Read how a dashing intellectual from Nova Scotia became a spy who warned the world of Nazi Germany’s plans for a race war
Of the many important figures that had the bravery and conviction to stand up against Nazi Germany, one has remained unnoticed in war history until now. Recently declassified papers reveal that British intelligence’s secret agent, Dr Winthrop Bell, provided the first warnings about the Nazis, and thwarted their earliest battle plans.
As an undercover operative in Germany, Bell, codenamed A12, gave the first warnings of the nascent Nazi ideology in early 1919. Months before Adolf Hitler was a player in the movement, Bell warned of Nazi plans for race war. In 1919, he described how the extremists planned to target Jews and team up with Russia and Japan to fight a war of revenge. His report was an eerily prescient warning of the birth of the Axis.
Two decades later, in spring 1939, Bell wrote the first intel alert of Hitler’s plans for the Holocaust, and later that year published it in a leading Canadian newspaper. It was the first warning of the horrors to come.
Bell wanted to warn the West to eradicate the Nazis before they became powerful, but the plot he described seemed, to some, too incredible to be true. Still, his warnings were sufficient to raise the alarm among far-sighted people, like the chiefs of MI6. Britain was sufficiently worried about the Nazis to rearm and counter them.
