massacred the male Jewish babies of Bethlehem. Bell didn’t know yet that the führer was now planning to outdo Herod.

The Bells were in Cologne to visit the philosopher Edith Stein at the Carmelite convent where she now lived. She was ethnically Jewish, but as a student she became an atheist and then converted to Catholicism. She finally became a cloistered nun, Sister Teresa Benedicta. Their interview happened “through the Grill.” For Bell, a Protestant, it was strange, but he admitted that Benedicta was “serene.”

The visit gave him his first chance to see with his own eyes what life was like for Jews under Nazi rule. Stein knew of the persecutions and was among the early academics to speak out about the nationalists. Her early 1930s lectures showed how the reactionaries made a target of women by pushing them out of their jobs and demanding they produce children.² As a Jew and a woman, she saw the attack from two sides. Later in the decade, she set to work on an autobiographical account to show that Jews were not the monsters the Nazis made them out to be.³

The next day was “sultry and heavy.” Bell sent flowers to the Carmelites and headed towards his Göttingen rendezvous with his top source.

Although eager to see his old friend, Bell didn’t act like he was in a hurry. A train would have been much faster, but the Bells took the leisurely route on a steamship from Koblenz. It was a glorious trip up the Rhine. Nothing could be more typical for tourists.

On Sunday afternoon, the Bells caught the 2:52 express train from Frankfurt to Göttingen, where Ella and Iris Runge, Wilhelm’s sisters, met them. Wilhelm had not arrived yet. The Bells checked into the Hotel Krone (the Crown), the city’s best hotel. In 1866, it was the anti-Prussian war headquarters of the blind King George, regent of Hanover and second in line to the British throne. George soon went on to lose the war, and his Hanoverian kingdom, to the Prussians.

Still, Göttingen never fully switched sides from the liberal, British-facing Hanover to militarist Prussia. Seven decades after George’s defeat, it was the seat of a clandestine anti-Nazi liberal circle of elites. The whole Runge family was anti-Nazi, except for Ella, who simply did not think about politics, as she was single-mindedly concerned with being a good medical doctor.

On Monday, Wilhelm Runge finally arrived at the Krone. As an officer in German military intelligence during the Great War, Runge had been one of Bell’s important sources during his 1918–20 intelligence service. But now he was even more important as one of the Nazis’ most dangerous internal enemies. In 1934, the Nazis relished a huge lead in military radar technology. It would have been insurmountable if not for Runge.

Over the next eighteen days of sightseeing and hiking throughout Germany, Runge explained his ingenious and extremely dangerous plan.

German military intelligence had taken the lead in inventing a powerful new tool, radar, which could make the difference between victory and defeat in the upcoming war. Runge was among Germany’s top radar scientists, having been taught how to use invisible waves for secret military communication by Richard Courant during the Great War.

Radar was, however, a powerful leap over Courant’s earlier work. The new technology meant military sight even in total darkness, solving a problem that had frozen effective nighttime military action for millennia. In the coming war, the side with radar superiority would have the best live-time picture of the air battles in every weather condition and would even be able to find bombing targets at night.

From the moment Courant recruited Runge into military intelligence during the First World War, his young protégé had climbed the ranks of the country’s military-industrial complex. When the Nazis took control, he was at the top, in the leading position of radar research at Telefunken. While the Nazis killed, imprisoned, or exiled many of the other good Germans, Runge remained at his powerful post, cracking anti-Nazi jokes with his closest friends.

His job was safe so long as his jokes stayed on the inside (later, a friend told him to tone it down, since there were now informers, pro-Nazi engineers, in their midst). Runge lacked compromising associations with communism, and by the Nazis’ definition, he was an Aryan. He had served with distinction in the First World War, and he was a member of one of Germany’s most important academic families. The Nazis had no reason to suspect that he would break their war machine from within.

RUNGE’S SABOTAGE OF Nazi radar did not involve cutting cables or attaching time bombs to disable individual devices, which would have done little and been easily discovered. Instead, he disabled the entirety of Germany’s radar research.

He needed to walk a tightrope. Letting German radar become too good would give the Nazis the advantage. If it became too bad, the Gestapo might discover his sabotage game and kill him.

Runge’s work undermining the Nazi war machine was already underway in 1933, the Nazis’ first year in power. The German navy had approached Telefunken about collaboratively developing radar. Runge ensured that the company rudely shot down the request. He instead partnered with Germany’s air force, Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, to develop it. Runge’s daring move split radar research into competing groups, including Telefunken and the navy’s GEMA.

Runge used his control over his part of the wartime radar industry to beneficial effect. Before the Nazis classified Telefunken’s work as top secret, he rushed to publish Germany’s world-leading radar research. The Nazis learned of their country’s amazing new radar capabilities at the same time as the rest of the world. At that time, Germany held an insurmountable lead in the crucial technology, but Runge’s blitzkrieg of scientific truthfulness annihilated the advantage. The military implications of the radar discovery were obvious. Yet since they were only implications and not yet legally binding military secrets, Runge was not doing anything illegal by revealing them.

We may expect that Bell, with his wry sense of humour, enjoyed the joke at Nazi expense. But his friend was far from finished. Germany’s radar was still the best in the world, and Telefunken was no longer the only company doing the work. Now came Runge’s much more dangerous mission: sabotaging the radar produced by other German companies.

His next chance to act came in 1942, when the Nazis controlled nearly all of Europe and looked to be unstoppable. Runge heard a proposal for a powerful new kind of Nazi radar based on microwave centimetre waves. It would be, Runge knew, a major technological advance over decimetre waves. If Germany developed the innovative technology first, the Nazis would regain a huge radar advantage.

Runge used his position and persuasive powers to defund the project, personally ensuring that the Nazis shut down research on the device in November 1942. The new technology was, he claimed, operationally unworkable. But a grave danger arose for him in February 1943, when German guns shot down a British Stirling bomber near Rotterdam. Inspection of the wreck revealed it was carrying a functional centimetre-wave radar system.

Runge’s life now balanced precariously on a single question: Had he been wrong about the centimetre waves intentionally or unintentionally? Younger pro-Nazi engineers at Telefunken were suspicious of their boss. They ran through the math and realized that his argument against centimetre waves was too absurd to be error. It was sabotage.

Finally, in 1944, their complaints reached the ear of Heinrich Himmler, head of the feared Schutzstaffel (SS), the internal security force. By then, the Allies were bombing Germany with impunity in nighttime raids, thanks to the centimetre-wave device. But the Nazis still had plenty of time to root out, torture, and kill their internal enemies. Himmler demanded an inquiry.

Standing next to the smoking ruins of Germany’s radar research, Runge played dumb. If he looked smart, he would be a dead man. He needed to convince leading Nazis, like Göring, that Deutschland lost the radar war because of his own stupidity.

In a war full of sombre tragedy, Runge’s performance was a moment of astounding comedy. He convinced Göring that the centimetre-wave failure was pure incompetence. Göring bought the act and began complaining that the country’s top radar scientists had “too little in their thick heads.” He blocked Himmler’s proposal for an investigation.⁴ It was not illegal, after all, to be dense.

Astoundingly, Runge did not quit his sabotage mission even after the Stirling device was found. He knew the Nazi evil and was willing to risk his life to destroy it. He made the “remarkable” argument that the Allies would not employ their new centimetre radar at sea.⁵ Scientifically speaking, his argument made no sense. But as an anti-Nazi gambit, it was brilliant. The Luftwaffe took Runge’s advice and didn’t tell the navy about the device for six months. Meanwhile, the British were indeed using the radar at sea to ravage the Nazi U-boat fleet while the German navy remained clueless about why it was happening. One phone call from the Luftwaffe would have let the navy work out countermeasures. But Runge’s ploy fatally delayed the knowledge transfer.⁶

How effective was Runge’s sabotage operation? He, likely more than any other German, was most responsible for the early downfall of the Nazis’ thousand-year Reich. Because of him, the Nazis were blinded, and their democratic enemies could see. In other realms, from jet airplanes to V-2 rockets to Panzer tanks, the Nazis held technological leads. But in radar, they lost their enormous head start, and all their other advantages came undone.⁷

As the historian Norman Ridley wrote: “The main problem with development of radar as an integrated component of the German military was the poor coordination between the military and the scientific community . . . It was noted by Professor Wilhelm Runge, head of development at Telefunken, especially in the case of the Luftwaffe, that ‘they never seemed to know what they wanted. One department said one thing, and this was usually countermanded by another.’”⁸ Runge was bragging, modestly, about his sabotage campaign. It worked by getting Nazi bureaucrats to reverse each another—easy engineering for a man like Dr. Runge, who was used to difficult mathematics.

We don’t know the precise words that Bell said to Runge during their weeks together in 1934. But it is certain that Bell gave his friend moral support. Encouragement is a crucial but often forgotten part of the intelligence business. The best spies work for loyalty.

AFTER SAYING FAREWELL to Runge in Freiburg and sending him back to Berlin “with a full tank of gas,” Bell’s next stop was a talk with his old dissertation advisor, the ethnically Jewish Protestant Edmund Husserl. He was once an esteemed emeritus professor at the University of Freiburg, but the Nazis had removed him from the post after their takeover because of his ethnicity. Bell knew that Husserl was a patriot who put his life savings into war bonds during the First World War. His son Wolfgang was killed in the trenches; his other son, Gerhardt, was blinded in one eye. But the Nazis did not care about the family’s patriotism. Husserl was a Jew, and they feared his “blood.”

Bell also met Husserl’s friend Gerhard Ritter, an “Aryan,” by Hitler’s definition, and a conservative historian. Their conversation was “long and very interesting.” It is likely that Ritter explained just how much he detested the Nazis. Opposition to Nazism was a common position among Germany’s conservatives, who loathed the Nazis for being revolutionary radicals and socialists. “Conserving” Germany meant preserving the country’s tradition of liberal tolerance. Like Runge, Ritter was opposed in more than just theory. In 1944, the Nazis implicated him in a plot to assassinate Hitler and imprisoned him for the rest of the war. He was one of the few arrested in the plot who lived to tell the tale.

After Freiburg, Bell slowly headed towards Germany’s exit, but he kept visiting friends along the way, including the physicist Paul Ewald on Sunday, August 19. That morning, Bell watched from his hotel room window as a procession of Hitler Youth marched in honour of voting day. It was a sham vote, featuring violence and intimidation, to unify the positions of president and chancellor in Hitler. The Nazis won with approximately 90 percent of the vote. But the remarkable fact was that 10 percent of the vote went against them, despite the intimidation and the hopelessness of winning. It stood for the courageous Germans who could undermine Nazism from within.

Four days later was the Bells’ last evening in Germany for a while. They had entered the country during stormy, threatening weather and were now leaving it the same way. They made it to their accommodations just in time: “Shortly after we got there a thunderstorm passed across the mountains. Very fine from our balcony, with full moon behind mountains, black clouds, high wind . . . I learned afterwards it did considerable damage elsewhere.” It was like everything about Germany: pretty on the surface but deadly underneath.

On September 5, Bell arrived in London for the intelligence-dissemination part of the mission. The next day, he lost the stem of his watch and “took it round to the place where I bought it fifteen years ago.” It’s bad luck for a watch to break, but good luck to be near the watch shop when it happens. For fifteen years, that watch had kept time of his knowledge of the Nazis’ secret plot for world domination. Now he delivered groundbreaking intelligence news once again.

Over the next days, Winthrop met with trusted members of British intelligence, including his old friend General Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin in 1919, and Colonel Georges Vanier of the Canadian Armed Forces, a wounded war hero and a deeply religious man of “sound character” who was admired and respected throughout Canada, as Hugh Keenleyside put it.⁹ We don’t have a transcript of what was said in the meetings, but Bell’s subsequent letters to General Malcolm reveal the kinds of intelligence he likely emphasized. Bell knew that war was coming. It might seem obvious today, but it was not at the time.

A 1937 letter from Bell to General Malcolm painted a stark distinction: either appease Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascistic demands or oppose them. Bell urged that yielding to the fascist blusterers set a bad precedent and would justify their claims and political programs. Worse, appeasement would only strengthen the Nazis’ military position, offering more resources for their policy of aggression. Instead, Bell urged resistance and rearmament. He told General Malcolm that Britain needed to take the lead in building an international coalition prepared to command “Halt!” to the fascist states and able to back the command with force.

In their last days in England before returning to Canada, Winthrop and Hazel went to the news theatre to watch the “wonderful” film Down Under, a scientific portrait of the hidden world of plant roots.¹⁰ Bell had recently met his botanist friend Michael Pease, which might have been why he was thinking about plants. He liked the movie so much that he went alone to see it again the next day.

The film reminded him, perhaps, of the subterranean world of secret intelligence. In 1934, events on the surface were distressing. The Nazis controlled Germany, and the leaders of the free world didn’t take the threat seriously. But interesting movements were happening underground. Runge blinded the Nazis in their own dark lair, like a radar-age Odysseus driving a stake into the Cyclops’s eye. Meanwhile in London, the rearm-and-resist faction, first advised by Bell in 1918, continued its steady growth towards the light.

Chapter 20

The Holocaust Code

Hitler’s extermination policy is world-wide.

—WINTHROP BELL, 1939

In the spring of 1939, Chester, Nova Scotia, unfurled its natural beauty, as usual. Winthrop Bell watched with delight as the birds returned from their southern sojourn and nature engaged in a gentle tug of war between the green shoots and falling snows.

The Bells enjoyed their retirement by the sea, which was heavy on classical music, reading, walks, and conversations with friends. It was a contented life “in this very beautiful place,” as he wrote to a friend, “in a house we planned and had built for ourselves . . . with a view for miles across an island-studded bay, and a bit of garden and a nice patch of woods running down a steep slope to the salt water.”

At the same time, he kept a wary eye on the rise of the Nazis as they grew in strength in Germany. Hitler pretended he wanted peace with his neighbours, but Bell knew better. That’s why the retired Canadian spy worked, once again, on communicating the Nazis’ true purpose to his intelligence sources and the reading public. It was rather like his job in 1919, except this time he was a private citizen, not a government agent. Now no random bureaucrat could censor him.

Earlier in the year, he had received a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the original German from the editor and translator Ted McClintock. Bell was grateful for the original text because he knew that the English translation cut many of the führer’s most offensive passages. The Nazis hadn’t translated it, but insisted on edits as their PR machine carefully crafted their leader’s image as a peace-loving man.¹

On Sunday, March 19, Bell listened to the radio for reports of the “new European crisis.” Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s prime minister, promised to resist any further German territorial expansion, after Hitler’s acquisition (with threat of force) of Austria, Moravia, and Bohemia.

Over the following week, Bell read Mein Kampf, jointly with Konrad Heiden’s biography of Hitler, One Man Against Europe. After working until the early morning on April 1, he finally went to sleep and later awoke to mild weather. He was listening to Hitler’s speech from Wilhelmshaven on the radio when it was suddenly cut off. Many listeners thought Hitler had been assassinated, but it was just a technical problem. Soon Bell heard reports filtering out of Germany: Hitler’s warlike speech promised peace, unless Germany was “encircled,” which would necessitate war. The führer did not say what he meant by encirclement, which was vaguely terrifying to his audience, but he added that Jews were “fungus.” He painted a paranoid picture of Germany as threatened by attack from every direction, but most seriously from within.

On April 2, a “half-gale” blew into Chester. Sleet and rain pelted Winthrop and Hazel on their usual walk down Haddon Hill. After drying off, Bell finished reading Hitler’s autobiography. He had been astounded to discover its hidden message: the Austrian meant to kill all the non-Aryans in the entire world.

Bell knew that Germany, although well-armed, would be hard-pressed to accomplish Hitler’s gruesome task. The führer was trying hard to be obscure, for a reason. Deutschland’s population was around eighty-five million (including occupied territories), while the world contained around 2.3 billion people. That’s why secrecy was essential to the functioning of the Holocaust Code. Hitler’s message was hidden for most people, except a group of indoctrinated Germans. But Bell plainly saw the sinister meaning. His long training in the phenomenological analysis of arguments made the significance obvious. If he revealed the hidden message, he could thwart the Nazis once again.

Hitler’s dilemma was that he needed to bring willing executioners in on the plan, but he couldn’t let anyone else know. Killing hundreds of millions of people required an immense organization, and creating it was the point of his code. It wasn’t a cipher in the sense of being numbers or letters that looked like a pure garble until they were decoded by a machine. Rather, the Holocaust Code was meant to look like plain German to the unsuspecting millions who read it, and yet it operated at another level, with a secret message for those with a particular shared background.

Hitler’s cryptogram, shared in Mein Kampf and in his public speeches, operated by appealing to a worldview shared by German racists who had been raised on the murderous antisemitic propaganda that began circulating in the country in 1919. At that time, Bell had been the first to warn the West about the highly organized anonymous attack plan against the Jews. Later, however, once the Nazis had demonstrated their true nature to a core group of supporters, they became silent about that essential feature of their existence. The key to their code was that the conclusion of the argument, race murder, was only ever implied and never directly stated. Yet Bell saw that every implication pointed in the same direction.

The secrecy was born of simple necessity. If Hitler had made his meaning clear in the early 1920s, when he wrote Mein Kampf, he would have been in serious trouble with the democratic German authorities. Even in 1939, when he ruled the country as dictator, his Wehrmacht forces were stronger than the armies of Germany’s immediate neighbours, but not better than every military combined. He knew that his blitzkrieg could work effectively only as a surprise attack. But at the same time, the Holocaust could not remain the private plot of just a few men and still succeed. That is why Mein Kampf gave instructions for the deployment of the Holocaust so that it could overcome national enemies one by one, rather than attempting to fight them all at once.

Bell settled into his sunny study, with its pleasant view of the hill sloping down to the water, and began to type his warning. He wanted it to be read by the intelligence community and the public at large, just as he had intended his Nazi warnings to be read in 1919. The Nazis’ camouflage for total extermination, Bell explained, would be to subject each “characterless people,” as Hitler called them, to “apparently isolated, though really cumulative oppression.”² Murdering whole races would be the last in a series of steps that laid a smokescreen for the attack.

In the spring of 1939, the Nazis were still laying that smokescreen. That’s why appeasement made sense to otherwise intelligent people. The standard line of international politics was that Hitler was worse than the moral average, but diplomacy and experience would bring him back to the middle.

As Bell later told the Harvard philosopher William Hocking, “It is usually difficult for the English to take fanaticism seriously. They were—a large proportion of them, at any rate—convinced that one needn’t take the rantings of Mein Kampf seriously;—coming into a position of ‘responsibility’ would tone Hitler down. He might still be objectionable and unpleasant, but could not really continue to think as his book suggested, or, at the very least, to act as that book suggested.”

