Mark Adkins's Reviews > Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada's Greatest Spy

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, well that is sort of what I did with this book. I picked it without reading the book’s blurb thinking it had something to do with either the German encoding machine or Bletchley Park which this book is not about. I found out this book is about Doctor Winthrop Bell of Halifax Nova Scotia and the code he broke was the NAZI’s plans for the Holocaust.

The book goes over the interesting life of Dr Bell and how he became well-suited to seeing what was going on in Germany and Europe and how Hitler and the NAZI party were able to come to power. It goes over how Bell found out what the true conditions in Germany were after the First World War and how he saw that the Treaty of Versailles was going to end up causing a second world war, which it did and how he attempted to tamper the punitive points in the treaty and focus of rebuilding. The book also looks at how Bell by visiting places in Europe, reading and analysing Hitler’s writing saw what the overall plan that the Third Reich had for all the non-Aryans.

I thought that this was an interesting book. It highlighted aspects of post-First World War that you don’t read about much and how troubled Germany was during that period. It also brought to the readers' attention, Doctor Bell (no relationship to the author) who is more famous for his teaching of philosophy and work as a historian of Nova Scotia. If you are interested in history then I would recommend this book.