WAR HERO POSE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 51, 27 January 1933, Page 4

WAR HERO POSE.

IMPOSTOR UNMASKED

Posing as a hero and n victim of the war, getting his name erased from a village war memorial’s list of the dead, receiving the Cross of Honour from the Government and being acclaimed by the folk of the village, a German impostor has been unmasked, says the Berlin correspondent of tlie London Times. Last year Herr and Frau Daubmann. of Edingen (Baden), whose son was reported missing at. Verdun in 1916, received a letter from Naples, purporting to be from their son, tlie writer, declaring that he had just escaped after 16 years’ imprisonment in Algiers, and asking that his birth certificate he sent him. The writer actually was a tailor named Hummel, who had a criminal record and who had entered Italy without a passport, his motive for writing to the Daubmanns being to obtain identification documents. He was unembarrassed when, after the birth certificate and passport bad been forwarded, be was met at the German frontier by the sergeant of Daubmann’s regiment, who escorted him to Endingen. In a motor bedecked with flowers he was welcomed by 15.000 people, and the Mayor solemnly erased Daubmann’s name from a memorial tablet. Daubmann’s regimental commander was convinced of the truth of Hummel’s story of sufferings at the bands of the French, who, he said, had kept him in a cell sewing trousers for the Foreign Legion.