It was the fault of the habitual tendency to reduce something extreme and novel to something already understood, a bias that phenomenology warned against. Bell’s phenomenology of Nazism looked for the essence of the movement through its own appearances: the phenomena leading to logos. He put aside the notion that because Nazism did not make sense as a good way of doing things, it therefore couldn’t be a real danger.

In explaining the fatal error of thinking that the Nazis were ordinary but quirky politicians, Bell knew he wasn’t only up against Hitler and his ten-million-strong military. The more dangerous enemy was the complacent belief, common in the democratic world, that the Nazis practised a normal, even if uncouth, type of politics. Many powerful British leaders, Bell explained, thought Hitler had just bashed the Jews to get elected, but once he had control of the country, he would act like a typical leader.

It was far from the truth, though, because Hitler wasn’t typical. Bell turned to page 166 of Mein Kampf. There, Hitler argued that different races were engaged in a “mortal struggle for existence.” Only the race that used “every means” to subjugate competing races would survive. There must be, Hitler insisted, “a quicker or slower extinction” of conquered peoples. He seemed to be speaking theoretically, as if “extinction” of a race meant the removal of its culture rather than the extermination of its people, but Bell knew that killing was the actual plan around which everything else revolved.

By Hitler’s own stated logic, race murder was not something that might or could happen, but something that must happen. Only “Aryans” would be safe from the Nazis’ wrath. But who exactly was an Aryan? At this most crucial juncture, the führer turned intentionally vague. Certainly, Jews, Slavs, Africans, and dark-skinned people would no longer be allowed to live on earth. On the other hand, Hitler planned to let Swedes, Brahmins, and the like survive, so long as they didn’t oppose him. But he seemed to err on the side of paranoia in other cases. For him, the French were already a “negroid” non-Aryan people, just like those living on the German–Austrian border, where young Adolf had grown up. It helps explain why he was so keen to take over Austria in 1938—because he wanted to kill the people he thought had oppressed him.

Bell also knew that Hitler’s planned massacres couldn’t stop at Europe’s borders, since racial poison easily drifted across political lines. Hitler insisted that “foreign racial poison” would destroy the Aryans if he didn’t destroy it first. No matter how many non-Aryans the Nazis slaughtered, the terrifying threat of poison would remain so long as any of them lived.

Bell continued to draft his warning. Hitler’s essential dogma, he typed, was to “exterminate non-Germans” everywhere around the world. Appeasement was worse than useless. It gave the Nazis extra time to bring more foreign peoples into their Reich, like lambs to the slaughter: “Germany is to conquer huge stretches of adjacent territory now inhabited by non-Germans. This enlarged German Reich is not to include any non-Germans in its population.”

Hitler, Bell explained, argued that a “healthy” Germany needed a much larger territory. The country was highly industrialized and needed to trade for food and raw materials. This “is not merely, in Hitler’s view, a precarious basis for the life of a people—precarious from the economic as well as vulnerable from any military point of view—but it is an ‘unhealthy’ one,” since the healthy state required both “agriculture and industry within the nation itself.” That combination would also be favourable from Hitler’s “military point of view.”

Hitler rejected the obvious solution adopted by other nations—international trade—because it implied “weakness.” The “healthy” state was fully self-sufficient. Hitler was obsessed with health and thought of the nation as a body and himself as its doctor. (The “Heil ” in “Heil Hitler” comes from the German word for “health.”)

Next, Bell continued, Hitler urged there should be only one world power. Germany would be that one, if the people had “the requisite determination and ruthlessness and stood with ruthless will to sacrifice everything else for its own existence ‘and increase.’” Germany needed to expand or it would die. One nation, Hitler insisted, must ruthlessly destroy the others. Germany could be the winner in that game, but only if Aryans followed Hitler in understanding that any racial policy that let “non-German” races live would leave the country in its “unhealthy” position, prey to whatever future conquering race would eventually win. The Germans, Hitler thought, would be subject to genocide if they did not destroy other races first. It was a repeat of the perverted version of Darwinism innovated by men like Talaat Pasha, Hans Humann, and Erich Ludendorff.

Yet even Hitler knew it would provoke overwhelming opposition to come right out and say that he meant to exterminate hundreds of millions of people who lived in the lands he intended to conquer. That is why, Bell saw, he spoke his message in a pseudo-medical, agricultural, and historical code meant to be understood by his biased followers alone. It was a trick he’d learned from Talaat during the Armenian genocide.

Bell had a master’s degree in history, which helped him understand the contemporary meaning of Hitler’s assertion that the Roman victory over Carthage, which ended with the annihilation of the innocent people of the city, was the right way to fight. Bell knew the führer was not just speaking about history. He was explaining to his followers what he would do once he won. By coding his genocidal analogy in the distant past, he obscured the present meaning of the reference.

Misunderstanding Hitler’s intimations and hints, London mistook what Germany was doing for a johnny-come-lately version of imperialism, the game England had mastered for centuries. But Bell knew that Hitler wasn’t playing the old imperial game. He was inventing a terrible new game. Hitler praised the historical Germans who, six hundred years earlier, had destroyed “entire tribes and peoples.” Yet he was also bitter that such massacres were infrequent, sometimes leaving conquered groups to live and interbreed with the Aryan victors. The führer promised to avoid the mistakes of the past. Instead of letting conquered peoples stay alive, resulting in poisoned Aryan blood, “Hitler makes it all the clearer that in his future colonization there is to be nothing of the kind.”

Bell flipped to page 743 of Mein Kampf. There, Hitler made the plan clearer with another historical allusion. His future conquest would not be an “intoxicating adventure” in the model of Alexander the Great, with Germany imposing new customs and a ruling class on an otherwise intact people.³ No, Germanization, Hitler wrote, “can be carried out only on the soil, not on the people.” It meant that indigenous populations would simply be annihilated.

Hitler promised, Bell continued, that Germans could become farmers and leave their city troubles behind. It was a strange appeal to foreigners who hadn’t known hunger, but the destitution of the country’s urban working poor during and after the Great War was abysmal. Only the farmers had eaten well. In great hunger, good land was more valuable than money. There wasn’t enough in Germany for the Nazis to offer everyone, so they needed to socialize foreign land.

Bell also saw how Hitler publicly proclaimed himself a man of peace and had fooled the free world into appeasement by this ruse. But in a perverse way, Hitler was telling the truth. Once Germans controlled all the land and purified it of non-Aryans, there would be no more fighting. In the short term, though, “the process will be a bloody one.”⁴

Bell knew that some people dismissed Mein Kampf as a product of youthful rebellion. But even as Hitler now played at being a responsible statesman, Bell showed that other leading Nazis were still speaking the same Holocaust Code. The plot for worldwide genocide was not “a dream for some vague future.” Instead, Bell told his readers, “its active initiation was pronounced to be the immediate practical project.”⁵

Then Bell shifted positions to argue from the perspective of a smug North American advocating for “isolation.” After all, a wide ocean guarded against merely “European” problems. But complacency could never work because Hitler urged a coming “world-decision, out of which will emerge a single power: one single race dominating the globe.”⁶ If Hitler won, the Holocaust would eventually find its victims in places like Toronto, New York City, Beijing, and Nairobi. It wouldn’t be a fast process, but recent history has shown that Hitler had already begun gathering intelligence about his racial enemies across the oceans.⁷

It did Bell no good to remain alone in his knowledge of Hitler’s ultimate plan. Among his influential intelligence friends were Maurice Hankey, whom Winston Churchill would appoint to his War Cabinet, and General Neill Malcolm, a Germany expert who was a principal intelligence figure at Chatham House in London. He also had important contacts in Canada, like James Ralston, Canada’s future minister of defence, and Colonel O.M. Biggar, who would become co-chair of the Canadian-American Permanent Joint Board on Defence during the Second World War.

And Winthrop’s brother, Ralph, one of Canada’s most important businessmen, was trusted by top military and political leaders. During the war, Canada would call on Ralph to help lead the industrial side of the fight against Nazism, appointing him in 1940 as director-general for aircraft production. Among Ralph’s powerful contacts were C.D. Howe, soon called to service as Canada’s wartime minister of munitions and supply, and Lord Beaverbrook, a fellow Maritime Canadian, who would serve as the minister of aircraft production in the United Kingdom.

But in addition to the intelligence world, Bell knew, just as he had in 1919, that he needed to get word out to the public through the press.

Hazel and Ralph were the first readers of the draft of Bell’s Holocaust warning. On Thursday, April 6, Ralph arranged an interview between his brother and the minister of agriculture, James Gardiner, who would soon serve as Canada’s minister of national war services. It is virtually certain that Gardiner knew Bell had been Canada’s and Britain’s best secret agent in Germany and an advisor to prime ministers. Now Bell was able to give official Britain, through Gardiner, its first concrete, detailed warning about Hitler’s plan for the Holocaust.⁸

Gardiner’s coming wartime authority was a considerable change from his job as agricultural minister. There is little doubt that Bell’s warning gave him the prescient intel that helped him land the powerful spot. Those politicians who were the first to warn against the Nazis, like Gardiner in Canada and Churchill in England (briefed by Bell in 1919), were quickly promoted once Hitler’s aggressions became obvious. If the Allies had been completely unprepared, Nazi history would have turned out much worse.

The next day, Winthrop visited Halifax to meet Ralph. He’d slept poorly and awoken to a sleet storm. Ralph sent a chauffeured car to get his brother from the elegant Lord Nelson Hotel at South Park Street, where the Bell family had a permanent suite. The two brothers had breakfast and discussed how to send the Holocaust warning to newspaper editors to “preserve secrecy,” as Bell wrote in his diary.

Why did the Bells want to preserve secrecy? The most likely answer is because it was a dangerous game to be the first to crack the Nazis’ secret code. Gestapo agents were active in North America, and if they learned what Bell knew, their next logical step would be to assassinate him. The Holocaust needed stealth to function, and the Nazis would not willingly let one man stand in the way of victory.

A week later, a dull, chilly, and unpleasant Saturday, April 15, Bell heard radio news of Roosevelt’s appeal to Germany and Italy on behalf of peace, which included a twenty-five-year promise of peace. From Hitler’s perspective, it was an insulting lowball offer. His own demand was a thousand years of Germany’s reign as the only power in the world. But Hitler needed to remain subtle in his challenge. He couldn’t invade the US quite yet.

On Friday, April 28, 1939, a “beautiful” day, Bell woke up at 6:45 a.m. to listen to the radio broadcast of Hitler’s Reichstag speech. The speech was, he reported in his diary, “the least exciting show I have ever heard him put on.” Hitler was probably depressed about Roosevelt’s peace offer, but he needed to tread carefully to avoid antagonizing America. Hitler was less shouty than usual, and instead full of bitter irony. He juxtaposed rich, successful, warlike America and poor, constrained, peaceful Germany. Hitler mollified the US while subtly mocking it. The führer was practised at speaking in code.

Bell sent a dispatch to Francis Deák, a friend from his Harvard days who was now an influential figure in America. A professor of law at Columbia University and a Carnegie Endowment affiliate, Deák was well connected in the US intelligence community.⁹ When Bell talked to him, he was talking to America’s foreign policy establishment.

Bell’s diary entry for May 19 records a letter from Deák about his Holocaust warning, but unfortunately, that letter does not survive among his papers. However, Deák wrote again on December 27, 1939, three months after the outbreak of the Second World War (but at a time when the US was still officially neutral). “I have thought of you more than once since the war broke out,” he wrote, “and particularly of your article on the Nazis which events have proved so accurate.” That Deák knew the secret of Hitler’s Holocaust Code meant that America knew.

Deák’s friendship with Bell and his trust in his information started the Americans’ process of understanding what they were up against and likely helps explain why the US decided to arm Britain even when Congress had technically made it illegal to do so. (Workarounds were found. Ralph, for instance, was able to get American patrol ships for Canadian waters by pretending they were pleasure yachts.)

The two old Harvard friends likely followed up with a conversation, as Deák’s letter continued, “I wish I could talk things over with you since most of the things we would like to discuss are not fit for correspondence.” He also asked Bell for another copy of his report—this time in its published version—surely with the intention of showing it around the State Department.¹⁰

Bell’s 1939 warning to Deák long predates the next known secret warning about the Holocaust, a November 1941 top-secret dispatch to Britain from a diplomat in Prague.¹¹ It also helps explain Deák’s extremely risky wartime plan to trick Hitler into defending Hungary instead of France against the Allies’ D-Day invasion in 1944. Deák’s virtually unknown Operation Sparrow was perhaps the most perilous Allied secret operation of the war. It involved using three American Special Forces soldiers, parachuted into Hungary, as bait. The idea was that the Nazis would capture the three crack soldiers, who didn’t realize that their mission was just a ruse, and become convinced they were reconnaissance for a planned invasion of Hungary. It went just as the US had hoped. To risk the execution of three of America’s best soldiers was a dangerous chance, and virtually unthinkable if the Nazis had been anything but genocidal maniacs.

Deák’s risky bet paid off. As an unnamed CIA historian put it in recently declassified documents, Hitler “swallowed the bait.” Because of Sparrow: “Two German divisions were removed from France and were not returned in time to be employed against the Normandy landings. German High Command Operations Chief, General Walter Warlimont, recalled after the war that ‘During the Hungarian operation, the Western front was left without a single battle-worthy, fully operational armored division at a moment when the invasion might come any day.’ Thus, Operation Sparrow triggered an unnecessary German invasion of Hungary with over 100,000 troops, including several armored divisions, which were desperately needed elsewhere.”¹²

The living bait, the three American soldiers, were imprisoned but survived the war. Allen Dulles, later head of the CIA, called Deák a “schemer.” He wasn’t wrong. It was only lucky that he was scheming for a good cause.

HOW WAS BELL able to warn about a plan so evil and so enormous that, as he put it, “even the ablest observers seem to have been unable to grasp it, or to credit the idea that even a Hitler could genuinely entertain it, or set it before his people as a definite purpose”?

A lot owed to Bell’s knowledge of the German militant racists from at least as early as 1918, when he first warned Robert Borden. And credit is due to the phenomenology that he’d learned with Royce at Harvard and Husserl at Göttingen. The phenomenological science demanded patient, unbiased observation of ideas for the sake of seeing intentions in themselves. The difficulty in doing phenomenology owes to our natural inclination to fit new information into existing structures. That is often a useful habit that lets us reduce complexity to simplicity and allows scientific hypotheses to function. Sometimes, however, a thing is new and needs to be understood on its own terms. The Nazis, Bell knew, were a strange new essence hidden under deep layers of illusion. Like the philosopher who escaped Socrates’s Cave, Bell needed to reveal the truth.

Yet the Canadian also knew, just like Socrates, that an often-repeated propaganda can seem to many to be more convincing than an unexpected truth. The Holocaust Code was so outlandish that it was uncertain whether he could convince others to believe it was real. It was the same problem he had faced when he first warned against the Nazis in the spring of 1919.

Now, two decades later, on April 15, 1939, a dull, chilly, and unpleasant day, retired agent A12 typed the closing words of his warning: “Hitler’s European policy is thus merely the first stage. ‘Isolation’ from concern with it is impossible for any country that is not blind to what Hitler himself has written.” Two decades earlier, Bell had thwarted Nazi takeover attempts in the Baltics, Silesia, and Danzig. Now he hoped to thwart the Holocaust before it started.

He pulled on his coat, hat, and gloves and walked briskly towards Chester’s post office in the town centre. He held several envelopes neatly addressed to trustworthy newspaper editors.

Twenty years earlier, Bell had wondered if the Allies would be “willing to make enormous concessions that we are unwilling to make” in order to save German democracy. He had seen the logical impossibility but still recognized the ethical imperative. He needed to try anyway.

And now, twenty years later, he faced the same problem. Could editors believe the unbelievable?

Chapter 21

The Last Warning

You G-men often come and go like shadows.

—GRANT LOCHHEAD TO WINTHROP BELL, OCTOBER 25, 1939

Editors did not believe him.

Not even Hitler, they thought, could seriously mean to murder all non-Aryan races everywhere on earth. According to a letter Bell wrote to a friend, editors told him, “You may be able to put passages together so as to make it look like that; but that cannot be a really intended program; such passages must represent merely random places where Hitler’s neurotic temperament ran away with his expressions.”¹ Bell, it seemed, was trying to make the führer look bad. Editors, he said, were “unwilling to ‘risk the reputation’ of their journals by publishing anything so ‘extreme.’”

It’s hard to imagine, knowing what we do about the death camps, the common-sense belief of 1939. It was a year before the construction of Auschwitz. Hitler was bombastic, sure, and an antisemite, yes. But a mass murderer? Seriously?

The British government had censored Bell’s Nazi warning in 1920, and now, when he had the freedom to write for a public audience, editors disbelieved what he had to say. But despair wasn’t an option.

On Friday, September 1, 1939, hundreds of thousands of Nazi troops launched a devastating offensive over the Polish border. It was the beginning of the Second World War. Once the Nazis held innocent Jewish and Polish populations in their power, they deployed the Einsatzgruppen to murder them. Their first massacres were conducted in utmost secrecy. When rumours began to seep out, Nazi leaders denounced them as cruel lies.

The beginning of the war was bad news, except that Bell’s publication chances finally improved. Now editors had reason to take Hitler’s irrational aggression seriously. Bell began typing a revised version of his springtime articles, updated to reflect current events.

Even though he had not been able find a publisher in the spring, his submission, as he wrote to a friend, “later got read to others who were much surprised by it.” That led to the desk of the editor B.K. Sandwell at the helm of the influential Canadian newsweekly Saturday Night. Finally, he had his publisher.

On October 24, Bell finished his revisions. The day was sunny and cold, with a high wind. He put on his coat and walked quickly to the Chester post office, his body clenched against the wind. In his pocket was an envelope holding his last warning. His Airedale terrier trotted by his side. With war dogs as ancestors, he shared his master’s loyalty for friends and clenched jaw for enemies.

Sandwell described Bell’s article as “one of the most important Saturday Night has published for quite a number of years.” Indeed, it was surely the most important article the newsweekly ever published, and one of the most important that any journal has ever published. It was the first publication, by years, to warn against the Nazis’ plan for worldwide genocides.

Bell’s warnings ran in two issues of Saturday Night, in November and December.² Sandwell penned a note to introduce them: Hitler wanted the “extermination” of “tens of millions” of innocent citizens living in Europe. The Jews were first on the death list. Unless the free world stopped the Nazis, the “Czechs, Ukrainians, Slovaks and Poles” would be the next to become ashes and dust.

Yet not even Sandwell was able to make the full leap to understanding Bell’s report. Even today, the popular imagination tends to think of the Holocaust as a purely European matter. But Hitler’s proposal, Bell explained, was not merely for Europe. The Nazis would not stop their murders until every single non-Aryan on earth—including Blacks, Asians, and anyone else Hitler thought didn’t belong to his idolized race—was dead.

