The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud

About this book

Tall handsome charming Col. Richard Meinertzhagen (18781967) was an acclaimed British war hero a secret agent and a dean of international ornithology. His exploits inspired three biographies movies have been based on his life and a square in Jerusalem is dedicated to his memory. Meinertzhagen was trusted by Winston Churchill David Lloyd George Chaim Weizmann David Ben Gurion T. E. Lawrence Elspeth Huxley and a great many others. He bamboozled them all. Meinertzhagen was a fraud. Many of the adventures recorded in his celebrated diaries were imaginary including a meeting with Hitler while he had a loaded pistol in his pocket an attempt to rescue the Russian royal family in 1918 and a shoot-out with Arabs in Haifa when he was seventy years old. True he was a key player in Middle Eastern events after World War I and during the 1930s he represented Zionisms interests in negotiations with Germany. But he also set up Nazi front organizations in England committed a half-century of major and costly scientific fraud and -- oddly -- may have been innocent of many killings to which he confessed (e.g. the murder of his own polo groom -- a crime of which he cheerfully boasted although the evidence suggests it never occurred at all). Further he may have been guilty of at least one homicide of which he professed innocence. A compelling read about a flamboyant rogue The Meinertzhagen Mystery shows how recorded history reflects not what happened but what we believe happened.