QI The Book of the Dead

corporations to exploit oil wells in central Europe, raising large amounts of investment on the stock market, not repaying borrowed money and ruining the shareholders in the companies he started, all of which collapsed. Desperate, he resorted to forgery to obtain further loans, but by 1914 he was bankrupt again.

    When the First World War broke out, Trebitsch Lincoln, as a former Austro-Hungarian citizen with a German wife, found himself in an awkward situation. He was also fearful of arrest, lest his forgeries be discovered. Never one to take the easy option, he decided he would become a spy – ideally as a double agent in a neutral country.
    He didn’t mind who took him on. He offered his services to the British first, but they ignored him. He then went to Holland and tried the Germans. The Germans were dubious, but decided to give him a go. So he returned to England and promptly offered to sell German secret codes (that he didn’t have) to the British. While he was getting nowhere with them, his past caught up with him (as he had feared it would) and he had to leave in a hurry for the United States to avoid arrest for fraud. Here he sold his story to the papers: the British MP turned German master-spy.
    Infuriated by his antics, the British government sought his extradition and Trebitsch was arrested by the Americans and packed off back to London. While in prison awaiting trial, he was given a job in the censor’s office at Mount Pleasant Sorting Office, reading mail written in German. He was taken there and back each day in a prison van. Making friends with his guards, on the way home one evening, he somehow persuaded them it would be a good idea if they all stopped off for a drink. So, while the guards went to the bar, Trebitsch went to the toilet and escaped out of the window.
    He went on the run, making his way back to the States and supporting himself by writing yet more brazen (and largely fictitious) accounts of his spying career for the newspapers. The British, after much difficulty and a series of fiascos involving the US Federal police and the Pinkerton detective agency, managedto track him down and extradite him a second time. He stood trial and was sentenced to three years for fraud, which he served in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. In 1919, having done his time, he was stripped of his British citizenship and deported to mainland Europe.
    He headed for Germany, where the extreme right-wing journalist Wolfgang Kapp and a cadre of anti-Semitic former German army officers were plotting the overthrow of the Weimar Republic. Trebitsch, with his effortless ability to get on with absolutely anybody, was appointed press officer to the group, in which capacity he met the young Hitler. With his fellow Nazi Dietrich Eckart, Hitler had flown to Berlin intending to join the coup. But on catching sight of Trebitsch’s distinctly Jewish physiognomy, so the tale goes, the deal was off. ‘Come on Adolf,’ said Eckart. ‘We have no further business here.’ Another version casts Trebitsch in an even more pivotal historic role: it is said that he saved Hitler’s life by bundling him on to a plane as he was about to be arrested.
    The putsch took place in 1920, when Kapp and 6,000 German naval commandos under General Walther von Lüttwitz marched on Berlin. The occupation was short-lived (the rebels were brought down in less than a week by a general strike) but, for a brief glorious moment, Mr Ignatius Lincoln was Minister of Information – the only former British MP ever to serve as a member of a German government. The revolt having failed, Trebitsch went south and took refuge in Munich, the heartland of fascism. Here he devoted himself to Byzantine intrigues with extreme right-wingers in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In Budapest he became involved with a loose alliance of rabid monarchists and fervent anti-communists known as ‘White International’. Many of its members were so murderously anti-Semitic that they preferred to avoid delegation and personally kill Jews, but Trebitsch, as ever, charmed them all. After which, true to form, he betrayed them: selling their secret plans to the Czechoslovak government. Because of his reputation, no one but the Czechs believed that the (for once) genuine documents were actually genuine. Trebitsch then set off for Italy to campaign for the fascists but they didn’t trust him an inch and threw him out. As a deportee from the USA, Britain, Austria and Italy, he