Since it was unclear from Hitler’s proclamations what he meant by “Aryan,” it’s impossible to perform a precise calculation of the number of people he wanted eliminated. But it was certainly in the hundreds of millions, at least.

Sandwell was not just an important editor but also an influential figure in his own right. Among his powerful friends was Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who would soon be Canada’s “warlord,” as the historian Tim Cook calls him, leading the country’s fight to defeat Hitler.³ With Saturday Night, what was once Bell’s private idea could spread to influential people throughout Canada.

And Sandwell didn’t stop spreading the news. As Bell’s scientist friend Grant Lochhead (from Ruhleben) wrote to him in December: “You have evidently got B.K. Sandwell pretty well convinced now, judging from his radio address the Sunday before last. Events seem to support you in a ghastly way in Poland, and you have the grim satisfaction of having your thesis confirmed.”

Meanwhile, a retired British judge in Burma (now Myanmar) sent Bell’s articles to Britain’s Ministry of Information. And Deák, with the US State Department and the Office of Strategic Services, also held the copy he’d personally requested of the author. Those were only some of Winthrop’s and Ralph’s influential friends in government.

Despite the six-month delay between its composition and its publication, Bell’s Holocaust warning appeared to be the first not by a little but by a lot. Three years passed before other news outlets reported on the true scale of the Holocaust. The historian Deborah Lipstadt shows that the news of the real meaning of Hitler’s racial exterminations only began appearing in American newspapers in 1942.⁴

On the first day of the war, Bell had written letters to Ottawa and London, volunteering to work in the fight against the Nazis for expenses only (he admitted he hoped to stay in Canada, if possible). Three months later, in December 1939, after his articles had finally appeared, he still waited for word from the intelligence agencies to see if they could use his services once again. The near-total disarray in Canada as it struggled to assemble an anti-Nazi military from almost nothing slowed things down, but with connections like Hankey, Malcolm, and Ralston, Bell was destined for a callback. Finally, before Christmas, he heard from Ralston, through Ralph, that his name was now on the classified job board.

By the time Canada was finally ready to offer Bell a job, an accident prevented him from immediately accepting it. On December 23, he fell while hauling wood into his house. His doctor suspected he’d cracked his tailbone. He was in agony for months, and the chances that he would be working behind enemy lines for his next intel mission became non-existent. Instead he was stuck at home, frustrated to be listening to radio news of the Nazi invasions of Norway, Holland, and Belgium in the spring. It was “anxious listening” as the Nazi blitzkrieg flattened opposition.

The news grew steadily worse. On Friday, June 21, he heard a radio report of the Soviet Union’s takeover of the Baltic democracies. For Bell, it was a personal tragedy. He’d helped save the Baltics from the Nazis twenty years earlier. But now the proud young nations had fallen just the same.

The next day, France surrendered to the Nazis. It was a catastrophe. By all appearances, the Nazis and the Soviets had democracy on the ropes and lined up for the knockout punch. Two decades earlier, Bell’s reports of the budding Nazi–Soviet alliance to fight the Second World War seemed to skeptics like his private paranoid delusion. Now, two decades later, the tyrannical alliance was obvious.

In mid-June, Hugh Keenleyside, of Canada’s external affairs department, wanted to meet Bell in Ottawa about a job. Bell’s diary does not say the nature of the work, but it was probably in Canada’s secret intelligence service, which Keenleyside was creating. When the invitation came, however, his injury prevented him from travelling to Ottawa.

Soon, he regularly awoke in the night with bad sweats. By the first days of July, he could sleep only if he took pills prescribed by his doctor. Desperate, he went to the Halifax hospital. Hazel drove as he lay across the back seat. He left the car “doubled up,” and orderlies took him to his room in a wheelchair. (After the war, he told his friends that the pain was not so bad. He may have said that because he studied the Stoics, who had a high threshold for suffering.)

At Halifax, he underwent his “big treatment”: diathermic heat, short-wave diathermy. But a distracted doctor accidentally left the heat machine on “toaster,” as Bell joked in his diary. Finally, a nurse rescued him, “wringing wet.” The medical mistake was just the miracle cure he needed. It was as if the heat unfroze him. That night, he enjoyed a “good deep natural sleep” for the first time in months. He woke up entirely free of pain.

The first enemy of the Nazis could finally come out of retirement to thwart them once again. But this time was different: he was no longer a solitary hero, fighting alone against an antisemitic army. Now he was joined by millions of allies.

ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1940, Bell nearly took his last frosty breath on this earth. Just before midnight, a vehicle almost ran him over on an icy Toronto street near his hotel, the imposing Royal York. “Nearly lost my life,” he wrote in his diary.

Was it a Nazi assassin behind the wheel? The Gestapo were active in North America and had already proved their willingness to assassinate enemies abroad. And it wasn’t a small risk for Bell to have revealed the Nazis’ ultimate secret in the press.⁵

But the driver who almost killed him was no Gestapo hit man. Bell’s near-death experience was the result of his own “momentary mental aberration.” Exhausted, he simply forgot to look before crossing.

Perhaps it was this experience that inspired him to go to church on Sunday at St. James Cathedral. But saying thanks to God did not mean turning off his critical thinking. “Service not as impressive as might be. Sermon by the Dean not too bad, but a bit incoherent in arrangement.” He then spent the evening in his “pleasant” hotel room, reading articles in the journal Philosophy. The next day promised to be busy, coordinating between the secret military world and the business world of capitalists, bankers, and workers. Yet he still took time for beauty, with a little “walk along the waterfront” in a biting January wind. This time, he looked both ways before crossing.

Bell’s movements in 1940 are still mysterious. On October 10, “old Alec Johnson,” the “wise old owl of Canadian public life,” for many years a deputy minister in Ottawa, approached him about a “mysterious job” over lunch at the Rideau Club in Ottawa. He introduced Bell to “everybody who was anybody.” The sheer level of talent led Bell to think these serendipitous meetings were prearranged. He met the chief of air services, two cabinet ministers (“C.D. Howe himself” and Thomas Crerar), a deputy minister, the head of the Canadian Press, and other powerful and influential people.

Canadian foreign intelligence was being set up at the time, and Canada might have been thinking of him for a top job, akin to Canada’s own C. As a German expert with an impressive intelligence résumé, Bell was perfect for the position. But he didn’t reveal just what the mysterious offer was. If he did take a job with Canadian intel, it was likely on a volunteer basis. After being caught up in a web of state secrets from 1918 to 1920, he had little interest in letting arbitrary bureaucrats censor him once again.

Still, Canada’s external affairs department wanted to hire him, though it’s unclear what exactly they wanted him for. Someone floated the possibility that Bell take a “swanky” job on the new American-Canadian Permanent Joint Board on Defence. He talked about it over lunch with his former colleague from the Versailles days, O.M. Biggar, who was co-chair of the board as its Canadian head.

External affairs may have also eyed the former A12 for a public-facing diplomatic position. Charles A. Bowman, the well-connected editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen, recommended him for the ambassadorship to Japan. It was at a time when the Allies hoped to keep Japan out of the war. Bell gave his polite regrets. He just wanted to do his “bit,” he responded, “in however humble a station, for the duration.” He didn’t want a permanent government job, he wrote, but he would be willing to be a substitute or an “extra” for a while. It was the same volunteering attitude he’d held towards his intelligence appointment in 1918–20, which he could surely have parlayed into a permanent post if he had wanted.

The government offered him another job it had created specifically for him. It didn’t have a name yet, but it amounted to being the auditor general for the department of finance, overseeing all the government’s finance departments. The position would have been similar in honour and workload to Ralph’s position as director-general for aircraft production, with national responsibility.

Bell quickly said no. The job would have meant being on the road constantly, and he might as well have been living in Japan for all the trouble. Besides, it would involve constant fighting with local government finance agencies. Intramural battles were a part of the job that Ralph apparently loved but Winthrop merely tolerated.

Impressive opportunities were arrayed before him. And rightfully so. He was the agent who first warned against the Nazis in 1919, and the first to crack their Holocaust Code in 1939. The people in the Foreign Office who were now reading his 1919 reports surely thought of him as an intelligence prophet. Power and honour were near to hand.

But centre stage was not Bell’s style. He wanted a job that was essential but would go unnoticed. He also wanted to work in the private sphere, where he could operate with less red tape, and he told Hazel that he would only work on a government salary if he were drafted.

But it clearly wasn’t an unfriendly divorce from the Secret Intelligence Service, and Bell willingly offered his intel analysis for free. For some very highly placed sources in the Canadian, British, and American governments, he was a trusted man.

BELL’S FIRST PRIVATE posting was as an executive for the new Federal Aircraft company, along with Ralph, who was president. But “private” is perhaps not entirely the best word, since the company was owned by the government. The arrangement was meant to cut through the bureaucratic red tape that ordinarily slowed down government, while still preserving secrecy and keeping costs down.

Since Ralph was usually away in his government job, Winthrop functionally ran Federal, which played a key role in creating Canada’s massive contribution to the air war. His position needed both top-secret clearance and business and engineering acumen. Few men in Canada combined all three, and fewer still were willing, like him, to work for free. He was paid expenses-only for much of his time at the company.

Before the US entered the war, Bell needed to import vast quantities of war materials to Canada during the period when it was technically illegal for America to export it. Rumours abound in Chester that Winthrop’s wealth came from rum-running. The truth is more interesting. He was running weapons from the States to fight the Nazis, and he wasn’t getting rich doing it. His brother was also involved in the trade, but for both, the motive was beating the Nazis, not profit.

Bell was a “harassed executive,” as he wrote to Hazel. Still, the job had its perks. Some of the time he had no salary but a comfortable per diem; other times, he had a big salary. Either way, he could live in style in Montreal, the only big Canadian city he liked. He also had a capable private secretary, Miss McNeill. She was efficient in her work, an attack dog who scared off unwanted visitors, and an intel expert on the office grapevine.

Bell invested in sharp suits, not out of vanity but because “I just need to be a well-dressed business man.” He typed quite a few of his letters to Hazel wearing his suit, starched collar, and tie, as he borrowed Miss McNeill’s typewriter while she was out at lunch.

While the US was still officially sitting on the sidelines, Canada was Britain’s arsenal for democracy. Federal Aircraft played a crucial role. Even as Nazi bombing raids devastated English industry, they could not touch Canada. At the beginning of the war, in 1939, the ragtag Royal Canadian Air Force would have quickly lost a dogfight against the Luftwaffe. By the end of the war, Canada’s air force was the fourth largest in the world. The Bell brothers were important agents in that change.

On August 4, 1940, Bell had a nightmare that the Nazis captured him. He managed to escape on a Dutch steamer in steerage class, but Nazis boarded to search for him, meaning he was still in mortal danger. He was “trying to meet problems involved when I half woke.”

Days later, his job at Federal turned into a real-life nightmare. C.D. Howe announced that Ralph was out, ostensibly so he could devote his full attention to his government position. Winthrop would have been the ideal new president of Federal, but it couldn’t happen because Ralph occupied a prominent government post, and Howe wanted to avoid the appearance of nepotism.

Federal’s new president was “a very unpleasant and unreasonable man,” as Bell put it to Hazel, who had the gall to criticize Miss McNeill for using a large envelope when a small one could have worked. Meanwhile, he was “oblivious to the ways in which this company may save hundreds of thousands, even millions, for the country.”

Bell feared for the company’s survival, and Canada’s fragile new air defence industry could easily have collapsed if Federal had failed. Inwardly, he resolved to quit a job he now detested, but not before setting the company on such a firm foundation that not even an incompetent president could undermine it. So when he felt the company was stable, in early September, he quit. His resignation letter was forceful enough that the board called in the president and told him to mend his ways. The president smartened up and began to listen to the experts.

Bell wrote to Hazel that all his work had not been for nothing. Federal was off the runway and into the air. And it was efficient. Bell’s efforts had saved the company—and indirectly the Canadian taxpayers, who owned the company—$4 million (about $70 million in today’s dollars).

The government had offered him prestigious positions, and they kept on doing so. But his friend Clark Ruse, an engineer at Federal, offered him a highly speculative position in private industry, in Ruse’s own planned company. Bell turned down the public posts for the private position, even though it did not yet exist. Bell wasn’t anti-government, but he was furious with government red tape, as when crucial steps in the formation of Canada’s aircraft industry had been delayed for weeks because paperwork requiring a signature waited in someone’s mailbox. He clearly wanted to be somewhere where he could decide something and act upon it without bureaucratic gridlock.

Ruse’s proposed company would, if it became real, overhaul damaged Royal Canadian aircraft so they could return to the fight against the Nazis. Bell’s job would be to administer the whole operation, slated to have around three hundred employees.

Why would Bell take a speculative risk over a prominent and secure government job? He explained it to Hazel in a letter. First, working for Ruse meant he would be doing real war work against the Nazis. His job would rebuild the steel that would destroy the Wehrmacht. Second, he personally liked Clark Ruse. And third, he would be close to home. The new aircraft plant, if it came to exist, would be in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, only seventy kilometres from Chester. Since Chester was too small to support industry, Dartmouth was the next best place because it meant he could spend part of Saturday and most of Sunday with Hazel. She wasn’t able to leave home because she was taking care of Fabian and Dora Pease, the refugee children of Michael Pease, and on holidays and weekends, she assisted with the care of Margaret Siriol Colley, the niece of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who’d warned the world about the Soviets’ genocidal policies in Ukraine and was murdered for his trouble in 1935.

Weekends with Hazel were surely the perk that Ruse knew could best assure Bell’s interest. And that is perhaps why a lonely military industry outpost was set up in Dartmouth when almost everything else was in Ontario and Quebec. Canada owed Bell a favour. Anything.

In April 1941, Clark Ruse Aircraft was finally real, incorporated and financed. Bell helped make it happen. The reward for his hard work was more work, as usual. His new job meant working “from early morning until late at night (often midnight) practically every day, even taking my light lunch at my desk within reach of telephones.”

SOME HISTORIANS ARGUE that the Second World War finally turned against Germany in the Battle of Stalingrad, which raged from August 1942 to February 1943. It was the first time Nazi land forces retreated. But Bell called the turning point much earlier, on December 8, 1940. It was at a moment when the Nazis looked unstoppable. Continental Europe foundered under an ocean of red, white, and black Swastika flags. Yet Bell saw that the balance of the war had tipped.

The Nazis, he pointed out in his correspondence, had failed to seize the Mediterranean and African strongpoints needed to neutralize Britain’s superior navy. Meanwhile, Italy’s battlefield failures revealed the weak underbelly of fascism. A morale boost now pierced one of Hitler’s greatest weapons, his aura of invincibility. Bell wrote: “The spell of the ‘inevitability’ of his programme has been broken, not only away at the maritime rim, against England, but actually on a land frontier . . . Resistance is no longer hopeless everywhere and under all conditions. Result, I should anticipate: that he will find it harder to hold down quietly all the other lands he has occupied; that elements everywhere will be encouraged to prepare actively for the ultimate overthrow, and to be ready to do something towards that end.”

Resistance heroes deep behind Nazi lines now saw their chance. But of course, a tipped balance wasn’t yet victory. It was only in January 1945 that Bell declared the “beginning of the end” for the Nazis. They were still putting up a massive fight on the battlefield, and it looked like the war could go either way. But Bell knew about industrial logistics. Relentless bombing (enabled in large measure by Runge’s radar sabotage and the Bells’ aircraft companies) meant that Nazi industry was destroyed and its military reserves depleted.

The massive European battles at the end of the war were like the grand finale of a fireworks show. The brightest, noisiest explosions would be followed by the darkest and quietest moments.

Even though the war was still a few months from being over, Bell decided to retire. With the war nearly won, he wanted to save Canadian taxpayers the expense of his salary and open up a line of work for a younger person. But his latest retirement did not mean shirking his duty. He now embarked on a plan to eliminate the possibility that the Nazis could regroup and fight again in the Third World War.

After Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945 Bell learned from his German sources that the situation in the aftermath of the Second World War was virtually identical to that after the First World War. Democracy was formally in charge, but the nation was hungry, its economy was shattered, anonymous propaganda against the Allies was common, and the Nazis were still the most organized group in the country. Bell’s mathematician friend Richard Courant, after returning from a secret mission to Germany, told of his grave worry that “German aggressive nationalism will again threaten the world in the future.”

Another of Bell’s German friends, the chemist Robert Meyer, told him: “The country has been so demoralized and corrupted by the Nazis that I do not see how it can raise a decent head out of the swamp of depravity in which it now grovels.”

Bell urged his contacts on both sides of the Atlantic to defeat the Nazis once and for all, as they had failed to do in 1919. Temporary battlefield superiority was not enough. The Allies still needed to correct their post–First World War failure, and now they had another chance. This time, they needed to be chivalrous towards Germany’s new democracy.

Even though the Nazis had violated the moral laws of war, Bell pointed out that the German people needed food, the economy needed to recover, and the country’s new democracy needed to join the community of nations. It was the same proposal he had made in 1919. But now his suggestion found more interested ears. No one wanted to fight World War Three twenty years later.

Courant’s scientific intelligence report about the state of Germany (a copy of which he sent to Bell) described the persistence of pro-Nazi sentiment throughout much of German science. That, along with Soviet tendencies, meant the Allies needed to cooperate with “reliable individuals and groups.” It was rather like the fight Courant had undertaken in 1919 on behalf of pro-democratic elements in the Social Democrats. Similarly, Bell knew that his network of anti-Nazi German sources could be a valuable resource for the country’s resurrection. He wrote to his contacts in the intelligence services about his friendship with eight leading German anti-Nazis who had miraculously survived the war unscathed. As Bell put it to Deák of the US State Department, they “are all liberals of long standing; deeply anxious that a new Germany should arise which would spontaneously orient itself towards ‘us.’”

Did Deák take Bell’s advice and contact them? It’s not possible to say for certain, but he trusted Bell, and he was not stupid.

Among Bell’s powerful anti-Nazi German friends, Wilhelm Runge was at the very top. In the post-war period, he got his job back with Telefunken. It was no black mark on his honour that the Nazis had fired him. Telefunken’s post-war public side sold top-shelf audio-visual equipment that is still in high demand with collectors today. Its back office sold cutting-edge spy equipment to governments. Runge was the real-life version of Ian Fleming’s Q, overseeing the development of secret spy tech. He was as well positioned to influence the Cold War as he had the war against Nazism.

The historian Keith R. Allen describes Runge’s close connections to British intelligence during the Cold War. MI6, he wrote, enjoyed “working relationships with such senior employees as Wilhelm Runge, head of the transmitter and development departments.”⁶ Runge also served as a key figure connecting West German military intelligence research to American agencies. Bell’s word no doubt helped Runge become a “trusted man” to the West.

WHEN BELL RETURNED to academic philosophy, he wondered how Nazism had swayed the minds of millions. In January 1946, he wrote an article for a phenomenology journal on Alfred Rosenberg, the “philosopher of Nazism,” who played a small but significant role in the rise of the movement with his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century.⁷ Bell’s interest was not just historical. He was worried about the conditions under which the Nazis had flourished, and under which they could flourish again.

