Thread by @ajcdeane

This is the 32nd instalment of #deanehistory.Hat tip: @FredTitmus.

Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Hungary. It was the last orthodox thing he ever did.

Whilst he did not complete his studies at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Dramatic Art, I think you’ll agree that what follows confirms a flair for the dramatic.

Regular arrested for theft, he abandoned his course and moved to England where he converted to Christianity & was sent to Germany by missionaries to train for religious orders, a vocation for which subsequent events showed him to be singularly ill-suited.

He was tasked with converting Jews in Canada to Christianity but soon returned to the UK, unhappy about his pay. He charmed the Archbishop of Canterbury into giving him a curacy, as one does. Plainly he had a gift for acquiring mentors & convincing them to assist his advancement.

He came to meet Seebohm Rowntree, millionaire confectioner, becoming his private secretary & thenceforth the Liberal Party’s candidate for the Darlington constituency as Rowntree was a luminary of the Liberals. He was elected to Parliament at the General Election of January 1910.

(He’d only become a British citizen in mid-1909, after he’d been selected as a candidate!)

1910 saw two elections; he didn’t stand in the second in November. At that time, MPs were unpaid – his finances had not improved since election and couldn’t afford to run again.

A series of failed business ventures took up his time before the war. When conflict loomed, naturally our man felt the call to serve.

Not in the front line, naturally. He rather thought of himself as a spy, actually.

And when his adopted country turned down his services, he did the obvious thing – he offered himself to the Germans. They said yes please, and he became a double agent having rather failed to be a single agent.

We were on to him rather promptly, as whatever else his failings he was an eminence grise in the all mouth and no trousers championships and made poor to no effort in covering his tracks as he talked up his important spying work he hadn’t actually done. He fled to the USA.

In the States, the German embassy had received orders not to touch this lunatic; understandable. So he sold his story. The MP who became a spy. It was a sensation. Our extradition treaty with the USA didn’t cover spying, so he was sent back on a fraud charge, which seems right.

The Americans sent him back and we put him to work in the post office as he awaited his trial. He treated his guards to a round in the pub after a shift at the post office, legged it out the pub window and made his way back to the USA, where he was deported back to us again.

He did three years in prison and was deported with his British citizenship revoked. On the continent he wormed his way into the nascent Nazi regime, writing for newspapers opposed to the post-First World War settlement at Versailles.

He was sent to interview the Dutch crown prince, who refused to see him. Details, details. He came back full of news about how well his interview had gone.

As a well known arbiter of truth, he became press censor for the new post-Kapp putsch German “government” which briefly seized power from the Weimar regime in 1920.

When that fell, he tried various other fringe political movements.

One, the White International (a clutch of Hungarian and Russian fascists) made him their archivist. “Me? Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln? Given your secrets? With MY reputation?” He promptly sold them to every country buying.

He was deported from Austria. He went to the USA again but was… asked to leave. ITL was fast running out of countries. So he went to China, worked for a warlord called General Yang Sen and converted to Buddhism.

Digression: he had a son who joined the British Army. Said son burgled a man and shot him dead. He was sentenced to death in a military court as he was a solder at the time of his offence. His father couldn’t get back to the UK in time to see him before his execution.

He established a new monastery, of which he was the abbot. It attracted some European initiates, so it was rather more successful than his Christian conversion work in Canada. New monks would have to give their possessions… to the abbot. He seduced a lot of nuns.

There’s only so long a man can stay on the straight & narrow & before long he changed loyalties again, writing anti-British material for Japan. His Nazi tendencies re-emerged upon the outbreak of the Second World War, as he offered to organise Buddhists in an anti-British effort.

It may seem daft but the Nazis were well known for their credulous fondness for mystical schemes & Himmler &Hess were both keen on this wheeze, but the wheels fell off when Hess made his flight to the UK, one of the maddest stories ever told and rather better known than this one.

So ITL had to content himself with declaring himself the Dalai Lama when the 13th DL and the Panchen Lama had both died without replacement in a short period of time – a claim that Japan actually supported.

But in a moment of decency Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln wrote to Hitler protesting against the Holocaust. The Nazis asked their Japanese allies to arrest him, which they did, and, allegedly, to poison him. Whether they did or not, he promptly died, in 1943, of a stomach ailment.