Bell 2023. Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada’s Greatest Spy
Bell, Jason. 2023. Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada’s Greatest Spy. First edition. Toronto, Ontario: HarperCollins Canada Ltd.
Once a foothold had been established [on the beaches at D-Day], the success of the operation would depend on the ability of the Allied armies to build up strength in the beachhead faster than the Germans could assemble strength to oppose it: in other words, upon the efficiency of the administrative and maintenance services. (Warren Wait for the Waggon: The story of the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps,1961, p. 270)
A number of years ago, I had occasion to read a number of regimental histories: Dileas: History of the 48th Highlanders of Canada, 1929-1956, The Regiment (Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment), The Gunners of Canada (Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery), and Wait for the Waggon (Royal Canadian Army Service Corps).
With the exception of Farley Mowat’s The Regiment, which is an interesting and well-written story (and hence a poor regimental history), the examples all read similarly enough to suggest that the genre brings with it some standard expectations:
- Everybody gets mentioned
- Inside jokes and nicknames are appreciated, especially for senior officers
- They couldn’t have won the war without you.
I said to people at the time that they reminded me a little of a cross between high school yearbooks and amateur small-town histories.
A fun example of that third bullet is found in my epigraph, from Wait for the Waggon. As I suppose you might expect, the history of the Royal Canadian Army Service Corps is focussed a lot on logistics: how you pack trucks, how you load them on to ships, how you get them off ships, and how you bring them back empty to refill them. And indeed, I’ve heard before that war really is in the end mostly about logistics: the army that can get troops and materiel to the front the fastest, in the greatest numbers, and in the best shape wins. But I’d also never thought of D-Day as being essentially about an efficiency battle between opposing crews of clerks and mechanics. Maybe Warren is right and it really was over once the RCASC got ashore; but I did have the feeling throughout the book that there might be some bias affecting his account.
I was reminded of this passage when I was reading Cracking the Nazi Code. Not because it was a regimental history — though you could see it as either the history of a regiment-of-one or “Phenomenologists go to war.” Rather because it shared a similar partisan feel with the best (or most typical, anyway) of those military yearbooks. Despite what you might think from its title (and I certainly did think this when I picked it up in the bookstore), Cracking the Nazi Code, is not about cryptology in the sense of Enigma and trying to read enemy codes during the war. Rather, it is about “codes” in the sense of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Robert Langdon, his Harvard-based “symbologist”: the book is a history of the intelligence career of Winthrop Bell, a wealthy and well-connected Canadian who fell into serving as a kind of spy, intelligence resource, analyst, and diplomat at the end of the first World War and, the book argues, realised long before anybody else did about the special danger the Nazis posed to the rest of the world.
Bell had been working on a PhD in phenomenology in Göttingen at the beginning of the war and was interned as an enemy alien at Ruhleben. After the ceasefire in November 1918, he began working for the Canadians and the British, passing on intelligence about the German political situation and helping the Canadians and British prepare positions at the Armistice conference in Paris in 1919. According to Jason Bell, Winthrop’s biographer (and, as we are told several times, no relation), this work involved emphasising the danger posed by right-wing reactionary forces and militias in the country and arguing for a rebuilding programme for Germany very similar to the one ultimately adopted at the end of the second world war as the Marshall plan.
So far so good. As I was reading the book I learned a lot about the first world war, and the immediate inter-war years which I really hadn’t known before (I know much more about WWII than WWI, I realise): I hadn’t known exactly why the powers ended up on the battlefield, or why Lenin was ultimately sent to Russia, or that November 11 marked a ceasefire rather than the end of the war (though I should have known this one), or just how early Hitler began to show up as a leader in the right wing circles (again, I should have known this one). And I certainly didn’t know about the role of Winthrop Bell in all of this.
But this is where the trouble comes in. Because I am not sure that I really do have an accurate sense of Winthrop Bell’s activity or its importance. I know that his biographer thinks it was important. But there are so many slippages, structural issues, and writing quirks that seem designed to make me think that Winthrop was crucial, that I confess I begin to wonder if the pudding is not overegged.
I gave an example of one of these issues in an earlier post: this was the example where the author describes what reads to me like a fairly innocuous letter home describing how the Canadians are in fine spirits as a carefully calibrated diplomatic communication designed to pass on crucial information to the Canadians without awakening the suspicions of the German censors. Except when Bell explains what it was that was so notable about the message, it turns out it was its nascent sense of “Canadian” as an identity — something I just can’t see German censors being all that worried about in the context of a shooting war in Europe.
This section is typical (and typically problematic) for another reason: before quoting the letter, Bell sets the scene:
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.