The Nazis, as Bell had seen up close in 1919, had offered “a rescue for devastated vanity and an augury of ultimate vindication.” It let men like Hitler and Rosenberg cast the evil spell that seduced a nation. To break their spell, the Allies needed to arrange the post-war peace differently this time.

Bell worked to make sure the horrors of European starvation did not happen again. At a personal level, he organized CARE food packages for his friends in Germany who’d survived five years of “double danger—from bombs above and Gestapo beneath.” But he also worked behind the scenes to ensure the whole German nation was fed.

It can seem, today, like it was perfectly obvious that 1919 Germany was destined to become a Nazi country, and that in 1946, it was destined for democracy. But in fact, the post-war situation looked remarkably similar. At both times, a small, well-organized, hidden group of racist militarists stood opposed to a disorganized, confused, and desperate democratic majority. Bell knew the democrats “are apt to become discouraged, but it is precisely that element which needs encouragement now, if we are not to find that the same old gang, merely with a change of shirt, is setting the pace in Germany.”

A year later, in October 1947, Germany was still hungry. The Nazis were still active underground, their anti-British propaganda continued unabated, and the German democrats were still on the defensive. Even Wilhelm Runge expressed his displeasure with the Allies’ treatment of the country. It was looking like post–First World War Germany all over again.

Bell wrote a long and detailed letter to Runge. It was a personal intel report for his old friend, but Bell also knew that Runge’s central position in German intelligence meant his message would spread more widely throughout pro-democratic German politics. As Mayor Sahm had proven in Danzig in the hot summer of 1919, facts could prevent war. Bell’s report to his friend started by showing the desperate condition of the grain reserves in Canada because of the vast help the country had already provided to a starving Europe. The condition, he explained, was so dire that a single bad harvest would devastate Canada. Besides, German U-boats had sunk many of the ships that carried grain. Bell made clear that German hunger wasn’t an Allied game, as it had been after the First World War.

Bell also encouraged Runge to understand why so many people detested Deutschland. Once again, as happened in the wake of the first war, the German people remained largely unaware of the crimes their country had committed. Most still did not know that foreigners loathed them—or why they loathed them, since the Holocaust wasn’t widely reported in German newspapers. Bell explained that he even heard the sentiment that if ten million Germans were to starve to death, it would not be unwelcome: “And if there are 10 million fewer Germans? They brought it upon themselves. With 10 million fewer Germans, the rest of the world can breathe more freely.” The number was evocative of the millions the Nazis had just killed in the Holocaust.

Bell knew that the growing mutual resentment could easily become the flash point for a future war. So he proposed a financial rescue plan, virtually identical to the one he had suggested after the First World War, to stop it from happening. It became a constant theme of his messages to his network of friends, who included highly placed figures in Canadian, British, and American intelligence. He knew that the Nazis were plotting revenge and gaining strength. Yet he was certain they could be defeated, and Germany won, if the country received “a chance to ‘work her passage’ back to some sort of reasonable livelihood within the circle of nations again.”

His plans were finally vindicated. In June 1947, General George Marshall declared at Harvard, Bell’s alma mater: “The revival of a working economy in the world” is a prerequisite to “the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”⁸ His speech was the kickoff of the Marshall Plan, the program that supplied financial support to democratic Europe, including Germany, after the war.

That Bell’s approach was correct has been proven by the peace that has reigned in the countries where the Marshall Plan was implemented, including Germany. While the industrialist Lewis H. Brown is given credit for writing the 1947 Report on Germany that was a key influence on the Marshall Plan, Bell’s 1919 Report on the Condition in Germany and the 1918 plan he laid out for Robert Borden had first made the case for immediately supporting the business climate within a newly democratic country whose militarists had just been defeated. That support would, in turn, give the defeated people real jobs so that they weren’t tempted to become mercenary soldiers for the terrorists, and it would provide the government with tax revenue to manage the country. Whether Brown read Bell’s report on loan from Britain’s Foreign Office library is not clear, but Brown interviewed top Allied leaders, and some of them certainly would have known about Bell’s ideas. A comparison of Bell’s and Brown’s reports reveals many similarities: both advocated the need for currency reform in Germany, the urgency of preventing a string of national bankruptcies, and the importance of getting food to German labourers so they could work on the country’s reconstruction.

Bell’s success was a long time coming—nearly three decades after he made the proposal to Borden in 1918. The retired A12 obviously didn’t care that he received no public acknowledgement for what he had done. The important task, he knew, wasn’t wearing medals and ribbons. It was bringing peace to Europe.

In the post-war period, Bell learned who’d lived and who’d died. Nearly all his anti-Nazi friends survived. The exception was the Catholic saint among them. On January 30, 1946, he received a worrying letter from Courant, Edith Stein’s cousin. Stein, today called St. Teresa Benedicta, was living as a nun in a Dutch convent and was, as Courant told him, “taken out by the Nazis in 1943 and has disappeared without a trace, presumably murdered as so many millions of other people of Jewish descent.” The same thing would have happened to Courant if he hadn’t left Germany.

Soon Courant confirmed the news. Gestapo agents had seized her at a convent in Holland, where her religious sisters had moved her to keep her safe from the Nazi menace. But Holland was not far enough to escape the blitzkrieg. The Nazis murdered her at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

Wilhelm’s sister Ella Runge, a medical doctor, died after volunteering her services in a region experiencing a typhus outbreak. She was, Bell wrote, a martyr to her profession.

But he probably never learned the fate of Levin Kruskal, the Manchester Jew arrested on the same day as Bell in 1914.⁹ Kruskal was one of the lucky ones, even though the Nazis arrested him again during the Second World War. His British citizenship was half the key that rescued him. The other half: in the mid-1920s, a rabbi recommended that he buy land in Palestine while it was cheap, and Levin took the advice. The resulting unusual combination of British and Palestinian citizenship saved his life. Rather than shipping Levin to the gas chambers, the Germans agreed to a prisoner exchange.

In late June 1944, they sent him and the chosen few on a train to freedom. On the way west, Levin saw his fellow Jews packed into cattle cars, headed for extermination in the east. His son, Herbert, sitting next to him, told “how they looked wistfully through the holes and cracks, like sheep for the slaughter.”¹⁰

It was the Nazi plan for the world.

Chapter 22

The Secret Elevator

A visitor could go all the way through the house and wonder where on earth it was.

—WINTHROP BELL TO CLARK RUSE, FEBRUARY 11, 1952

The intensive strain of war work had taken a serious physical toll. Winthrop Bell’s heart problems worsened.

In 1951, he went to the hospital with angina and arterial thrombosis. There is little doubt that his massive, unceasing anti-Nazi and propeace efforts had seriously damaged his health. For years, he hardly slept, and he kept himself in a constant state of strain. He had dutifully offered himself, mind and body, for his loyalties.

The medical authorities told him to slow down, and he finally did. He followed the strict diet prepared by his doctors. He also started reading detective stories, a natural fit for the lead investigator on the worst mass murder case of the twentieth century.

His life was, he wrote, “a happy life as well as a quiet one.” In Chester, the Bells watched the yachts “coming in on the last leg of their race—all together, a beautiful sight.”

In later years, he kept up with his charitable contributions to the poor, and to his alma mater, Mount Allison. He set to work on a monumental series of projects related to Nova Scotia history, which culminated in an award-winning book.¹

The historian Terrence Punch heard him speak, and recalled: “Bell’s low voice commanded an immediate hush . . . His force of character and intellect were formidable. People’s awe of him was manifest throughout the room.”²

His splendour transcended his scholarship. He was radiant in the style of a man who’d completed the cycle of the epic hero. As a young man, Bell had left his humble home on the rocky soil of Halifax. He travelled the great world, thwarted the Nazis, and returned home bearing gifts of wisdom. It is the same old epic story, as Joseph Campbell put it: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”³

The retired A12 also devoted himself to completing a book on family genealogy. He published A Genealogical Study in 1962. As a historian and a philosopher, he was interested in how the past helps to create the present. He also had a question that he could better answer with genealogy than with a memoir: How did Winthrop Bell himself come to be? As he wrote in his Study, “We are inescapably conditioned by the past; in the first instance genetically by our own past.”

His father, Andrew, taught his sons the value of fighting bullies, Bell wrote, and going along genially with everyone else. He also showed how to be accomplished and humble at the same time. “Anything like boastfulness or self-conceit was foreign to his impulses and distasteful to him.”

His mother, Mary Emerancy, taught him music appreciation and perfectionism. “Everything had to be properly done; she was constitutionally incapable of intentionally sketchy or slapdash performance—the result was that she was always trying to carry out more than any one person could accomplish.” The parental tendencies combined in their son.

Bell entertained visitors at Drumnaha who wanted to talk about history. In addition to sharing stories about the world wars, Bell might have shared the philosophy of history he’d taught at Ruhleben University in 1918: “We can never say absolutely that a historical fact is complete.”

It is a fact that the Nazis lost the war, but the effects of their loss, and freedom’s victory, will never be complete. Had the Nazis won, there would only be monochromatic “Aryans” living in the world, and none of the other peoples who constitute the diversity and interest of life. And Hitler would have surely killed off the morally decent and courageous Aryans too.

Bell was the quiet hero who helped defeat the great evil. His example shows how a philosophically trained mind can cut through a morass of lies to reveal the truth. It is a lesson that remains of crucial interest today, when antisemitism is on the rise and dictators dream of genocide.

That is why A12 is a spy not just for history but for our own day. Bell cracked the Nazi Code. But more importantly, he cracked the peace code.

BELL’S HOUSE, DRUMNAHA, had three floors. After his heart attacks, he couldn’t climb the stairs. Rather than move from his perfect place by the sea, he designed a hidden elevator.

He told Clark Ruse, who had top-secret clearance, about its construction. It was “built by local artificers,” he explained, “all except the motor-and-drum unit up aloft, which was purchased intact. The fitting of it into this small house, so that a visitor could go all the way through the house and wonder where on earth it was, has been a really neat piece of work.” On the two main floors of the house, “it is completely inconspicuous—in fact, nothing suggesting an elevator is in sight. And yet it is right there all the time.”

It is Winthrop Bell’s self-portrait of the master spy. Completely inconspicuous, and yet right there all the time.

Epilogue

On Sunday, April 4, 1965, Winthrop Bell died by the sea at Drumnaha. His heart, which had loyally carried him through grave dangers and heroic toils, finally gave out.

His gravestone at Chester’s Old Burial Ground, in sight of his house, bears the words “The good man is the friend of all living things,” quoting Gandhi. There is also an image of a chickadee. It recalls the remarkable habit of Bell’s retirement: sitting with Hazel in their garden, with seeds on their hands, waiting patiently as songbirds alighted for the feast.

The ancient Greeks believed that great heroes become a light in the heavens. If they were right, the Early Bird satellite, launched on the third day after Bell died, is his light. He was the spy who rose early to catch the Nazi worm. Like the satellite that marked “the beginning of the global village linked instantaneously,”¹ altering, as the New York Times put it, “economic, social and political patterns,”² A12’s intelligence work helped create the modern international order.

THREE DECADES AFTER BELL’S PASSING, I unwittingly set out on the track that led me to his secret papers. I was trying to solve a philosophical mystery, not an espionage one.

Despite the coincidence in surname, we are not related. But we are long-lost philosophy twins. In the 1990s, I was a student at a small liberal arts university, Oklahoma City University, a place rather like Bell’s Mount Allison (Methodist, and favouring the fine arts). OCU was one of very few places in the world that researched the philosophies of both Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl. During my undergraduate studies, I spent an exchange year at the University of Göttingen in Germany, where Royce and Husserl were both scholars, although decades apart. Later, as a graduate student at Vanderbilt University in the early 2000s, I could not shake the feeling that Royce and Husserl sounded too much alike to be mere coincidence. Perhaps Göttingen was key to the mystery? In 2008, as I was finishing my PhD on Royce—the same topic that Bell, coincidentally, wrote on in a previous century—I decided to go to Germany to see what I could find out.

Next was the academic version of a cliffhanger. The first days of searching resulted in nothing except charming scenery. I had one last afternoon at the university library before making my return trip to the United States. It was in the literal last hour that I unexpectedly found an unpublished 1914 Göttingen dissertation. It was on Royce’s philosophy. Then my eyes went farther down the page. Husserl directed the dissertation! In the silence of the library, my outburst of surprise no doubt raised the eyebrows of the well-mannered researchers on either side of me. Forgive me, dear scholars, but I was astounded. Here was the missing link between the two philosophers. And not just that, it was the link between American pragmatism and German phenomenology. It seemed even more unlikely than the author’s surname matching mine.

I was immediately confronted with a new puzzle. Two pages were missing from this dissertation. Bell’s papers, I learned, were at the Ralph Pickard Bell Library (named for Winthrop’s brother) at Mount Allison University. Might the missing pages be there? It was worth another scholarly fishing expedition.

Strangely, the Bell Library said they were holding his papers under restriction. “All diaries, personal letters, and other personal papers of Winthrop Pickard Bell shall be sealed . . . until January 1, 2012.”³

I could hardly wait years to learn how pragmatism and phenomenology were related. I wrote a letter to the president of Mount Allison, Dr. Robert Campbell, asking for permission to search the papers. Dr. Campbell generously agreed. I later learned that before granting permission for my visit, the university confirmed that in the judgement of the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom, it was not illegal for me to have a look.

Showing up at Mount Allison was surreal. Every third building, it seemed, had a Bell name on it. The family has given millions of dollars to the university, in addition to making contributions to its leadership. Winthrop was a trustee, Ralph was the first chancellor, and other relatives continue to serve on important committees today. I was received with such honour that I suspect some thought I was a family heir.

At the Ralph Bell Library, across from the famous silver spoons (donated to the university by Bell’s Irish ancestors, who were among the founders of Mount Allison—making Bell something like an academic prince), I began opening boxes of his papers. On the first day of research, I found the missing pages in his copy of the dissertation, complete with Husserl’s copious handwritten notes. It was an exciting discovery for phenomenology research.⁴

I kept opening boxes. It soon became clear why his papers were restricted. Prime ministers and generals read his secret anti-Nazi intelligence work. Then, like Indiana Jones’ lost ark, the secret to beating the Nazis went into a box in a classified archive.

Mount Allison’s treasure had remained undisturbed for decades. Over the years, MI6 destroyed virtually everything from the crucial period near its founding. But in the most surprising location, in rural eastern Canada, we find a vivid tableau of the Secret Intelligence Service’s most important battle. The free world needed to beat the Nazis, and Bell first led the fight.

But who is to say that there is not some other, earlier warning by another secret agent? After all, the world of espionage is perhaps the most difficult department of recent history because so many documents have been concealed or destroyed. Yet there are reasons to believe that even after every archive is fully opened and investigated, Bell will still stand as the first Western intelligence enemy of the Nazis. Books on the history of MI6 (MI6 and the Machinery of Spying, The Ultimate Enemy, Secret Wars, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, Six, The Quest for C) reveal no earlier warning.⁵

This book is the product of fifteen years of research on Dr. Winthrop Bell. The labour was worth it to meet a virtuous hero who fought alone, for a long while, to thwart the Nazis.

Author’s Note

This is the true story of Winthrop Bell, quite possibly history’s greatest spy. Code-named A12, he was a Canadian-born British secret agent who dodged gunfire and explosions in Berlin in 1919 to become the first Western secret agent to fight the Nazis. His intelligence campaign helped ensure that Adolf Hitler lost World War II. Bell was also a key, though necessarily unnamed, architect of peace after both world wars.

Why has his amazing story never been told? As Winthrop Bell later wrote about his own espionage career, in a letter to the spymaster Lord Maurice Hankey, “Naturally I have not talked of it.”¹ Meanwhile, the British government did its part by keeping many of his papers classified. Only now can his astonishing secret life be revealed.

Bell was the first known person to warn against the Nazis’ deadliest plots, and he did it twice. In the spring of 1919, he was the first intelligence agent to warn about the National Socialists and their plan for the Second World War. This was a year before the Kapp Putsch attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic and take over Germany, and years before people first referred to supporters of National Socialism as Nazis.

Two decades later, in 1939, Bell published the first warning about the Nazis’ ultimate secret. Years before the major newspapers began reporting on the Holocaust, Bell told intelligence agencies and the public about Adolf Hitler’s plans for racial exterminations, and how his intentions were global in scope.

How did he do it? Bell was in the right place at the right time with the right sources. He was the lead British secret agent in Germany in the spring of 1919, with highly placed contacts deeply embedded in German military intelligence. Some of them were his closest friends. Others were key diplomats, politicians, labour leaders, business owners, and journalists.

But it would have been for naught if Bell weren’t courageous, persistent, and intelligent. As a philosophy graduate student in Germany, Bell had successfully interpreted Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, a notoriously difficult book. He then wrote his own book on the theory of knowledge, an extremely demanding philosophical topic. He finished his doctoral studies in 1914 and would have ordinarily been immediately awarded the PhD, but his German university refused to formally confer the degree on an “enemy citizen.” (It was eventually granted in 1922, but that didn’t stop Canada’s prime minister, Robert Borden, from addressing him as “doctor” in 1918.)

A12’s training wasn’t just academic. As a new agent, he received intelligence training from the legendary founder of the British Secret Intelligence Service, Mansfield Smith Cumming, aka C, before departing for Berlin.

His training was the best, but Bell was also a man of scientific character. As the historian Terrence Punch observed, Bell was “ruthless” and “relentless” in pursuit of historical facts, and “determined, unwavering and unwilling to abide hindrance or objection.”² Although Punch described Bell as a scholar, his words equally apply to his intelligence war against Nazism and his formulation of a plan for enduring post-war peace that can continue to guide us today.

From sounding the first anti-Nazi warnings to laying the foundations for the Marshall Plan, Bell is history’s greatest spy. Of course, there are other greats, including the Hungarian Ármin Vámbéry, the Russian Sidney Reilly, and the Canadian William Stephenson. The “greatest” may end up being a tie, but I’m sure there are none greater than A12.

This is a work of non-fiction, and everything in quotes has been sourced from the historical record. I conducted much of the research among unpublished papers held in archives in Canada, Germany, and the UK. The most important of these is the Winthrop Pickard Bell fonds at Mount Allison University, in rural Sackville, New Brunswick. Bell’s papers were held under restriction until 2012, and I was the first visiting researcher allowed unrestricted access. Also valuable were Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s papers at the Parliamentary Archives, London; Sir James Headlam-Morley’s papers at Churchill College, Cambridge University; the Versailles Peace Treaty papers at the National Archives in Richmond, England; the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, in Göttingen, Germany; and the archives at King’s College London. Bell’s reports, diaries, and letters are quoted verbatim (subject to minor edits, as 1919 telegraphic reports, for instance, left off words for the sake of economy; I have provided these corrections without brackets, for the sake of readability).

