Canada's unsung hero: Academic turned spy foresaw WW II, says UNB scholar

Many Canadians have likely never heard of Winthrop Pickard Bell. 

But for one New Brunswick scholar, he's considered a hero.  

Winthrop Bell, who was born in Halifax in 1884, was an academic who studied at a variety of universities, including Mount Allison, Harvard and McGill.

But he also lived a secret life, working undercover for Canadian and British governments.

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"He wasn't a soldier on the battlefront, but what he was doing with his mind and with his body was equivalent to the heroism of soldiers," said Jason Bell, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick. 

For years Jason Bell (no relation) has been piecing together the story of Winthrop's mysterious contributions to the war effort.

Where it all began

Winthrop Bell was completing his dissertation in philosophy at the University of Göttingen in Germany when the First World War broke out in 1914.

"He was arrested as an enemy citizen [and] spent the war years in prison," Jason Bell said. "The Germans at the time suspected he was a spy, but at that moment he was actually just an innocent student."

There's this ancient tradition of the hero as being the one who stands out in the middle of the field and fights alone. And that's what Winthrop did​- Jason Bell, assistant professor at the University of New Brunswick

The arrest and Winthrop Bell's imprisonment at the Canadian Ruhleben Internment Camp in Germany led, in part, to his career in espionage.

After the war, Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden, who was friends with Winthrop Bell's father Andrew, needed help at the Paris Peace Conference, also known as Versailles Peace Conference, in 1919. This was a meeting in which victorious Allied forces outlined post-war peace terms.

Borden needed someone who spoke German, understood German culture and "the German way of thinking" to become Canada's next spy.

"He really knew these people well," Jason Bell said.

In addition to philosophy, the prime minister was also looking for someone who had been trained in economics, politics.

"Winthrop was suggested for a position basically created from nothing, as an espionage agent for the British government," he said.

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After the war, Winthrop Bell attended the peace conference and went on to work undercover in Germany and eastern Europe as a Reuters reporter in 1919.

As he wrote his reports, he had access to top thinkers like Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.

"He ran in the most serious intellectual circles, he could ask these people questions, he could get the introductions and things like this that allowed him to tell the story of what life was like in Germany after World War One," Jason Bell said.   

Winthrop Bell's reports were sent to Borden, who was circulating the reports to leaders of the Allied forces, including David Lloyd George, prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922.

"Reports of his were being read at the highest level of government," he said.

A critical time in Germany 

According to Jason Bell, these reports were being written during a critical time in Germany.

In his reports, Winthrop Bell said he could already detect the rise of an unofficial "military plot" in 1919, predicting an "anti-Semitic war of revenge."

"He was seeing a problem that nearly nobody else saw and he probably is the only one who saw it in the detail that he did," Jason Bell said.     

In his report, Winthrop Bell also proposed an initiative where Allied countries come together with neutral countries to recreate the business life in Germany that would support the German government.

"He saw them as reasonable people who had a hopeless case in front of them. So if we can support the rebuilding of the business life of Germany, the politics will naturally follow," he said.

But his advice was never followed by political leaders with the Allied forces and the Second World War broke out two decades later.

The United States would later adopt a similar proposal after the Second World War. Named the Marshall Plan, the program provided financial support to western countries in Europe after the war. 

A plan for racial extermination

Before the Second World War, Winthrop Bell took a trip to Germany and met with Jewish friends undergoing persecution.

At the time he acquired a copy of Adolph Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, which presented personal goals and philosophy. Winthrop read it through and detected an eventual plan for "racial extermination."

"He appears to be the only person in the world who detected this in 1939," Jason Bell said.

In the spring of 1939, he wrote several articles about his theory and submitted them throughout Canada but no one would publish them.

"They said he was apparently putting together passages to make Hitler look bad," he said.

The articles were eventually published after the Second World War began in a Canadian magazine called Saturday Night with headlines about how Hitler was planning racial exterminations in Europe.

Even though his articles landed in a prominent publication, Jason Bell said they were lost in the fog of war.

"Had Winthrop Bell been listened to here, I think the historical story would've been very different," he said.

Winthrop offered services — once again

Many of Winthrop Bell's original handlers and supervisors, including Borden, died in the lead up and during the Second World War.

"As the war was breaking out, he was writing to people he didn't know very well," Jason Bell said. "He was telling them about his service, offering to take a position again."

But no one took him up on his offer.

He contributed to the war effort by working for a company dedicated to the repair of the Royal Canadian Air Force, a job he took quite seriously.

"There's this ancient tradition of the hero as being the one who stands out in the middle of the field and fights alone. And that's what Winthrop did," said Jason Bell.

"He was fighting for a team and for a cause. He was fighting not only for Canada, but for Great Britain and also for human rights. But he was willing to do this even if he was the only one there."