Given how loosely (and inaccurately) Bell-the-biographer is using “intelligence mission” to describe this innocuous letter, the other elements of his scene setting become suspect: not whether or not the first day of July 1915 was sunny in Berlin (well, maybe that as well, though I hope he looked it up), but the idea of the “Canadian Club.” Bell-the-biographer notes in his introduction that he has taken some creative licence in setting the scene throughout the book; but it isn’t clear where that creativity begins and ends (except he says that all quotations are real): was there really a “Canadian Club” at Ruhleben? Or is the choice of the term Bell-the-biographer’s way of indicating that there were some other Canadians at the camp, whether or not they were actually organised into a group called “The Canadian Club”? Or is “Canadian Club” the name Jason Bell is giving to them?
This might seem like nitpicking, but it isn’t: there are a number of places in the biography where it isn’t clear whether Bell is presenting terms and describing organisations as they were understood at the time.
The most important of these, of course, is “Nazi,” since Cracking the Nazi Code’s main argument is that Winthrop Bell recognised the danger they posed long before anybody else. A key passage is the following:
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 anti-Semitism merged into a unified plot. It has often seemed that Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party invented the movement in the early 1920s, but Bell saw the moment when the dangerous movement actually began, a year earlier. When A12 [i.e. Winthrop Bell] 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, anti-semites, 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 leader Benito Mussolini, whose brutality was real enough, but very modest compared to Hitler’s.
The term “Nazi” became common in English newspapers only around 1930… (p. 162).
Since later on, Bell-the-biographer is going to use the word “Nazi” repeatedly in summarising and paraphrasing Winthrop’s reports, and since Winthrop-uncovered-the-Nazis-long-before-anybody-else is a thesis of the book, exactly what Winthrop Bell discovered, when he discovered it, and what he called it is really extremely important.
As far as I can see, however, Winthrop Bell did not actually discover the Nazis in 1919 (which is what I assume Jason Bell means by “a year earlier” than “the early 1920s”). What he seems to have done is recognised the danger of the rise and coalescence of reactionary anti-Semitism as a political force dangerous to the Allies as early as 1919 — a political force that would later go on to become the genesis of the Nazi party in the early 1920s. The party that became the Nazis, the Deutsches Arbeiters Partei (DAP) was founded in 1919 and renamed the National Socialists “in the early 1920s.” According to the Online Etymological dictionary (quoting the Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache), the word Nazi “was favored in southern German (supposedly from c. 1924) among opponents of National Socialism because the nickname Nazi… was used colloquially to mean ‘a foolish person, clumsy or awkward person’.” All of which makes it difficult to believe that Winthrop Bell identified specifically National Socialists as early as 1919 — or that a group that “still lacked a name and a leader…. [and was] just a shared purpose, a common cause, a predatory loyalty” could also be said to have a “moment when the dangerous movement actually began, a year earlier” and “did not want their enemies to know they existed because they weren’t strong enough to wage world war — yet.” It seems to me that you either are an inchoate potential, or you are an organisation that is having its founding moment; I don’t see how you at the same time be both leaderless, formless, and nothing but a shared purpose, and at the same time organised enough to be collectively biding your time to start a world war — and be recognised by Winthrop Bell.
In actual fact, however, I don’t actually think that Jason Bell is actually trying to say that Winthrop recognised the danger of the DAP specifically and uniquely as early as the year of its foundation, or that he described them as Nazis. As I understand the larger discussion, what Winthrop saw (and what Jason Bell is actually trying to show is that he recognised the importance of) was that the constellation of right wing parties that would later coalesce around and become the National Socialists was a danger that the allies needed to take more seriously.
The problem, however, is that this (important) point is being undercut by the narrative looseness of the presentation: by using anachronistic references, hinting at anachronistic prescience on the part of his hero, and using concepts like “codes” in unusual (or sometimes incorrect or anachronistic) senses,1 Bell-the-biographer actually makes his case for Bell-the-agent weaker than it should be. The book is hard to trust in details, when Bell-the-biographer’s point is that Bell-the-secret-agent was extremely good in recognising them.
Notes
1 As an example, Bell-the-biographer seems to be implying that Bell-the-spy was preparing for a life of danger by preparing business cards with only his name on them; my understanding (confirmed by the Wikipedia) had been that in upper class circles in the 19th century, visiting cards often had only the name of the person on them — the point was not to let somebody know where you lived, but rather that you had called (the very fact that they were calling meant you should know where they lived). As a member of a very high society Nova Scotian family running around a London in which he is bring introduced to all the right people by family friends, I’m not sure a lack of an address on his calling card is evidence that he’s a secret agent.