Bell’s reports are sometimes given as direct speech. He did not, of course, record every glance out the window, smile, or arched eyebrow, but I have included details like these when it was natural for the situation.

Bell’s early typewriters lacked the ability to write in italics, so he used underlines. In later work, he used italics. For the sake of consistency, I have updated the underlines to italics.

Despite our shared surname, Winthrop and I are not known relations.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for interviews with people who knew Winthrop Bell: his grand-niece Heather Johnston; his grand-nephew Andrew Wood; and Dr. Fabian Pease (son of Bell’s friend Michael Pease), an English child refugee who lived with the Bells during the Second World War. These interviews gave a sense of the man.

Profound thanks to editors Patrick Crean, the first champion of this book; Jim Gifford, who played the middle game; and Julia McDowell, who shepherded it to completion; Canaan Chu, for his excellent production; Janice Weaver, for her superb copyediting; Lisa Bettencourt for her design; Lloyd Davis for his proofreading; and Iris Tupholme and Jennifer Lambert, at the helm of HarperCollins Canada. Thanks as well to Dave Knox and Lisa Rundle of HarperCollins Canada, and Jaime Witcomb, my UK publicist. And thank you to Nick Mullendore, of Vertical Ink Agency, and John Henry Crosby, director of the Dietrich von Hildebrand Project.

The Mount Allison archivists David Mawhinney and Rhianna Edwards have been extraordinarily helpful with this research, as has Jane Heys of the Ralph Pickard Bell Library, who transcribed a range of Bell’s intelligence reports.

Thanks to Phil Harold, Nadine McSherry, Claire Morrison, Jennifer Russell, and my family, especially Jessica Bell, for reading early drafts of the book; and, for numerous and varied contributions, to (in reverse alphabetical order) Richard Zaner, Vivien Zelazny, Wesley Wark, William Sweet, Mark Stout, Whipple Smith, Michael Smith, Jean and John Sharp, Clive Priddle, John L. Orr, Robbie Moser, Dermot Moran, Molly McGrath, Margaret MacMillan, George Lucas, Robert Larmer, John Lachs, Sarah Kimbell, Hayden Kee, Seth and Stacy Kastner, Robert Henderson, Rachel Harold, Jan Goldman, Brian Fox, Christiane Faris, Chad Engelland, Matt Dinan, Barry Cull, Sarah-Jane Corke, Jessica Collins, Frank Chalk, Robert Campbell, Catharina Bonnemann, Katrin Bolbeth, Christian Beyer, Renée Belliveau, Randall Auxier, and my splendid colleagues in the University of New Brunswick, who helped with various stages of the research.

I appreciate the students who worked on his project: Nora Wagner, Vanessa Randall, Daniel Prouse, Maxwell Pond, Tristan Nkoghe, Monica MacDonald, Indhu Iyengar, Josée Caron, and Zosia Bell.

Thanks to the generous funders of my research on Winthrop Bell: the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Catholic University of Leuven, Assumption University, Mount Allison University’s Marjorie Young Bell Endowment Fund Committee, the University of New Brunswick, and the Harrison McCain Foundation. Earlier, William A. Lowell, the Lowell Institute of Boston, Vanderbilt University, and Oklahoma City University supported my research on Josiah Royce, which led, by and by, to Winthrop Bell.

And eternal gratitude to my family, who heard this story first and longest. My archival adventures required moving with my young family (of three, then four, then five children) among four nations and three languages. Fortunately, like C, they found espionage research to be “capital sport.”

Notes

AUTHOR’S NOTE

1.   Mount Allison University Archives, Winthrop Bell Fonds, 8550/1/117.

2.   Terrence M. Punch, “‘Even if I Cannot Finish . . .’: Winthrop Bell and His Register,” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, vol. 7 (2004), pp.114–15.

PROLOGUE

1.   Bell Fonds, 6501/10/3 No. 14. Bell’s intelligence files are located under the signature 6501/10 sub-series 3 and 7. I will leave off citing Bell’s intelligence reports in what follows. They are arranged by date in the Bell Fonds.

2.   Winthrop Bell, “Exterminate Non-Germans, Dogma of ‘Mein Kampf,’” Saturday Night, November 25, 1939; Winthrop Bell, “Hitler’s Extermination Policy Is World-wide,” Saturday Night, December 2, 1939. Bell’s 1939 springtime compositions, which editors read at the time but did not believe, do not appear to survive. But he told a friend that his published versions from the fall of 1939 were based on the spring original, updated to reflect current events.

3.   R.J. Rummel, Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (New York: Routledge, 2019), p. 11.

4.   Jürgen Matthäus, Predicting the Holocaust: Jewish Organizations Report from Geneva on the Emergence of the “Final Solution,” 1939–1942 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), p. 19. Bell’s concrete warnings were penned a half year before the next known speculative warning. In mid-October 1939, soon after the beginning of the Second World War, Richard Lichtheim, head of the Geneva office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, wrote to the agency’s London headquarters, “I am afraid . . . that under German rule 2,000,000 Jews will be annihilated.” Ibid., p. 2. Here it is important to note that Bell had already realized a half year earlier that Hitler’s extermination plans envisioned a much higher number of victims, at least in the hundreds of millions. The next known concrete warning was written on August 8, 1942, when Gerhart Riegner, head of the Geneva branch of the World Jewish Congress, cabled to WJC headquarters in New York and London that Hitler’s headquarters were discussing a plan that “THREEANDHALF TO FOUR MILLIONS SHOULD AFTER DEPORTATION AND CONCENTRATION IN EAST BE AT ONE BLOW EXTERMINATED.” Ibid., p. 1. Also noteworthy is Pierre van Paassen, a Canadian Christian and Zionist. He warned, in 1934, that the economic boycott of Jews in Nazi Germany would result in the destruction of one-third of the country’s Jews.

5.   Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1993). As for non-English papers, the historian Henry R. Huttenbach writes of the situation in the 1930s: “Though unaware of the ultimate catastrophe”—the Holocaust—“through its unambiguous commitment to emigration, the Jewish press in Germany achieved what other Jewish presses elsewhere failed to do as well in the 1930s . . . 60% of German Jews were out of Germany by September 1939.” Henry R. Huttenbach, “Adjusting to Catastrophe: The German Jewish Press (1933–1938) and the Debate Over Mass-Emigration,” in Why Did Not the Press Shout? American & International Journalism During the Holocaust, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2003), p. 265.

6.   Andrew Nagorski, Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), p. 3.

CHAPTER 1: THE PHENOMENOLOGIST

1.   Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family: Her Unfinished Autobiographical Account, eds. L. Gelber and Romaeus Leuven, OCD; trans. Josephine Koeppel, OCD (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986), p. 19.

2.   Harold Black, Sackville Tribune Post, October 6, 1966.

3.   Ibid.

4.   Personalism is a philosophical doctrine that refuses to subsume personal subjectivity to anything else. As Karol Wojtyla, later Pope and St. John Paul II (who was influenced by Bell’s professor Max Scheler), wrote: “Man experiences himself as the agent of his action and is thus its subject. He also has the experience of himself as the subject, but the experience of subjectiveness differs from that of efficacy.” Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), p. 191.

5.   Interview with the author, February 13, 2021.

6.   Göttingen’s religious diversity was a testament to the liberal spirit that prevailed there, as compared to the mono-religious character of much of Europe. Göttingen’s university was founded by Britain’s King George II, who was simultaneously regent of Königreich Hanover. The union discontinued when Queen Victoria ascended to the throne because the German Reich would not permit a female monarch.

7.   The Agadir Crisis nearly precipitated the First World War three years avant la lettre. At Agadir, German ships confronted the French, and the British navy came next to frighten the Germans. Faces were saved when Germany was given part of the Congo in appeasement. This was soon after a horrific German slaughter of the Namibians, about which Britain surely knew something.

8.   Husserl’s book that most influenced Bell: Logical Investigations, ed. Dermot Moran (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2001). Husserl’s shorter summary of the task of Logical Investigations is found in Jason Bell and Catharina Bonnemann, eds., “On the Task and the Historical Position of the Logical Investigations,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 25, no. 267 (2011).

9.   C.S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 147.

10.  See also Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960).

11.  Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

12.  The Germans argued that it was hypocritical for western European nations to criticize them for the slaughter at Namibia, given that their enemies, the Belgians, slaughtered the inhabitants of Congo beginning in 1885. It points to the danger of precedent.

13.  Winston Churchill, The World Crisis (Toronto: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 245–46.

14.  “Levin” was likely the wealthy Leo Levin Kruskal.

15.  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W.D. Ross (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), p. 247.

16.  A description of the Göttingen police’s distrust of the “suspicious . . . enemy” is found in Detlef Busse, Engagement oder Rückzug? Göttinger Naturwissenschaften im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2008), p. 48.

17.  Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, p. 303.

18.  Ibid., p. 301.

19.  Ibid., p. 302.

20.  Thomas Vongehr, “Kriegsbriefe Husserl-Söhne,” Husserl Archives Leuven, October 27, 2014, https://hua.ophen.org/category/kriegsbriefe-husserl-sohne/page/14/.

21.  Stein, Life in a Jewish Family, p. 303.

CHAPTER 2: THE PROFESSOR

1.   Like other prisoners, Bell was moved around, and he also lived in other barracks at Ruhleben.

2.   After hearing Bell’s Ruhleben prison lecture on relations between Canada and Europe, Pease wrote in his diary on November 15, 1915: “Very able and illuminating paper though far too long: he went on for 2 hours and 10 minutes and then did not finish, but it was not a bit dull the whole time. He dealt with the economic, educational, racial and imperial problems. By a long chalk the most interesting person I’ve met here, Bell is.” Michael Pease, Are We Downhearted? The Letters and Diaries of Michael Stewart Pease from Ruhleben, eds. Sarah Kimbell and Rowan Pease (Melton Mowbray, UK: Poplars Press, 2020).

3.   Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

4.   Karl Liebknecht, The Future Belongs to the People (New York: Macmillan, 1918), p. 117.

5.   Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

6.   Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1995).

7.   Nietzsche was German by citizenship but Polish by self-claimed ethnicity, at a time when he worked to disassociate himself from German racism. Scholars who have investigated the genealogy have not found the Polish ancestry that Nietzsche described, so it isn’t clear if he was imagining the connection, or if he knew something the genealogists do not.

8.   Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003).

9.   Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), p. 271.

10.  John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage, 2000), p. 434.

11.  McGrath continues about phenomenological evidence, “The key is its verbal form: things evidence themselves. We are to accept them as how they evidence themselves (and only as that) while doing phenomenology (the principle of principles), and reflect on how they evidence themselves.” Email message to the author, August 12, 2022.

CHAPTER 3: THE ANTI-SEMITIC LEAGUE

1.   Chicago Commerce, March 13, 1914.

2.   The British Secret Intelligence Service, now called MI6, was called M.I.i.c. at the time. I have used MI6 throughout, as it is more familiar.

3.   Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (London: Picador, 2002), p. 27.

4.   Ibid., p. 28.

5.   Bell later described his liberal politics in a letter to a friend: “I am a liberal by earnest and enthusiastic conviction. On the other hand, I am a ‘democrat’ only secondarily, not very enthusiastically, and certainly not unconditionally.” He thought that democracy was usually the least harmful, but “a democratic majority can, and perhaps would usually be, just as tyrannous and illiberal as any dictator. The most important right or privilege to be preserved in a democracy, is the right of a minority to its own ways, to the fullest extent compatible with the healthy maintenance of the community at all. And a democracy without a serious and abiding sense of some principles transcending the fluctuating preferences of its majorities, is a vicious as well as a precarious thing.”

6.   Lt. Col. Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, The Gourmet’s Guide to London (Edinburgh: Riverside Press, 1914), p. 369.

7.   “Enthülltes Geheimnis,” Jüdische Rundschau, November 30, 1917. The English translations are from a review article, “An Anti-Jewish Campaign,” Birmingham Daily Post, January 1, 1918. “Anti-Semitic League” is the newspaper’s translation of the Rundschau’s “antisemitischen Bewegung.” It is not clear whether the plotters called themselves anything, or if it was an unnamed plot.

8.   “An Anti-Jewish Campaign,” Birmingham Daily Post, January 1, 1918.

9.   The Parliamentary Debates (Official Report), fifth series, vol. 19 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1919), p. 996.

10.  Ludendorff and Hitler stand next to each other in the well-known photo taken after the Nazis’ Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.

CHAPTER 4: THE SECRET BASE

1.   Newnham-Davis, The Gourmet’s Guide to London, p. 69.

2.   Hugh L. Keenleyside, On the Bridge of Time (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982), p. 55.

3.   Winthrop Bell Fonds, 6501/10/2.

CHAPTER 5: CODE NAME A12

1.   Michael Smith, Six: The Real James Bonds 1909–1939 (London: Biteback, 2010).

2.   Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

3.   Robert G.L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany, 1918–1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952).

4.   Haffner, Defying Hitler, p. 34.

5.   Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 61.

6.   The intersubjective method would later make virtually all the phenomenologists (and all the smart ones) immune to the führer principle (Führerprinzip), which held that one man knew all the right answers. The phenomenologists knew that knowledge does not advance through single-sided authoritarianism.

CHAPTER 6: THE KILLERS

1.   Smith, Six, pp. 386–402.

2.   Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, ed. Dermot Moran (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012), p. 191.

3.   Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy (London: Routledge & Kegan Press, 1954).

4.   The Winnipeg report is found in the David Lloyd George papers at the Parliamentary Archives, UK, under Prime Minister Borden’s signature, March 14, 1919, no. 13, folder 3, box 38.

5.   Manfred Nebelin, Ludendorff: Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (München: Siedler Verlag, 2011).

6.   Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 141.

7.   Jay Lockenour, Dragonslayer: The Legend of Erich Ludendorff in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), p. 6.

8.   Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2021).

9.   Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2012).

10.  Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, p. 9.

11.  “Ukrainian Jews Aim to Stop Pogroms,” New York Times, September 8, 1919.

12.  Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, p. 248.

13.  Shmuel Rubinshteyn, cited in Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, p. 272.

14.  Winthrop Bell Fonds, 6501/10/3, no. 12.

15.  Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 126.

16.  Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, p. 322.

17.  At this time, Canada was a moral exemplar in some realms, like allowing Jews to enter the country, but not in other realms, like its treatment of Indigenous populations and the Chinese.

18.  “British Airmen’s Gallant Rescue of Comrades,” Observer, August 24, 1919.

19.  “Aid for Germany Declared Urgent,” New York Times, April 17, 1919, was based on Bell’s report to the War Cabinet. Bell’s diary indicates that his research was used in a story for the Nation; that article is most likely “The Resuscitation of Liberty,” Nation, October 25, 1919, p. 539.

20.  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Modern Library, 1999).

21.  Today Baron von der Heydt’s art collection is housed at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, Germany.

22.  “Germany: Death of Von Maltzan,” Time, October 3, 1927.

23.  During the Cold War, the former Fürstenhof hotel stood at the no man’s land between the free and the Soviet zones. Today, it is a stone’s throw from the Deutsches Spionagemuseum (German Spy Museum).

24.  Hahn and Prince Max co-founded the Salem School in Germany. After he fled the Nazis, Hahn founded Gordonstoun School in Scotland in 1934. Hahn’s schools, modelled on Plato’s philosophy, have educated notables, including King Charles III of the United Kingdom and Sofia, Queen of Spain.

25.  Daily Telegraph and Courier, October 21, 1907.

26.  Hans-Lukas Kieser writes: “It is remarkable how Talaat made Soviet Russian, German nationalist and pro-fascist Italian contacts.” Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 7.

27.  For instance, “German Propaganda,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, April 14, 1919.

28.  Five years earlier, the First World War likely could have been avoided if Serbia had accepted Austria’s demand to send a similar oversight commission into Serbia.

29.  Josiah Royce, Studies of Good and Evil (New York: D. Appleton, 1902), p. 249.

CHAPTER 7: THE BATTLE FOR BERLIN

1.   Translated by Alfred Engel.

2.   Bell’s interview with Einstein ran under such headlines as “Germany’s Last Meals” (Pall Mall Gazette, March 13, 1919); “Hunger in Germany” (Westminster Gazette, March 13, 1919); “Starvation in Germany” (Daily News, March 13, 1919).

3.   “Over 1000 Killed and Wounded in the Battle for Berlin,” Dundee Courier, March 10, 1919.

4.   “Street Strewn with Bodies,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, March 10, 1919.

5.   Bell’s telegram was dated March 7. It ran six days later in newspapers: “Hunger in Germany at the Root of All the Trouble/Famine Spectre,” Westminster Gazette, March 13, 1919.

6.   Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 160.

7.   “Germany’s Last Meals.”

8.   Scott Manning, “Churchill’s Efforts to Feed Germany After the Great War,” Finest Hour 145 (Winter 2009–10).

9.   Bell’s story ran, among other places, as “The Danger of Starvation,” Scotsman, March 14, 1919.

10.  Haffner, Defying Hitler.

11.  “Wanted—A Man,” Sheffield Evening Telegraph, April 30, 1919.

12.  “State of Germany,” Newcastle Daily Chronicle, March 24, 1919.

13.  George Young, The New Germany (London: Constable, 1920).

14.  Ibid., p. 2.

15.  Young’s sympathies were apparently with the pro-democratic and anti-terroristic branch of the German Soviets. Even that would have been considered edgy for the Secret Intelligence Service and may explain why he left secret diplomacy to take up a career as a writer.

16.  “Berlin ‘Massacre,’” Aberdeen Press and Journal, March 12, 1919.

17.  “Berlin Strike Over,” Leeds Mercury, March 12, 1919.

18.  Bell’s report ran in English newspapers, but the scope of the empire meant that it was also heard throughout the world, as in “The Spartacist Terror,” Civil & Military Gazette (Lahore, Pakistan), March 19, 1919.

19.  For instance, in “Food and Work,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, March 25, 1919.

CHAPTER 8: LOYALTY TO LOYALTY

1.   “The Week in Paris,” Westminster Gazette, May 26, 1919.

2.   “Housing the Delegates,” Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, January 14, 1919.

3.   Game theory considers situations in which the outcomes depend on the actions of multiple participants.

4.   Josiah Royce, War and Insurance (New York: Macmillan, 1914).

5.   Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: MacMillan, 1908). Such loyalty was, for Royce, possible in business, the military, politics, family life, and other spheres.

6.   Maurice Hankey, The Supreme Control at the Paris Peace Conference (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963).

7.   Daniel Larsen, “The First Intelligence Prime Minister: David Lloyd George (1916–1922),” Cabinet Office, U.K., 2013, https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/80179/Lloyd-George-as-PM.pdf.

