{"id":21019,"date":"2024-01-14T02:17:11","date_gmt":"2024-01-13T20:47:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/inside-story-of-real-life-spy-who-discovered-holocaust-but-went-completely-ignored-books-entertainment\/"},"modified":"2024-01-14T02:17:11","modified_gmt":"2024-01-13T20:47:11","slug":"inside-story-of-real-life-spy-who-discovered-holocaust-but-went-completely-ignored-books-entertainment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/inside-story-of-real-life-spy-who-discovered-holocaust-but-went-completely-ignored-books-entertainment\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside story of real-life spy who discovered Holocaust – but went completely ignored | Books | Entertainment"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"Jewish<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/p>\n

Inside story of real-life spy who discovered Holocaust – but went completely ignored (Image: Getty)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Yet Winthrop Pickard Bell\u2019s claims largely fell on deaf ears and a genuine opportunity to avert global calamity was missed, a new book claims.<\/p>\n

\u201cWinthrop was the first who left a publishing trail warning about Hitler\u2019s plans,\u201d says Jason Bell, an author who has just completed the first biography of Winthrop, based on documents declassified in 2012.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe discovered the Nazis and their plan for race war as far back as 1919, when they were just a small, fledgling group. That let Bell connect the dots in Hitler\u2019s later writing and speeches.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in the Canadian town of Halifax in 1884, Winthrop was studying at the University of G\u00f6ttingen in Germany when the First World War was declared.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Arrested as a citizen of an enemy country, he was incarcerated at the Canadian Ruhleben Internment Camp. Safely back in Canada, his experiences in Germany and his knowledge of the language, its people and its politics were harnessed by Canadian PM Robert Borden.<\/p>\n

He took the young academic with him to the Treaty of Versailles summit, where the imposition of reparation payments sowed the seeds of Germany\u2019s economic collapse.<\/p>\n

Winthrop agreed to go back to Germany in 1919, ostensibly as a reporter for Reuters news agency.<\/p>\n

In reality, however, he was now a spy for the Canadian government and the British secret services.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI wouldn\u2019t call him reckless, but Bell was courageous,\u201d says Jason.<\/p>\n

\u201cWinthrop, like many prisoners at Ruhleben, was frustrated he was unable to do his part to help his country in the war. So he committed to winning the peace after.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe knew establishing friendship with Germany\u2019s new democracy would protect Britain from another world war.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his new dual role, Bell realised in the early 1920s that the inchoate, but growing gang of anti-Semites and hooligans led by army corporal Adolf Hitler wanted a second world war.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    Blond and blue eyed, the journalist was adept at earning the trust of some of Germany\u2019s most esteemed intellectuals. And what he saw emerging was chilling.<\/p>\n

    His reports back to Canada and the UK in 1919 warned of an unofficial \u201cmilitary plot\u201d and predicted an \u201canti-Semitic war of revenge\u201d.<\/p>\n

    Jason says: \u201cWinthrop was the first person to warn about the anti-Semites\u2019 war plans to ally with the Soviets, Japan and Italy for revenge against the Allies.<\/p>\n

    \u201cIt was so early that these extremists hadn\u2019t even yet been named as Nazis.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    Yet to Winthrop, American visitors to Germany felt that Hitler, \u201cwas not some embodiment of evil but a real-life politician\u201d.<\/p>\n

    They failed to see that Hitler planned to murder non-Aryans in America just as surely as he meant to destroy them in Europe.<\/p>\n

    Bell continued to gather intelligence on Germany, travelling to Poland, Ukraine and Russia.<\/p>\n

    He observed, helplessly, as his on-the-ground sources were murdered, exiled or simply disappeared amid the horror of the Third Reich.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    Jason says: \u201cBell warned Hitler meant to kill all Jews across the globe. But he also knew the Nazis wouldn\u2019t stop there. Hitler meant to kill all Jews, Slavs, Blacks, Asians, \u2013 as well as the French and Austrians who he thought once were Aryan, but had poisoned their blood through intermarriage.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Yet politicians refused to release Bell\u2019s reports. Austen Chamberlain, chancellor of the exchequer, bloc-ked Bell\u2019s request, as did an equally powerful figure in the Foreign Office, Lord Charles Hardinge.<\/p>\n

    In the 1930s Hardinge was a key architect of appeasing the Fascists, and even signed a letter advocating friendship with Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    READ MORE <\/strong> Author Farhana Islam unveils new school library funded <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    By the dawn of the war with Bell living back in Canada, his feature story warning of the Holocaust,
    was almost universally rejected, only appearing in a magazine called Saturday Night, two months after Germany had invaded Poland.<\/p>\n

    \u201cHe was seeing a problem nearly nobody else saw and is the only one who saw it in the detail he did,\u201d says Jason. \u201cWinthrop read Mein Kampf and detected an eventual plan for racial extermination.\u201d<\/p>\n

    With most of Bell\u2019s original handlers from 20 years earlier having died, the redundant spy saw out the war repairing aircraft for the Royal Canadian Air Service.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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    \u201cIf Bell\u2019s warnings had been published earlier, it would have given the Allies time to prepare for the Blitzkrieg,\u201d concludes Jason.<\/p>\n

    \u201cEven after the Nazi invasion of Poland there was a common belief in the West that the Nazi government would fall apart.<\/p>\n

    \u201cIf they had an idea of what Hitler had in store, they would have known to attack western Germany, when the Nazis were tied up in Poland. Had Winthrop Bell been listened to, I think history would\u2019ve been very different.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Cracking The Nazi Code by Jason Bell (Harper Collins, \u00a325)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    [ad_1] Inside story of real-life spy who discovered Holocaust – but went completely ignored (Image: Getty) Yet Winthrop Pickard Bell\u2019s claims largely fell on deaf ears and a genuine opportunity to avert global calamity was missed, a new book claims. \u201cWinthrop was the first who left a publishing trail warning about Hitler\u2019s plans,\u201d says Jason …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1023],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21019"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}