Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln

Ignácz Trebitsch (Hungarian: Trebitsch Ignác(z)) was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in the town of Paks in Hungary in 1879, subsequently moving with his family to Budapest. His father, Náthán Trebitsch (Hungarian: Trebitsch Náthán), was from Moravia. After leaving school he enrolled in the Royal Hungarian Academy of Dramatic Art, but was frequently in trouble with the police over acts of petty theft. In 1897 he fled abroad, ending up in London, where he took up with some Christian missionaries and converted from Judaism. He was baptised on Christmas Day 1899, and set off to study at a Lutheran seminary in Breklum in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, destined for the ministry. Restless, he was sent to Canada to carry out missionary work among the Jews of Montreal, first on behalf of the Presbyterians, and then the Anglicans. He returned to England in 1903 after a quarrel over the size of his stipend. He became Tribich Lincoln (or I. T. T. Lincoln) by deed poll in October 1904 and secured British naturalisation on 11 May 1909.

Trebitsch-Lincoln made the acquaintance of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who appointed him as a curate in Appledore, Kent, his last ecclesiastical post. Soon thereafter he met Seebohm Rowntree, a prominent member of the Liberal Party, who offered him the position of his private secretary. With Rowntree's support, he was nominated in 1909 as the Liberal candidate for the Parliamentary constituency of Darlington in County Durham, even though he was still a Hungarian citizen at the time. In the election of January 1910 he beat the sitting Unionist member Herbert Pease, whose family had held the seat since 1895. However, at the time of this dramatic entrance to political life, MPs were not paid and Lincoln's financial troubles grew worse. He was unable to stand when a second general election was called in November 1910 and lost the post. Darlington returned to Pease.

In the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, he was involved in a variety of failed commercial endeavours, living for a time in Bucharest, hoping to make money in the oil industry. Back in London with no money, he offered his services to the British government as a spy. When he was rejected he went to the Netherlands and made contact with the Germans, who employed him as a double agent. Returning to England, he narrowly escaped arrest, leaving for the United States in 1915, where he made contact with the German military attaché, Franz von Papen. Papen was instructed by Berlin to have nothing to do with him, whereupon Trebitsch sold his story to the New York World Magazine, which published it under the banner headline "Revelation of I. T. T. Lincoln, Former Member of Parliament Who Became a Spy". His book Revelations of an International Spy was published by Robert M. McBride in New York in 1916. The British government, anxious to avoid any embarrassment, employed the Pinkerton agency to track down Trebitsch-Lincoln. He was returned to England—though not on a charge of espionage, which was not covered by the Anglo-American extradition treaty, but of fraud. He served three years in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, and was released and deported in 1919. His British nationality was revoked by the Home Secretary on 3 December 1918.

A penniless refugee, Trebitsch-Lincoln worked his way bit by bit into the extreme right-wing and militarist fringe in Weimar Germany, making the acquaintance of Wolfgang Kapp and Erich Ludendorff among others. In 1920, following the Kapp Putsch, he was appointed press censor to Kapp's provisional government. In this capacity he met Adolf Hitler, who flew in from Munich the day before the Putsch collapsed. With the fall of Kapp, Trebitsch fled south from Munich to Vienna to Budapest, intriguing all along the way, linking up with a whole variety of fringe political factions, such as a loose alliance of monarchists and reactionaries from all over Europe known as the White International. Entrusted with the organization's archives, he promptly sold the information to the secret services of various governments. Tried and acquitted on a charge of high treason in Austria, he was deported yet again. His name was also used by other impostors; following the assassination of the Italian MP Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, the police arrested a certain Otto Thierschadl alias Chirzel, who gave as his name Tribisch Lincoln.

In March 1926 Trebitsch-Lincoln's 23-year-old son, John Lincoln, was hanged for murder at Shepton Mallet prison. There was extensive newspaper coverage of the father's desperate journey from Ceylon to see his son before his execution, which proved to be in vain.

Trebitsch-Lincoln died of stomach trouble in Shanghai in 1943, aged 64. Yosef Nedava, who attended his funeral, assumed that the coffin was empty. In 1956, he wrote Trebitsch's biography in Hebrew.