8.   David Lloyd George, The Truth About the Peace Treaties (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 409.

9.   By the time reparations were finally agreed upon in 1921, the total was £6.5 billion, or US$14 billion (around $250 billion today). It was a significant reduction from the initial Allied figures. But the still-high total, without financial help to rescue Germany’s economy, was a dreadful mistake. By Bell’s reckoning, Germany needed positive financial support for its democracy to survive, not merely reduced reparations.

10.  Hankey, The Supreme Control at the Paris Peace Conference, p. 21.

11.  Army, Command Paper 54, Further Reports by British Officers on the Economic Conditions Prevailing in Germany, “Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty” (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, April 1919), pp. 2–11. Bell’s information is also included among other reports on pp. 17–18.

CHAPTER 9: NAZIS IN EDEN

1.   “German Nation’s Great Need,” Nottingham Journal, April 26, 1919.

2.   Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference 1919, vol. 5 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1944), p. 151.

3.   Ibid.

4.   Ibid.

5.   “Food and Work,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, March 25, 1919.

6.   The spirit of the game is revealed, for instance, in Compton Mackenzie’s book, when he reminisces about his chats with Baron von Schenck. Compton Mackenzie, Greek Memories (London: Biteback, 2012).

7.   “Master Hun in Athens,” Sheffield Independent, December 27, 1916.

8.   Mackenzie, Greek Memories, p. 257.

9.   Ibid., p. 269.

10.  J.M.N. Jeffries, “Von Schenck’s Bodyguard,” Ballarat Courier (Australia), September 7, 1916.

11.  “Germany’s Secrets,” Westminster Gazette, April 25, 1919.

12.  Not all far-left socialist factions joined in the Nazi plot. There was continued fighting between the communists and the Nazis after the Eden meeting and throughout the 1920s.

13.  The earlier German proto-Nazis’ influence on Adolf Hitler, when the anti-Jewish hatred remained just nationalistic and had not yet merged with socialism, is explored in Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

14.  Leonard Spray, “Keep Your Eye on Hitler—the ‘German Mussolini,’” Newcastle Daily Chronicle, December 21, 1922; “The Fascisti,” Denver Jewish News, December 27, 1922.

15.  Oscar T. Schweriner, “A New Hymn of Hate,” Yorkshire Evening Post, June 7, 1930.

16.  “Germany at Polls,” Daily Herald, September 13, 1930.

17.  Timothy Snyder, “We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist,” New York Times, May 19, 2022.

18.  Lockenour, Dragonslayer, p. 89.

CHAPTER 10: THE PARIS EDITOR

1.   For a description of Courant’s activities, see Colin McLarty, “Richard Courant in the German Revolution,” Mathematical Intelligencer 23 (2001).

2.   Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (Dordrecht: Springer, 1964).

3.   Hitler wrote: “I have learned a great deal from Marxism . . . . Only I seriously went about doing what these little tradesmen and secretary minds timidly started. The whole of National Socialism is implicit in that . . . National Socialism is what Marxism could have been had it freed itself from the absurd, artificial link with a democratic system.” Joachim Fest, Hitler (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 126.

4.   Laurence Rees, Hitler’s Charisma: Leading Millions Into the Abyss (New York: Random House, 2014), p. 17.

5.   Times, June 18, 1919.

6.   “By the Spree,” Evening Mail, September 3, 1919.

7.   “Back in Berlin,” Bystander, December 17, 1919.

8.   Bell’s report served as the basis for “The German Government Is Weakening,” Yorkshire Evening Post, April 17, 1919.

9.   “The Mood of the Germans,” Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, May 21, 1919.

10.  “Grave Hour in Prussia,” Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, May 12, 1919.

11.  “The ‘Black Week’ in Germany,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, May 12, 1919.

12.  “Pan-German Protests,” Westminster Gazette, May 16, 1919.

13.  “The ‘Impossible’ Terms,” Dundee Courier, May 26, 1919.

14.  “Earl of Erroll Dies Suddenly,” New York Times, February 21, 1928.

15.  That A12 mentioned his source’s name in his coming dispatch, while he’d kept sensitive names secret earlier in the year, shows how secure communications became possible after the British military mission set up shop in Berlin.

16.  No doubt twentieth-century history would have taken a very different turn if the democratic socialism of Karl Kautsky had triumphed in Germany after the First World War instead of the nationalist-militarist socialism of Ludendorff and Hitler.

17.  Keith Allen, “Sharing Scarcity: Bread Rationing and the First World War in Berlin, 1914–1923,” Journal of Social History 32, no. 2 (1998).

18.  Globe, August 9, 1919.

CHAPTER 11: THE POLISH PLAN

1.   “Polish Peril,” Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner, June 28, 1919.

2.   Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939: 1919, first series, vol. 6, eds. E.L. Woodward and Rohan Butler (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1956), p. 19.

3.   John P. Fox, “Max Bauer: Chiang Kai-Shek’s First German Military Adviser,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 4 (1970).

4.   Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939: 1919, pp. 25–28.

5.   Ibid., p. 28.

6.   “Promise of Food as Propaganda,” Pall Mall Gazette, May 5, 1919.

7.   Ibid.

8.   David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Paris Peace Conference, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939), p. 472.

9.   Paul-Joseph Mantoux, The Deliberations of the Council of Four (March 24–June 28, 1919), vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 270.

10.  James Headlam-Morley, A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 153.

11.  Ibid.

12.  Lloyd George, The Truth About the Peace Treaties, p. 454.

13.  “Germany and Poland,” Scotsman, June 30, 1919.

14.  MacMillan, Paris 1919.

15.  “Berlin’s First Pogrom,” Daily News (London), July 8, 1919. It is not clear which newspaper reports on the anti-Jewish violence in Germany were written by Bell, but he was certainly deeply involved in the reporting. Unfortunately, not all of Bell’s MI6 and Reuters dispatches still exist, as some of his intelligence documents were destroyed in a Halifax fire. The originals of his July reports seem to have become smoke and ashes. His July activities thus need to be reconstructed from his diaries, the anonymous newspaper warnings from this time, and his warnings about the racist plot from his intelligence reports earlier and later in the year.

16.  “Berlin’s Nerves,” Evening Mail, August 20, 1919.

17.  “Germany’s Internal State,” Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, August 20, 1919.

18.  “New Germany,” Leicester Daily Post, August 19, 1919.

CHAPTER 12: THE TRUSTED MEN

1.   Smith, Six.

2.   Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2000).

3.   Winthrop Bell, Report on the Condition of Germany, Winthrop Bell Fonds, 6501/10/3, no. 14. I have translated this quote from Bell’s English translation back into German. The other Nazi quotes in this chapter are from unsigned propaganda circulated during this time and contemporary newspaper reports. Bell’s intelligence reports quote the Nazis and describe the “table-talk” of the officers. The historical record does not show how he came to quote the Nazis, only that he did it. But the most plausible place for it to happen would have been a Kneipe. The Nazis’ early chapters were written in beer halls—from Hitler’s first National Socialist organizational meetings in 1919 to the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.

4.   “Nationalist Fracas,” Westminster Gazette, November 19, 1919. It is not certain that this and the following three footnotes are Bell’s own reporting, as they are anonymous, but it is certain that he was involved in calling attention to German antisemitism.

5.   “Jews in Europe,” Nottingham Evening Post, October 31, 1919.

6.   “Anti-Semitic Propaganda in Germany,” Scotsman, August 25, 1919.

7.   “Germany and the Jews,” Westminster Gazette, December 2, 1919.

8.   We can give a detailed sketch of Hitler’s first public speech from witnesses, but with the proviso that their memories were recorded years later.

9.   Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), p. 87.

10.  Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), pp. 125–26.

CHAPTER 13: THE BALTIC ADVENTURE

1.   For accounts of the Annelise, see “A New German Airplane,” Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, November 6, 1919, and A. Alp Yenen, The Young Turk Aftermath (Basel: Bommer, 2019).

2.   Kieser, Talaat Pasha, p. 343.

3.   “News from Turkey,” Liverpool Echo, June 1, 1915.

4.   Kieser writes, “Humann gives a foretaste of an exterminatory National Socialism that has more to do with the German experience and perception of genocide in Turkey than popular history has revealed.” Kieser, Talaat Pasha, p. 19.

5.   The evidence from Bell’s October 3, 1919, report, combined with his diary entries, indicates Achim von Arnim was his key source on the General Staff. Yet Bell’s report did not name him directly, likely for security reasons. His was the kind of high-level name that would be mentioned only in person.

6.   General Bermont claimed one hundred thousand troops, according to Bell’s October 3, 1919, intel report. But other estimates Bell cited differ significantly, from thirty-five to seventy thousand. It was difficult to tell the real number, Bell explained, because the German units fighting in the Baltics were a mixture of Volunteer (Freikorps) troops, who could appear and disappear at a moment’s notice, Bischoff’s Iron Regiment, and Bermont’s troops.

7.   It is hard to know how Bell and Achim von Arnim became friendly, particularly given Arnim’s strange career that followed. Career stops included professor of military science; president of the Technical University of Berlin, which became a top centre for Nazi military research; a leader of the feared Sturmabteilung, the SA; and finally, a lieutenant-colonel in the Nazi army. It appears that Arnim joined the Nazi Party rather late, at a time when it was requisite for advancement in the military, rather than early, which would have indicated he was a true believer. I suspect that he remained an anti-Nazi until the end, but much remains shrouded in mystery, as Arnim was killed in battle in France in May 1940.

8.   Documents on British Foreign Policy: 1919–1939, third series, vol. 7, eds. E.L. Woodward and Rohan Butler (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954), p. 258.

9.   H. Schurer, “Karl Moor: German Agent and Friend of Lenin,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970), p. 152.

10.  Michael Smith discusses evidence of the Hugo Haase–MI6 connection in Six.

11.  “Allies’ Warning to Germany,” Dundee Courier, October 11, 1919.

12.  “Plucky Patriots Hold Riga,” Sheffield Independent, October 14, 1919.

13.  Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, vol. 3, pp. 222–23.

CHAPTER 14: TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM

1.   For instance, in “Army of 100,000,” Daily News (London), October 11, 1919.

2.   In the fall of 1919, the British imposed a small blockade on German Baltic shipping during the period of confusion about which Germans were attacking the Baltics. During the blockade, some German ships were seized, but the effort was advertised as being in line with humanitarian principles, which meant letting food continue to get through. It was far from the ruinous starvation caused by the Allied blockade of Germany from 1914 until spring 1919. However, it still had the deleterious effect of reminding Germans of the starvation they had gone through for years, and how the British could easily make it happen again.

3.   Bell’s source was likely Dr. Georg Ahrens, who served in Germany’s Foreign Office during the Second World War in the culture department. Yet he evidently kept himself clean of Nazism to a degree that enabled him to secure a plum post–Second World War role as head of consulate in Atlanta. It was surely a mark in his favour that he had done valuable work for Bell in 1919 that benefited MI6 and democratic Germany.

4.   “Berlin Embassy,” Pall Mall Gazette, October 23, 1919.

5.   Bell’s advice likely sped up the timeline of the troop rotation out of Russia, but the Allies had already decided to leave the country, since it was clear that the war was going against their White Russian allies.

CHAPTER 15: THE ONE HOPE FOR THE WORLD

1.   “Garvin” is likely James Louis Garvin, editor of the Observer. What did May Cumming, spouse of Mansfield Smith Cumming, the head of MI6, know about a secret agent’s work? She was too discreet to plainly say it in her letters, but Bell had frequent meetings with her, sometimes in concert with other top British officers. Sometimes, but not always, her husband was there too. May’s September 2, 1919, letter to Bell indicates, within the bounds of propriety, that she knew at least some of the essence of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Perhaps the brilliant early success of MI6 owed to its having both a male chief and a first lady, who were together smarter than most single leaders could have been.

2.   All Winthrop Bell quotes in this chapter are from Bell, Report on the Condition of Germany.

3.   Haffner, Defying Hitler, p. 59.

4.   By then, the swastika was the height of fashion for Germany’s militarist racists. It was already used by Austrian antisemites and others before Hitler adopted it for the Nazi flag.

5.   Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates, January 6–28, 1920, vol. LIX, part 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), p. 1610.

6.   “Great World Danger,” Daily News (London), January 16, 1920.

CHAPTER 16: LORD NO AND SIR NO

1.   Churchill College Archives, Cambridge University, James Headlam-Morley Fonds, HDLM 6/3/1.

2.   Times, October 6, 1938.

3.   Churchill College Archives, HDLM 6/3/1.

4.   Simon Tate, Assessing the Role of Turkey in British Foreign Policy, 1908–1914, University of East Anglia, 2020, https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/79296/1/2020TateSRPhD.pdf.

5.   John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1920), p. 4.

6.   Ibid., p. 37.

7.   “Grave Money Position,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, February 12, 1920.

8.   British reports from the Paris Peace Treaty negotiations indicate frequent condescension towards the Americas, including such hijinks as telling an American admiral the wrong time for a meeting so he would not show up.

9.   “Exchange Problems,” Daily Herald, January 29, 1920.

10.  However, in contrast to later Keynesean-inspired economics, with a permanent and growing budget deficit, Bell advocated deficit spending as a last-ditch emergency measure to counteract the massive destruction of wealth during wartime.

11.  Bell worked on an introduction to the book that is separate from the report that went to the Foreign Office. But it is clear that the report was to be the basis for the published book.

12.  Giles Milton, Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Plot for Global Revolution (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), p. 87.

13.  Britain foolishly gave public awards to operatives in their then secret Dame Blanche network in Belgium. When the Second World War broke out, the publicity made it impossible to reactivate the network.

CHAPTER 17: AFTERLIFE

1.   Bell’s spring 1919 report on the starvation and political conditions in Germany appeared as the lead article in a document commissioned by Winston Churchill for Parliament. Army. Command Paper 54.

2.   “Great German Army,” Evening Mail, January 2, 1920.

3.   “Secret Army,” Dundee Courier, January 2, 1920.

4.   Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, first series, vol. 6, 460.

CHAPTER 18: THE PHILOSOPHER

1.   The original letter from Husserl to William Ernest Hocking is housed at Harvard University’s Houghton Library in the William Ernest Hocking collection. A transcription has been published in Edmund Husserl, Husserliana Dokumente; Briefwechsel Band III. Die Göttinger Schule, ed. Karl Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 164–65.

CHAPTER 19: THE SABOTAGE GAME

1.   Sir Robert Watson-Watt, The Pulse of Radar (New York: The Dial Press, 1959), p. 199.

2.   Edith Stein, Essays on Woman (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1996).

3.   Stein, Life in a Jewish Family.

4.   Gebhard Aders, History of the German Night Fighter Force, 1917–1945 (London: Jane’s Publishing, 1978), p. 74.

5.   Louis Brown, A Radar History of World War II: Technical and Military Imperatives (Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1999), p. 342.

6.   A secret report for the US government described the consequences: “How this six months’ delay occurred is one of the mysteries of the war and a significant factor in the U-boat war (it can perhaps be explained only by a criminal lack of liaison between the German air and naval technical staffs).” Philip M. Morse and George E. Kimball, Methods of Operations Research (Washington, DC: Operations Evaluation Group, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Department, Report No. 54, 1946), p. 96. However, to call Runge’s actions “criminal” is incorrect, as he was the opposite of a criminal. The Nazis were the criminals, Runge was a crimefighter.

7.   As the technological intelligence expert Azriel Lorber writes, “Germany had an initial lead in radar technology . . . [but] failed to translate its technological lead to a long-lasting operational superiority.” Azriel Lorber, “Technological Intelligence and the Radar War in World War II,” RCAF Journal 5, no. 1 (2016).

8.   Norman Ridley, The Role of Intelligence in the Battle of Britain (Philadelphia: Pen and Sword Books, 2021), p. 79.

9.   Keenleyside, On the Bridge of Time, p. 60.

10.  Secrets of Nature: Down Under, British Instructional Films, Ltd., 1930.

CHAPTER 20: THE HOLOCAUST CODE

1.   James Barnes and Patience Barnes, Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Britain and America: A Publishing History 1930–39 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 6–7.

2.   Winthrop Bell, “Exterminate Non-Germans, Dogma of ‘Mein Kampf,’” Saturday Night, November 25, 1939; Winthrop Bell, “Hitler’s Extermination Policy Is World-wide,” Saturday Night, December 2, 1939.

3.   One passage in Mein Kampf spoke of the possibility of foreign slaves for the conquering Aryan population, but it was only to discard this idea. Such a plan, Bell wrote, would result in the “ultimate mixture of the races, which [Hitler] passionately denounces.” Ibid.

4.   Ibid.

5.   Ibid.

6.   Ibid.

7.   “Hitler-Owned Book Hints at Nazi Plans for North America,” BBC News, January 24, 2019.

8.   Canada was at the time a constituent member of Britain, with Canadian citizenship starting only in 1947.

9.   Already in 1939, Deák was in a prominent policy position as an affiliate for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which has “been closely connected with the State Department, successive presidents, numerous private foreign affairs groups and the leaders of the main political parties.” Inderjeet Parmar, “Engineering Consent: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Mobilization of American Public Opinion 1939–1945,” Review of International Studies 26, no. 1 (2000).

10.  Winthrop Pickard Bell fonds, 8550/1/14.

11.  Peter Beaumont, “British Spy’s Early Alert on Holocaust,” Guardian, July 8, 2001. As the headline makes clear, even 1942 was an “early” warning, which makes Bell’s warning in 1939 all the more remarkable.

12.  “The Tangled Web,” Studies in Intelligence 31 (Spring 1987).

CHAPTER 21: THE LAST WARNING

1.   Winthrop Bell Fonds, Winthrop Bell to Marvin Farber, December 28, 1945.

2.   Bell, “Exterminate Non-Germans”; Bell, “Hitler’s Extermination Policy.”

3.   Tim Cook, Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada’s World Wars (Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2013).

4.   Lipstadt, Beyond Belief.

5.   It was, however, a smaller risk for Bell in November and December 1939, when his Holocaust articles were finally published, than when he first submitted them in the spring of that year. Canada was at war from September 1939, at which point it would have been difficult for the Gestapo to cross into the country. But in the spring, before the war started, cross-border travel would have been relatively easy for a Nazi agent.

6.   Keith R. Allen, Interrogation Nation: Refugees and Spies in Cold War Germany (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), pp. 96, 112–13.

7.   “Rosenberg’s Nazi Myth.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 7, no. 1, (1946), p. 8.

8.   Andrew Preston, Jeffrey A. Engel, and Mark Atwood Lawrence, eds., America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 170.

9.   Bell’s diary only mentions “Levin,” so the identification is not certain, but Levin Kruskal is the most likely candidate.

10.  Gedalia Guttentag, “Promised Land,” Mishpacha, no. 817 (2020).

CHAPTER 22: THE SECRET ELEVATOR

1.   Winthrop Bell, The “Foreign Protestants” and the Settlement of Nova Scotia: The History of a Piece of Arrested British Colonial Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961).

