For those who aren't familiar with the name, Trebitsch Lincoln was quite a bit more than just a "con man"; indeed, one of the remarkable things about him, certainly at this late stage in his career, seems to have been his ability to persuade himself that the things was doing and the things that he wanted were real. His biographer, Bernard Wasserstein –an otherwise pretty sober professor of history at Oxford – prefers the term "political adventurer," and calls him "one of the most astounding and bizarre figures in modern history."

In the course of a long career that began at the turn of the 20th century, Lincoln (1879-1943) – who was born into a Jewish family in Hungary – was successively a trainee actor, Presbyterian missionary in Canada, Anglican curate, British Liberal MP, bankrupt, oilman, tramp and German spy. During the First World War he served a three-year prison term in Britain for fraud; after his release, he left for Germany, where be became head of press for the very short-lived post-war government installed during the Kapp Putsch of 1920, and later a prominent member of the inter-war White International. Indicted for high treason in Vienna, Lincoln fled to China, where he became political advisor to a succession of prominent warlords. He spent the remainder of his life in Asia as an arms dealer, Buddhist abbot, and Bodhisattva, living in Shanghai under the name Chao Kung. All this, as Wasserstein observes, makes Lincoln

the only person ever to have been formally adopted by a major British political party as a parliamentary candidate while still a Hungarian citizen ...[and also] the only former British MP ever to serve as a member of a German government."

Attempting to install oneself as Dalai Lama might have seemed ambitious even for a man of all these many talents, but it was certainly something that might conceivably have been in line with Lincoln's personality and interests – Wasserstein comments that he had developed "an obsession with the idea of travelling to Tibet" as early as the 1920s. However, the source that Wiki cites for the information you are interested in is not an especially reliable one. It's a feature published in an Australian newspaper by a former Buddhist monk turned journalist, and it appeared in April 1945, two years after Lincoln's death and still several months before Japan's surrender, at a a time when none of those with knowledge of what had happened was actually available for interview. As such, the Australian report seems to have relied more on rumour than anything else to label Lincoln as someone suffering from a life-long "religious mania" and suggest that

When the Dalai Lama died, Trebitsch-Lincoln notified the Buddhist Lamas of Tibet that the old Lama had been reincarnated in him – Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch-Lincoln! The Japanese government and Buddhist hierarchy gave him an eager backing and vehemently confirmed his claim to the Dalai Lamahood. Japan began to press his claim.

But the Tibetans thought otherwise, and found their new Dalai Lama [who was, in fact, the present one, who we're all pretty familiar with] in the person of a Chinese baby. So Trebitsch-Lincoln committed hara-kiri to save Japanese face, or, more likely, he was "happily despatched by the Japanese themselves.

There is much that is demonstrably wrong with this report. For example, the 14th Dalai Lama was not a "Chinese" baby. And Lincoln certainly did not commit suicide – though his death was in fact rather mysterious, and Wasserstein concedes it is possible he was killed by the Japanese. But it seems to be the only published report that mentions the story you are interested in at all.

Wasserstein's biography of Lincoln is the the best-sourced and most carefully considered account of his life that we have, so we need to turn to him to try to discern the actual course of events. He begins by pointing out that Lincoln was living in Asia during a period of incredible disruption. There had been tension between China and Japan since the beginning of the 1930s, and full-scale war had broken out in 1937. Furthermore, the death of the 13th Dalai Lama in 1933 was followed fairly closely by that of the second most important Tibetan leader, the Panchen Lama, in 1937, threatening the fragile internal stability of Tibet.

It was, Wasserstein relates, against this background that the British consul-general in Chungking composed a dispatch in September 1938 reporting that

Trebitsch Lincoln is proceeding towards Tibet and that he claims to be, by some extraordinary metempsychosis, a reincarnation of both the Dalai and the Tashi [Panchen] Lamas.

This dispatch, then, appears to be the origin of the story that Lincoln schemed to become the Dalai Lama, but Wasserstein is quick to point out that the original informant, a "Mr Cunningham of Tatsienlu," about whom nothing else at all is known, had apparently confused Lincoln (then definitely in Shanghai) with an American by the name of Engler who had been passing through his city. We are as certain as we can be that Lincoln himself made no attempt to reach Tibet and, in any case, the boy who would become the 14th Dalai Lama had by that point already been identified as the tulku (reincarnate custodian) of the spirit of the previous 13 holders of that office; he would be formally recognised as such in 1939.

What, though, of the involvement of the Japanese and the Germans in the selection of the new Dalai Lama? It is certainly the case that foreign interference in the process was so commonplace by this time as to be unremarkable; China had laid claim to a major role in the selection of a successor since the 18th century. And Lincoln certainly was known to Police-Colonel Josph Meisinger, the senior Gestapo officer mentioned by Wiki. But Meisinger came onto the scene only four years after the events set out above occurred. In 1937-38 he was still in Germany, where he had charge of the Gestapo office responsible for the investigation of homosexuality and abortions; in 1939 he was in Warsaw, where he ordered the execution of 16,000 Jewish people, a crime for which Poland would execute him after the war. He was not appointed to the Far East until 1941, when he was made "police attache" at the German embassy in Tokyo, and he did not visit Shanghai until May of that year.

Lincoln was well known to be a charismatic and persuasive individual, and he certainly seems to have had an impact on Meisinger, who sent a telegram to Berlin urging that the German government take seriously the "plans" Lincoln had for "China, Tibet and India," which Meisinger considered "worthy of consideration." What these plans were, we do not know, but certainly Meisinger's enthusiasm for Lincoln was not shared by other German officials in the Far East. The Consul-General in Japan, Martin Fischer, appended his own commentary to the telegram, pointing out that Lincoln was a "political adventurer" with no known influence in "lama circles", and, when the message did reach Germany, there were plenty of people there with memories long enough to remember the Lincoln of the 1920s; one of these, a Foreign Office official named Martin Luther – who readers of historical fiction may recognise as an important character in Robert Harris's famous counter-factual thriller Fatherland – wrote a strongly-worded memo pointing out that Lincoln was not only wildly unreliable, but also "by birth a Hungarian Jew". Meisinger's interest in Lincoln promptly cooled, and Wasserstein does not mention any connection between Lincoln and the Japanese at all.

Did Lincoln proclaim himself the new Dalai Lama? We have no evidence he did so, though it would not, apparently, have been wholly out of character for him to have harboured such a dream. Did the Japanese support that candidacy, or indeed make any effort to meddle in the selection and installation of the 14th Dalai Lama? I can find nothing to suggest as much, and Japan seems to have taken very little interest in Tibet at all during this period; a single Japanese agent, Hisao Kimura, who posed as a Mongolian, is known to have spent 18 months in the country in 1940-1, but, other than that, there seems to be very little to suggest that Japan took any interest in Tibetan affairs.

I note that Wiki does not include Wasserstein's important and conspicuously well-researched book among the sources for its article on Trebitsch Lincoln; this explains why it carries such an inaccurate account. Regrettably and unfortunately, this seems to be yet another example of the need to treat the material it publishes with caution.

Sources

Daisuke Murakami, "Japanese imaginings of Tibet: past and present," Inner Asia 12 (2010)

Ivan Orlov-Abstrebski, "Buddha threatens the Japanese," Sydney Morning Herald, 7 April 1945

Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (New Haven, 1988)

______________________, Lincoln, Ignatius Timotheus Trebitsch, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography