Well, if it’s 6 October, it’s the 80th anniversary of the demise of Ignatius Trebitsch-Lincoln, dead at just 64, but a man who… had packed a fair bit in. Born a Hungarian Jew, he’d been elected to the House of Commons, spied for Germany in both world wars, stolen, swindled, worked for warlords, met Hitler and Errol Flynn (separately), and eventually declared himself the 14th Dalai Lama.
After an apparently unremarkable schooling, he became a student at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Dramatic Art but — in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography — “left Hungary before completing his course after being accused of stealing a gold watch”.
Whether he wanted to be an actor, we can’t be sure, but we do know he spent the rest of his life pretending to be things he wasn’t.
At this stage, he was still known by the name he’d been given by his parents: Ignácz Trebitsch. He travelled to Britain, met some missionaries, and stole a vicar’s wife’s jewellery. The Revd C T Lypshytz later wrote of him:
He is thoroughly bad, a genius, and very attractive, but taking the crooked way always for choice.
From there, he went to Germany, converted to Christianity, got married, and headed to Montreal to convert Jews there to Christianity. While there, he changed churches, argued about money with his employers, and gave up missionary work to return to England.
He was a curate for a while, and then failed an exam to enter the priesthood. He started spending all of his wife’s money, and signed up to carry out sociological research for philanthropist Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, who had influence in the Liberal Party.
Around this time he took a new surname and started calling himself Tribich Lincoln or I. T. T. Lincoln. Rowntree got him taken on as Liberal candidate for Darlington, and in January 1910 he took the seat with a surprise majority of 29.
His maiden speech, according to historian Bernard Wasserstein, was “an unimpressive hotch-potch of tired campaign rhetoric … stale jokes and lengthy anecdotes”, and the rest of his career wasn’t much better, although he did get into Punch, who mocked his heavy accent.
‘Lincoln’ kept the insulting and slightly racist cartoon, and would “proudly cite [it] as evidence of his political importance” — a trait which can also be measured by the fact that, in December 1910, having been an MP for less than a year, he had to stand down because he was insolvent.
He asked Rowntree for money, got it, and set up “a series of public companies to exploit Galician and Romanian oil” (ODNB again). He raised lots of money on the stock exchange, but there was, in fact, little to no oil, and by 1914, he was “down and out”.
So he suggested to British naval intelligence that he become a double agent, feeding German contacts tiny snippets of information. This, apparently, would allow him to entice the entire German fleet into the North Sea, where it would be destroyed.
The British… had their doubts about the plan, so naturally he approached the Germans, who got him to start sending them reports of shipping activity at British ports. This went as well as you might expect, and he abandoned his family to flee for America in January 1915.
In the US, he published Revelations of an International Spy, which claimed — erroneously on both counts — that he had (a) been a successful spy, and (b) been doing it for years. In Wasserstein’s words:
it was revealing of little save monumental self-glorification and obsessional perversion of the truth.
The book came out while he was in a US prison, at the request of the British government, but he persuaded the Americans to let him decipher some German codes for them, which meant being escorted to and from the Federal Building in Brooklyn every day…
When he and his escort stopped off for something to eat one day, Trebitsch asked permission to visit the men’s room — and ran away. He was recaptured, appealed to the Supreme Court, failed, got extradited, and was jailed for three years in Britain.
Being a more successful conman than he was a spy, he was done for fraud, rather than espionage. After his three years, he was immediately deported, so — well, obviously — “insinuated himself into German nationalist circles in Berlin” (ODNB).
In 1920, he even managed to become “‘director of foreign press affairs’ in the short-lived militarist government of Wolfgang Kapp”. He was deported from Austria in 1921 after being indicted for high treason (although the charge was dropped).
This period saw him encounter Hitler, and hang out with rabid antisemites such as Colonel Max Bauer, even though he made no secret of his Jewishness. (He also once met Errol Flynn, who apparently recognised him as a “kindred spirit”.)
Anyway, after the Kapp putsch business, he went to China, and spent most of the rest of his life out there. He converted to Buddhism, took the name Chao Kung, and became a monk. The kind of monk who spent much of his time seducing nuns, obviously.
This was after he’d spent a couple of years as an arms dealer and adviser to several different warlords. Equally obviously. And when the 13th Dalai Lama died, Trebitsch said he was the 14th. The Tibetans… doubted this.
In 1941, he contacted the police attaché at the German embassy in Tokyo and said (in the words of Bernard Wasserstein):
the sages of Tibet, who represented a sort of unofficial world government, had formed the view that the time was now ripe for Germany to make peace.
The attaché, Joseph Meisinger, was one of the last people he managed to swindle. A telegram arrived in Berlin that May, saying his plans were “worthy of consideration”, but his timing was off. Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland just days later.
Hess was one of the most prominent Nazis who believed in the occult, and the regime swiftly turned against mysticism in all its forms. Help with their war effort from a Buddhist monk who spoke fluent English with a Hungarian accent was, oddly, not what they were after at the time.
At this point, Wasserstein’s book comes up with one of its finest sentences. After 315 pages of Trebitsch’s life, it’s not even that strange:
Two years later, his “meagre living as a low-level agent for Japanese and German intelligence agencies in Shanghai” (ODNB) had dried up, so he wrote to Hitler. This was not a good idea. In the letter, he told the Fuhrer to stop exterminating the Jews — and that if this warning was not heeded, he would hand the British the plans for Germany’s secret weapons. Of course, he had no way of contacting British intelligence, his history with Britain would make them sceptical of anything he offered, and he didn’t possess a solitary secret plan.
He died in hospital in Shanghai that October, and there is some evidence that he was poisoned by that city’s branch of the Gestapo. To say that his was an unusual life would be something of an understatement, I think.
Bernard Wasserstein wrote a piece for the New York Times about the writing of the man’s biography, in which he asks the obvious question about someone so convinced of their own brilliance, despite repeated evidence to the contrary:
There isn’t really an answer, which is a pity, because it’s not like there’s any shortage of fundamentally dishonest, empty, delusional people in public life today, but I can recommend the book.
Highly. This short account barely touches the surface.