2.   Terrence M. Punch, “‘Even if I Cannot Finish . . .’: Winthrop Bell and His Register,” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 7 (2004), p. 126.

3.   Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 28.

EPILOGUE

1.   Joseph A. Angelo, Satellites (New York: Infobase, 2006), p. 160.

2.   Evert Clark, “New Satellite Planned,” New York Times, March 31, 1965.

3.   Winthrop Bell Fonds 6501, item 85.

4.   Winthrop Bell’s dissertation, complete with Husserl’s notes, has been published as a book. Winthrop Bell, Eine kritische Untersuchung der Erkenntnistheorie Josiah Royces, eds. Jason Bell and Thomas Vongehr (Berlin: Springer, 2018).

5.   Philip Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying: Structure and Process in Britain’s Secret Intelligence (New York: Routledge, 2004); Wesley Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Gordon Thomas, Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010); Keith Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Michael Smith, Six: The Real James Bonds 1909–1939 (London: Biteback, 2010); Alan Judd, The Quest for C: Sir Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the British Secret Service (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

Index

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In the index, the initials “WB” stand for Winthrop Bell.

Agadir Crisis (1911), 11, 14, 15, 315n7

Ahrens, Georg, 327n3

Allen, Clifford, 246

Allen, Keith R., 296–7

Allenby, Edmund, 97

American–Canadian Permanent Joint Board on Defence, 289

Angell, Norman, 233

Annelise (German plane), 207, 209

antisemitism: Anti-Semitic League (1915), 62–6; and Balfour Declaration, 98; and Freikorps violence, 161–4, 192–4; in German military, 39–40; Jewish emigration from Germany, 314n5; Ludendorff’s scheme, 64–6, 98–9, 164, 192–5, 210; perverted Darwinism, 210, 275; survey of German troops (1916), 98–9

appeasement, 243, 245, 267–8, 272–6, 315n7

Aristotle, 21, 83

Armenian genocide, 107, 210–11, 215–16, 275

Arnim, Achim von: background, 212–14, 326nn5, 7; source for WB, 109, 116, 162, 201, 209, 227, 326nn5, 7

Asquith, Herbert, 239

atomism, 47, 167

Baden, Prince Max von, 48–9, 107, 174, 319n24

Balfour, Arthur James, Balfour Declaration, 98, 177, 185

Baltic states. See Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania

Bartholomew, William, 147, 180

Bauer, Max (Colonel), 98–100, 185–6

Baumann, Adalbert, 202

Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken), 277

Belgium: Congo massacre, 315n12; German invasion (1914), 18, 21, 37, 61; MI6 train spotters, 53

Bell, Andrew (father), 9, 48, 303

Bell, Hazel (nee Deinstadt, wife): in First World War, 256; in Germany with WB (1934), 258, 268; marriage and home with WB, 256–7, 270, 287, 290–3, 304–5, 307; and WB’s Holocaust Code warning, 278; and WB’s wartime work, 290–3

Bell, Jason, 308–10

Bell, Mary Emerancy (mother), 303

Bell, Ralph (brother): aircraft production, 277–8, 290, 292; business connections, 46, 259, 277, 280, 286; fishery, 257, 259; on Halifax Relief Commission, 46; and Mount Allison University, 309

Bell, Winthrop: Jason Bell’s research on, 308–10; contribution and influence, 250–3; family background and youth, 8, 303–4; at Federal Aircraft Company, 290–2; financial theories and knowledge, 243–5; friends in Germany, 54; influential friends and contacts, 277; as a liberal, 61; on Nazi Code (1919), 2–4; return to England (1918), 49–50, 51–3; return to England (Nov. 1919), 232; visit to Germany (July 1934), 258; work during Second World War, 286–97; work in family fishery business, 257

—intelligence reports: on Baltics, 217–18; censorship of, 134–5; declassification of, 134, 230, 232, 234, 241–2, 243; on extremist forces in Germany (Feb. and Mar. 1919), 109–13, 121–9, 138–49; financial rescue plan for German democracy, 74–6, 136–7, 153–5, 237–40, 241–8, 321n9; on Germany (Dec. 1918), 55–61, 66–80; from Germany Apr 1919, 150–2; on Holocaust code (Apr. 1939), 278; lighter subjects in, 130–1; MI6 training for, 77–8; Report on the Condition in Germany (1919), 299; on Russia and Eastern Europe (Oct 1919), 227; source references in, 78, 112; on Ukraine genocides, 100–2; on Versailles treaty draft (May 1919), 174–82; warning about Holocaust Code (spring 1939), 272–7

—later espionage career: connections and sources, 48–9; as a private citizen, 270; in retirement years, 258–68; work on Holocaust code, 269–82

—academic career: appearance, 8–9; dissertation and defense (1914), viii, 8, 11, 14, 20–1, 23–4, 308–9, 332n4; at Göttingen University (Germany), 9–11, 14, 281, 308; at Harvard, 3, 8, 11, 13, 51, 255–6, 257; at Mount Allison University, 9–10, 254–7; at University of Toronto, 254, 255

—private life: archival papers, 308–10; back injury (Dec. 1939), 286–7; death and legacy, 307–10; Drumnaha (house in Chester, Nova Scotia), 1, 257, 269, 302–5, 307; health issues, 11–12, 46–7, 138, 184, 225, 234, 302; marriage with Hazel, 256–7, 270, 287, 290–3, 304–5, 307; retirement years, 257, 295, 302–5

—writing: book on Nazi race war, 230–9, 241–9, 251; on family genealogy, 303; on Nova Scotia history, 303; typewriters for, ix, 4, 96, 105

Berlin: Alexanderplatz (Berlin), 123–4; battle for (spring 1919), 117–37; British Embassy, 226–7; cultural change, 171–2; food shortage and starvation, 115, 119–20; nightclubs, 171, 231; telegraph office, 124–5, 153; unemployed ex-soldiers, 60, 115–16; WB’s mission in (Feb. 1919), 1–2, 96–7, 104–13

—British Military Mission: Malcolm at, 176, 267; message transmission, 153, 157, 191, 201, 218, 323n15

Bermont (Bermondt-Avalov), Pavel, 223–5, 326n6

Bethell, Alexander, 87

Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 37–8

Biggar, Oliver Mowat, 76–7, 80, 277, 289

Bischoff Iron Regiment, 326n6

Biskupski, Vasily, 101–2

blitzkrieg, 25, 251, 263, 272, 286, 300

Bonar Law, Andrew, 82

Bonham-Carter, Maurice, 233

Borden, Robert: and Bell family, 8; at Versailles negotiations, 35, 140, 147–8; wartime advisors, 76–7; WB’s contacts with, 35, 51–2, 54, 255; and WB’s reports, 67–81, 238, 242, 281, 299–300; and Winnipeg warning, 97, 99, 102, 318n4

Born, Max, 18, 54, 56, 119

Bosch, Carl, 136

Bowman, Charles A., 289

Boyce, Ernest, 247

Breitscheid, Rudolf, 109, 157–8, 161, 177–9, 186

Britain; Camp Ripon (England), 55–61; disinclination to help enemy state, 243–4; misunderstanding of Hitler, 272–5; and slaughter of Jews in Ukraine, 164; War Cabinet members, 58, 81; and WB’s report on Germany for (Dec. 1918), 75–7, 80–1, 142, 319n19

—MI6: in 1918 Germany, 53; archival records, 310; creation, 84; diplomatic and military roles, 127–8; espionage training, 77–8; funding for, 81, 87–8, 90–1; leadership, 83–90, 233; Rotterdam station, 53, 94, 104, 129–30; Ruhleben internees in, 35–6; and Russian communism, 86–7; wartime activity, 53–4; WB’s agent ID, cover, salary, and military rank, 89–91, 126; WB’s resignation from, 247, 248–9

—other intelligence services: on aviation, 78–80; Eastern Mediterranean Special Bureau, 58; Experimental Station Orfordness, 78–80, 181; MI3, 147; MI5, 54; War Trade Department, 89

Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich von, 154, 159

Brown, Lewis H., 299–300

Burt, Alfred, 220

Cambridge University, 8, 11, 32, 33

Campbell, Robert, 309

Canada: Canadian identity, 35; Halifax Explosion (1917), 45–6; intelligence service, 287, 289; Royal Canadian Air Force, 291

Canadian Zionist Federation, 97

Carathéodory, Constantin, 16–17

Cecil, Lord Robert, 142, 239, 245, 251

Chamberlain, Austen, 245

Chamberlain, Neville, 245, 270

chivalry, 76, 138, 141, 239, 295–6

Christie, Loring, 76, 80

Churchill, Winston: on First World War, 19; and Morton, 233; on Russian campaign (1918), 71; warnings against Nazis, 277–8; WB’s contacts with, 250–2; and WB’s reports, 81, 127, 140, 148, 329n1

Clemenceau, Georges, 126, 140, 155, 189

Cohn, Gustav, 20

Colley, Margaret Siriol, 293

communist forces: Britain’s fixation on, 71–2; in Germany, 55, 86–7, 133–4; Lenin in Russia, 43; and Nazi forces, 163–4, 170, 217–19, 226–7

Congo, 315nn7, 12

Cook, Tim, 285

Courant, Richard: on Freikorps, 85–6; in German military intelligence, 41–2, 54, 262, 263, 295–6; on postwar Germany, 295–6; and Social Democratic Party, 167; source for WB, 49, 78, 84–5, 152, 157, 162; WB’s friendship with, 9, 41, 49, 55

Crerar, Thomas, 289

Cumming, Mansfield Smith (C, Captain Spencer), viii, 83–90, 179–80, 238, 247, 251

Cumming, May, 181, 229, 247, 299, 327n1

Cunliffe, Walter, 146

Curzon, George, 156

Danzig, 183–6, 282, 298

Däumig, Ernst, 145

D’Avenel, Georges, 94

Deák, Francis, 252, 279–81, 285–6, 296, 330–1n9

Deinstadt, Hazel. See Bell, Hazel (née Deinstadt, wife)

Denikin, Anton, 101–2, 122, 164

Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP, German Workers’ Party), 201–5

Dickinson, F.W., 103

Dreyfus, Ludwig, 78

du Bois-Reymond, René, 78

Dulles, Allen, 281

Dyer (British Lieutenant), 58, 61

Early Bird satellite, 307

Eddington, Arthur, 120

Einstein, Albert, 114, 119–21, 137, 320n2

Ellison, Wallace, 35

Eltzbacher, Paul, 216–17

empathy (Einfühlung), 93, 167

Enver Pasha, 208, 211

Erzberger, Matthias, 45

espionage skills and training: fitting in, 118, 197, 198, 230; links with philosophy and phenomenology, 94–5, 96; passes, 105; precise observation, 95; report writing and source references, 77–8, 112; resources and equipment, 96, 296–7

Estonia, 46, 199, 220

Ewald, Paul, 266

Fabian Society, 34, 58, 233

Fairholme, Frederick, 84

Federal Aircraft Company, 290–2

Ferdinand, Franz, Archduke of Austria, 11, 14

First World War: agriculture and supply lines, 67; British entry, 68–9; Halifax Explosion, 45–6; Hazel Deinstadt’s service in, 256; outbreak and early months, 10–11, 14–20, 24–8; trench warfare, 25, 36–7; US entry, 44–5; Verdun, 36–7, 38; war-guilt issues, 37–8, 44–5, 159–60; Ypres, 27, 39

—Armistice (Nov. 1918): as a ceasefire, 49, 53; conditions of, 67–70, 92, 115–16, 127, 166; lack of planning for, 67–70; realization of Allied victory, 59

—reparations issues: British views, 141, 188–9, 237; final amount, 190, 321n9; German reactions to, 154–5; WB’s views on, 73–5, 126–7, 146–7, 178, 237

Förster, Friedrich, 41

Frederik VIII (ship), 51–2, 54

Freikorps (militarist proto-Nazis): antisemitic violence, 161–4, 192–4; in battle for Berlin, 86, 117–37; and Deniken’s Volunteers, 101; described in WB’s Feb 1919 report, 110–11; in eastern Germany, 181; Ehrhardt Brigade, 236; failed Berlin coup (Mar. 1920), 116–17, 236; formation, 110–11; funding for, 131–2, 194, 225; integration into regular army, 122–3; and Munich Soviet, 170; planned coup of Germany, 186

Freud, Sigmund, 14

game theory, 141, 187, 321n3

Gandhi, Mahatma, 307

Gardiner, James, 278

Garvin, James Louis, 229, 327n1

genocides: against Armenians, 17, 63, 98, 107, 208, 210–11; against Greeks, 107, 208; against Jews, 208, 284; against Namibians, 15, 21, 84, 98, 211, 315nn7, 12

Germany: civil war (1919), 86, 231; control of Eastern Europe, 46; economic desperation, 53, 69–71; extremist militias, 138–9; German–Russian alliance, 111–12; industrialists funding, 194, 225; industrial problems, 136–7; inflation, 73–4, 92, 131, 136, 199; Kapp Putsch (1920), vii, 196, 211; Kiel mutiny (1918), 57; as a nightmare, 231; November Revolution, 55–6, 61, 86, 93, 114, 144, 183, 223; planned Nazi coup (July 1919), 185–7; and Polish territories, 165–70; political apathy, 56–7; postwar challenges, 295–6; and Prussian militarism, 16, 38–40, 98, 118; reactionary strength, 231–2; responses to Versailles treaty, 172–5, 177–82, 191–2; right-wing militarists, 58–9; Social Democratic strength, 37, 55–72; survey of Jewish troops, 98–9; territories lost, 173; wartime censorship, 60–1; WB and Hazel in (1934), 260–7; WB’s extensive knowledge on, 54–61; WB’s financial rescue scheme for postwar Europe, 74–6, 136–7, 153—155, 237–40, 321n9; WB’s network of anti-Nazi sources in, 296; weakening democracy in, 227–8

—Allied blockade; impact, 40, 119–20, 126–7, 143, 153; lifting of, 126–7; perspectives on, 92–3, 119, 170–1; in postwar years, 53, 61, 92, 155–6

Gibson, Thornely, 153–5

Göring, Hermann, 263

Göttingen city and university: archival resources, ix; diversity and liberal spirit, 315n6; WB’s imprisonment in (1914), 17–23, 25–8; WB’s studies in, 9–11, 14, 281, 308; WB’s visits to, 138, 152, 261–2

Grant, Lesley Renwick, 53–4

Grzesinski, Albert, 224

Guillebaud, Claude, 182

Haase, Hugo, 219

Haffner, Sebastian: on battle of Berlin, 130; on Freikorps, 91, 236; on Germany’s defeat, 59; on Rathenau, 135

Hahn, Kurt, 48, 106, 157, 319n24

Haig, Douglas, 46

Halifax Explosion (1917), 45–6

Hankey, Maurice: on espionage, vii; and Gibson, 155; and MI6, 88–9; and Pease, 34, 58; at Versailles negotiations, 142, 147, 155, 174–6, 179; WB’s contacts with, 81, 231–2, 251, 277, 286

Hardinge, Charles, 89, 242–3, 247

Harrison, Marguerite, 158

Harvard University: Royce at, 13, 281; WB at, 3, 8, 11, 13, 51, 255–6, 257

Headlam-Morley, James: support for WB, 231, 242; on Versailles treaty, 172–3; and WB’s mission in Silesia, 188–9, 237–8

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 172

Heiden, Konrad, 202, 270

Heydt, Eduard von der, 104, 319n21

Himmler, Heinrich, 264

Hindenberg, Paul von, 59, 64

Hitler, Adolf: antisemitism, 39; in Bavaria, 101–2, 169–70; in DAP, 203–4; in First World War, 27–8, 38–9; Gemlich letter, 109, 204; Heiden’s biography of, 270; and Humann, 211; Lebensraum doctrine, 40, 210, 216; and Ludendorff, 64, 66; on Marxism, 323n3; in Munich, 64, 66, 160, 170, 196, 201–3, 236; and National Socialist German Workers’ Party, 248; obsession with health, 274–5; Reichstag speech (Apr. 1939), 279; and Stalin, 217

—Mein Kampf, 2–3, 203–4, 270–3, 276, 330n2, 330n3

Hocking, William, 272

Hoffmann, Adolf, 173

Hohenborn, Adolf Wild von, 98–9

Holocaust Code, 269–82; for all non-Aryans, 3–5, 163, 184, 270, 274, 283; funded by property socialization, 97, 163, 178, 248, 276; warning from Prague diplomat (1941), 280, 331n11; warning in Jüdische Rundschau (1917), 62–4, 97–103, 192, 317n7; WB’s warning (spring 1939), 272–82, 283–5, 312n2. See also Nazi Code

Hoover, Herbert, 239

Hörsing, Otto, 169

Howe, C.D., 277, 289, 292

Humann, Hans, 107–8, 109, 211, 275, 326n4

Husserl, Edmund: on faithful description, 95; and Hocking, 329n1; Logical Investigations, viii, 314n8; in Nazi Germany, 266; and Peirce, 12; and Royce, 308; on science of seeing, 12; support for WB, 234, 254–5; WB’s studies with, 8, 11, 14, 20, 51, 281, 332n4; WB’s visit with (1934), 266

Husserl, Gerhart (son), 27, 266

Huttenbach, Henry R., 314n5

Independent Socialists (Germany), 144–5, 157, 159, 161, 173, 177, 219, 225

intersubjective inquiry, 93, 318n6

Jannasch, Hans, 78

Japan, 22, 24, 41, 99–100, 224, 289–90

Jewish Agency for Palestine, 313n4

Joerden, Otto, 22

Johnson, Alec, 288–9

Johnston, Heather, 10, 311

Jones, Gareth, 293

Jones, Roderick, 90, 103, 109

Jüdische Rundschau (Jewish Review), 62–4, 192, 317n7

Kamps, Albert, 30

Kautsky, Karl, 159–60, 180, 221, 226, 323n16

Keenleyside, Hugh, 76, 267, 287

Kellogg, Michael, 101

Keynes, John Maynard: and Dudley, 182; on reparations, 146; and WB’s financial rescue plan, 155, 244–6, 252, 328n10

Kieser, Hans-Lukas, 320n26, 326n4

Killinger, Manfred von, 45

Kilmarnock, Lord Victor, 177

Krüger, Karl, 54

Kruskal, Leo (“Levin”), 19, 300–1, 315n14, 331n9

Kuss, Mark, 243

Landau, Henry, 53

Larsen, Daniel, 142

Latvia, 198–201, 212–15, 218–20, 221–4

Lauer, William, 164

League of Nations, 52, 61, 142, 172, 187–90

Lenin, Vladimir: Britian’s hatred for, 164; on land for peasants, 227; and Ludendorf, 217; and Nazi-Soviet-Young Turk partnership, 209; and Russian Revolution, 43, 45–6

Levin (Jew from Manchester). See Kruskal, Leo

Lichnowsky, Karl Max, Prince, 150

Lichtheim, Richard, 313–14n4

Liebknecht, Karl: on invasion of Belgium, 37–8; in postwar Germany, 55–6; as Sparticist leader, 72–3, 86; targeted by Freikorps, 91

Lipstadt, Deborah, 4, 286

Lithuania, 46, 199, 206–8, 210, 220

Lloyd George, David: on Danzig, 184; and declassification of WB’s book, 230–2; and Gibson, 154–6; and WB’s reports on Germany, 126, 140–9, 187–90; and Winnipeg report (1919), 102

Lochhead, Grant, 55, 62, 283, 285

Lockenour, Jay, 100

Lorber, Azriel, 330n7

Ludendorff, General: antisemitic scheme, 64–6, 98–9, 164, 192–5, 210; continuing influence, 59–60; and Hitler, 205, 236, 275, 318n10; and Kaiser Wilhelm, 38; and Moor, 217; and Nazi coup of Germany, 185–6; and Ukraine genocides, 97–101

Luxembourg, 17–18, 21

Luxembourg, Rosa, 91

Mackenzie, Compton, 158, 322n6

Mackenzie King, William Lyon, 285

Maclean, Donald, 239

MacMillan, Ernest, 31

MacMillan, Margaret, 126, 191

Malcolm, Neill: at Berlin Military Mission, 176, 186; and passes for German mercenaries, 223, 226; WB’s contacts with, 181, 251, 267–8, 277, 286

Maltzan, Ago von, 104–5

Mantler, Heinrich, 109

Marlowe, Christopher, 29

Marshall, Catherine, 233

Marshall, George, 252

Marshall Plan, ix, 252–3, 297–300

Martin, Hugh, 158

Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 43–5, 73, 170, 323n3

Masterman, John Cecil, 33, 35–6

Matthäus, Jürgen, 4

Maxwell, John, 55, 58, 61

Mayr, Karl, 170, 201–2, 205

McClintock, Ted, 270

McGrath, Molly, 48, 317n11

McNeill, Miss (at Federal Aircraft), 291

Melchior, Carl, 154–5

Menzies, Stewart, 90, 232, 247, 250

Meyer, Robert, 295

MI6. See under Britain

Moloney, William, 105, 214

monism and atomism, 47

Moor, Karl, 217

Morgan, J.P., 239, 246

Morton, Desmond, 233, 247

Mount Allison University (Sackville, New Brunswick): Hazel Deinstadt at, 256; WB’s association with, 9–10, 303; Winthrop Pickard Bell fonds, ix, 308–10

Müller, Georg, 20

Mussolini, Benito, 162, 267

Musson, F.W., 80

Nadolny, Rudolf, 166

Nagorski, Andrew, 5

Namibia, 15, 21, 84, 98, 211, 315nn7, 12

Nathan, Robert, 233, 247

Nazi Code: early warnings of, 62–3; WB’s discovery of, 2–6. See also Holocaust Code

Nazis, Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers Party): anti-communist facade, 163–4; antisemitism, 163–4, 199–200; Baltic invasion, 221–2; coded language, 2–3; Hitler’s leadership, 236–7, 248; industrialist support, 194; meetings in bars, 194, 197–8; on non-Aryans, 4–5, 163–4, 273–4; roots, emergence, and leadership, 62–6, 161–2, 196; Rosenberg’s role in, 297; Russian antisemites, 101, 224; WB’s warnings about, vii–viii, 2–5, 163–4

newspapers (open source intelligence), 159, 249

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 39, 65, 100, 316n7

Northcliffe, Lord (Alfred Harmsworth), 92, 170–1

Noske, Gustav, 200, 224

Oklahoma City University, 308

Oliphant, Lancelot, 242–3, 247

Olivier, Laurence, 233

Ottoman Empire: genocides, 16–17, 208, 210–11; and Palestine, 98; under Taalat Pasha, 107–8, 208, 210

Paassen, Pierre van, 314n4

Paish, George, 247

Palestine, 97–8, 301

Pease, Dora, 293

Pease, Edward, 58

Pease, Fabian, 293

Pease, Michael: at Camp Ripon, 55, 58; and Hankey, 34; WB’s friendship with, 30–5, 49, 234–5, 268, 316n2

Peirce, Charles, 12

phenomenology, phenomenological method: for analysis of texts, 271–2; vs Cartesianism, 13; empathy (Einfühlung), 93, 167; essence vs appearance, 12, 109–10; evidence, 48, 222, 317n11; faithful or precise observation, 95; Husserl’s contribution to, 12–14, 255–6; intersubjective method, 318n6; knowledge (Erkenntnis), 7–8; personal experience, 13–14; personalism, 10, 314–15n4; perspective, 93, 168; research on, 308–9; WB’s dissertation on, 7

Poland: and Danzig, 183–6; German territory ceded to, 180; Nazi invasion (1939), 200–1, 284

Punch, Terrence, viii–ix, 303

radar technology, 261–5, 294–5, 329–30nn6–7

Radcliffe, General (military operations), 181

Radek, Karl, 108

Ralston, James, 277, 286

Rangen, Captain (Silesian border guard), 169

Rathenau, Walther, 135, 136

Reading, Lord Rufus Isaacs, 81, 88–9

Reigner, Gerhart, 314n4

Reilly, Sidney, ix, 127

Reinhard, Wilhelm, 110, 116–17, 122, 124

Republican Soldiers’ Army (Germany, 1919), 117–37

Reuters News: cover for WB, 89–90, 95–6, 103, 105, 128; WB’s dispatches, 108–9, 115, 187, 212–14, 324n15

Reventlow, Ernst, 63–4

Richter, Elise, 135

Ridley, Norman, 265

Riegner, Gerhart, 314n4

Riga. See under Latvia

Ritter, Gerhard, 266

Ritzau (news agency), 103, 121

Röhm, Ernst, 202

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 77, 279

Rosenberg, Alfred, 297

Royce, Josiah: on ego, 13; on game theory and loyalty, 138, 141, 187, 321n5; and Husserl, 281, 308; on observation, 281; on postwar triadic interpreters, 173; WB’s dissertation on, 308, 332n4; on working alone, 113

Ruhleben (German prison camp): future intelligence operatives at, 35–6; life and culture, 28, 30–2; location and living conditions, 29–30, 40–1; Spanish flu, 47; university and lectures, 33, 36, 47, 49, 304, 316n2; WB’s contacts and friends from, 34, 42, 62, 234, 285, 316n2; WB’s years at, 29–50, 256

Runge, Berhnard, 20–1, 23, 24, 27–8

Runge, Carl, 21, 23–4, 42

Runge, Ella, 261, 300

Runge, Iris, 261

Runge, Wilhelm: and Courant, 42, 49; in German military intelligence, 38, 42, 48, 54, 57, 106; postwar career, 296–7; radar expertise and sabotage, 261–5, 294–5, 329–30n6; source for WB, 49, 57, 78, 106, 152, 162; WB’s friendship with, 18, 23, 49, 55, 298–9; WB’s visit with (1934), 261

Ruse, Clark, and Clark Ruse Aircraft, 292–3, 302, 304

Russell, Bertrand, 233

Russell, Harold, 241

Russia (later Soviet Union): alliance with Nazis, 286; Allies’ anti-communist campaign, 71; in First World War, 17, 43–6; intelligence service, 99–100; Revolution, 43–5; Soviet conquest, 248

Ryan, Rupert, 185–6

Sahm, Heinrich, 185, 298

Şakir, Bahaeddin, 208, 211

Sandwell, B.K., and Saturday Night, 284–5, 313n2

Santayana, George, 43

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 13, 39

Scheidemann, Philipp, 44

Scheler, Max, 13, 315n4

Schenck, Baron von, 158, 162–3, 322n6

Schwabach, Paul von, 175

Second World War: D-Day invasion, 36, 280; Marshall Plan, ix, 252–3, 297–300; Nazi invasion of Poland, 200–1, 284; turning point, 294, 295; and Versailles Treaty, 191; WB’s work during, 286–90. See also Holocaust Code

Shakespeare, William, 10, 31, 51

Shaw, George Bernard, 34, 233

Shortt, Edward, 248

Silesia: German attacks on, 189, 190–1; plebiscite for, 168, 175, 180, 188–9, 191; WB’s reports on (Mar. 1919), 165–9, 173, 175, 186–91, 242

Siriol Colley, Margaret, 293

Smith, Michael, 84, 94

Snyder, Timothy, 164

Socratic tradition of philosophy, 13

Soviets (councils), 72–3

Soviet Union. See Russia

Spanish flu epidemic, 47

Spartacists, 122, 133, 217, 235. See also Liebknecht, Karl

Stalin, Joseph, 217

Stein, Edith (later Sister Teresa Benedicta): on Carl Runge, 23; and Courant, 41, 167; death, 300; WB’s friendship with, 9, 26, 32, 166–7, 260

Stephenson, William, ix

Stinnes, Hugo, 225

Sumner, Lord (John Andrew Hamilton), 146

Talaat Pasha (Talaat Bey, Grand Vizier): Armenian genocides, 208, 210–11, 215–16; and Hitler, 109, 204–5, 216; network and plot, 107–9, 111, 320n26

Tate, Simon, 243

Tehlirian, Soghomon, 215–16

telegraph communications: for MI6, 78, 90, 103; vs telephone, 105; for WB’s dispatches, 90, 103, 105, 124–6

Thomas, J.H., 239

Thwaites, William, 87, 181, 186

Tinsley, Richard, 53, 94–5, 103–6, 130

Twiss, William, 147, 156

Ukraine: antisemitic genocides, 97, 100–2, 122, 164, 192, 214, 293; under Russian control (1918), 46

United States of America: arms exports to Britain, 280, 291; espionage agents, 158; in First World War, 44, 48, 54; Operation Sparrow (1944), 280–1. See also Wilson, Woodrow

Unwin, Stanley, 234

value theory, 47

Vámbéry, Ármin, ix, 79

Vanier, Georges, 267

Veidlinger, Jeffrey, 100–1

Versailles negotiations (Paris): and Allied plans for invasion, 153–5; Astoria and Majestic hotels (Paris), 139–40, 147; Big Three (formerly Council of Four), 140–2, 155, 174, 188–90; Borden’s intelligence for, 51–2; on Silesia, 169, 187–9; war guilt clause, 159–60

Versailles Peace Treaty: committees drafting, 172; draft presented May 1919, 171–9; final text, 191–2; German responses to, 176–82; German territories lost, 173; signing of, 176, 191; WB’s warnings about (Mar. 1919), 138–41, 171–82

Vischer, Friedrich, 41

Voss, Johann, 219

Waite, Robert, 91

Wallace, Jack, 78–80

Wallas, Graham, 34, 233

Ward, William Dudley, 182

Warlimont, Walter, 280

Webb, Sidney, 233

Werner, Richard, 120–1

Wilhelm, Kaiser, II, 38, 49, 66

Wilson, Henry (General), 177

Wilson, Woodrow: Fourteen Points, 71, 168, 172; and Keynes, 245; at Versailles negotiations, 111, 140, 142, 187, 189. See also United States of America

Winnipeg Jewish community, 97, 99, 102, 318n4

Wojtyla, Karol (later Pope, St. John Paul II), 314–15n4

Wolff Telegraphic Bureau, 109, 157

Wolff, Theodor, 109, 127–8

Wood, Andrew, 10, 311

World Jewish Congress, 314n4

Young, George, 132–3, 321n15

Young Turks, 208–9, 216

Photo Section

Winthrop Bell, Mount Allison University graduation portrait, 1904. (Courtesy of Mount Allison University, 17/2/7/2.)

Bell rock climbing in Germany, circa 1911–14. He had the hiking skills needed to access the earliest Nazi militia camps in 1919. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/8/1/p8.)

Winthrop Bell (front row, second from right) with his Cambridge University rowing crew, circa 1909–10. He had earned money for graduate study working as a surveyor, mapping the future route of the National Transcontinental Railway through vast Canadian forests. It was a hard life that built his muscles for collegiate sports, and later for his career in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. (Courtesy of Mount Allison University, Winthrop Pickard Bell fonds, 6501/19/2.)

Rothenburg, Germany, in light and darkness, circa 1911–14. In the early 1930s, the Nazis embraced the town’s traditional half-timbered architecture as representing the ideal Germany. They might have also been inspired by medieval massacres of Rothenburg’s Jews. This picture was likely taken by Bell, an avid photographer. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/8/1/p17.)

Bell acting in a theatrical production in Germany, circa 1911–14. Although an introvert, he could play a role when needed. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/8/1/p49.)

Cologne, Germany, circa 1911–14, showing the twin spires of the famous cathedral, the Dom. The spires became crucial landmarks for Allied bombers during the Second World War. The cathedral was one of the only buildings in the city not levelled in that war. Photo likely taken by Bell. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/8/1/p9.)

The Walhalla memorial near Regensburg, Germany, circa 1911–14. The memorial is a pantheon built in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Lingering resentment between the French and the Germans contributed to devastating wars in the twentieth century, including during Bell’s time in Europe. Photo likely taken by Bell. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/8/1/p13.)

Hazel Deinstadt (the future Mrs. Bell) as a First World War nurse in Arc-en-Barrois, France, at the château of the Duke of Penthièvre. The building and grounds were transformed into a hospital that used sunlight as one of its most powerful medicines. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/10/3/p60.)

Bell’s philosopher friend Edith Stein (the future St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), circa 1913. (Courtesy of Edith Stein Archive in Cologne, Germany.)

Bell’s friends Bernhard and Wilhelm Runge, ready for the front, 1914. Only one brother would come back alive. (Bell fonds, 8550/9/1/24/1.)

The Ruhleben prison camp theatre, circa 1915–18. Bell helped build its stage scenery. Visitors said Ruhleben’s offerings were as good as a production in the big city. Photo likely taken by Bell. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/6/2/11.)

A baseball game at Ruhleben, with Bell’s friend Grant Lochhead at bat, circa 1915–18. Photo likely taken by Bell. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/6/3/2.)

Albert Einstein’s note introducing Bell to Dr. Richard Werner of the Siemens firm as a representative of the news agency Reuters, March 1919. It was agent A12’s entry pass into the most technologically advanced German industrial circles. (Bell fonds, 6501/10/6/9.)

Bell’s press card for the German National Assembly, 1919. The highest levels of government discussed his reporting, including at a meeting of Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann’s cabinet on May 20, 1919. (Bell fonds, 6501/10/6/35.)

The philosopher Edmund Husserl in Schwarzwald, Germany, August 1921, when he was a world-famous professor at Freiburg. But a decade earlier, when Bell first travelled to study with him in Göttingen, Husserl was just one more promising German logician. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/7/1; original photo at the Husserl Archives, Leuven BE/212934/PP/Husserl/X XII 1.)

Winthrop Bell during his time teaching philosophy at Harvard University, ca. 1921-1927. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/2/4.)

Adolf Hitler in 1921, when he was thirty-two. At the time, he was working to build up the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as a political front for race war. (BayHStA, Nachlass Hitler, Adolf 17.)

Bell’s view of Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, August 12, 1930. He came to the bay because his wife owned property there. With his background in engineering and meticulous attention to detail, he helped build his home, insisting on top quality materials. He was handy with an axe and chopped his own firewood through the long Canadian winters. Photo likely taken by Bell. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/8/3/p54.)

Bell’s German friend and inside source Wilhelm Runge balancing his sons, Bernhard and Otto, on his shoulders, circa 1933. Runge would soon begin another delicate balancing act: undermining Nazi radar development from within while maintaining his credibility as a top scientist in communications research and development. (Bell fonds, 6501/17/8/5/p4.)

Winthrop’s brother, Ralph Bell, Canada’s director-general for aircraft production, in a Stirling, Britain’s largest wartime bomber, Ottawa, August 31, 1942. At the beginning of the war, Canada could produce forty aircraft a year. By the end, thanks in large part to the Bell brothers’ organizational expertise, the country had produced over sixteen thousand, including Hawker Hurricanes and Mosquito fighter-bombers. (Bell fonds, 7636/1/4.)

In spring 1939, Bell alerted newspaper editors and his government contacts about Hitler’s plans for a worldwide Holocaust. The Nazi extermination plan, Bell revealed once he broke the code, would leave “one single race dominating the globe.” It wasn’t the first Holocaust warning by a little, but a lot. The next warning didn’t appear in secret intelligence files until late 1941 and didn’t appear in newspapers until 1942. By then, the slaughter of millions was underway. The media disbelieved Bell’s early warning at first, but his articles finally appeared in Saturday Night in November and December 1939. The November 25 headline was “Exterminate Non-Germans, Dogma of ‘Mein Kampf.’” (Bell fonds, 6501/3/3/2/2.)

Winthrop and Hazel Bell visiting Berlin in May 1950, three decades after the intelligence he gathered there for MI6 influenced the outcome of the Treaty of Versailles. (Bell fonds, 8550/9/1/25/3.)

About the Author

JASON BELL, PhD, is associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick. He has served as a Fulbright professor in Göttingen, Germany, and has taught at universities in Belgium, the United States, and Canada. He was the first scholar granted exclusive access to Winthrop Bell’s classified espionage papers. Despite the coincidence in surname, Jason and Winthrop are not known relations.

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Copyright

Cracking the Nazi Code

Copyright © 2023 by Jason Bell.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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FIRST EDITION

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Epub Edition SEPT 2023 Epub ISBN: 978-1-4434-6675-2

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Cracking the Nazi code : the untold story of Canada’s greatest spy / Jason Bell.

Names: Bell, Jason (Professor of philosophy), author.

Description: First edition. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230166369 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230166415 ISBN 9781443466745 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781443466752 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Bell, Winthrop Pickard, 1884-1965. | LCSH: Spies—Canada—Biography.

LCGFT: Biographies. | Classification: LCC UB271.C32 B45 2023 | DDC 327.12092—dc23

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Phenomenologist

Chapter 2: The Professor

Chapter 3: The Anti-Semitic League

Chapter 4: The Secret Base

Chapter 5: Code Name A12

Chapter 6: The Killers

Chapter 7: The Battle for Berlin

Chapter 8: Loyalty to Loyalty

Chapter 9: Nazis in Eden

Chapter 10: The Paris Editor

Chapter 11: The Polish Plan

Chapter 12: The Trusted Men

Chapter 13: The Baltic Adventure

Chapter 14: Terrorism and Communism

Chapter 15: The One Hope for the World

Chapter 16: Lord No and Sir No

Chapter 17: Afterlife

Chapter 18: The Philosopher

Chapter 19: The Sabotage Game

Chapter 20: The Holocaust Code

Chapter 21: The Last Warning

Chapter 22: The Secret Elevator

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Photo Section

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher