TAILOR HOAXES GERMANY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19373, 23 December 1932, Page 8

TAILOR HOAXES GERMANY

NEW TICHBORNE AFFAIR. An impostor whose record provides interesting parallels to the Tichborne case has just been exposed at Baden. In the spring of this year a man called at the German Consulate at Naples and told a romantic story. He said he had escaped from a French penal settlement where he had served a long sentence for insubordination as a prisoner of war. The wanderer had, he said, tramped hundreds of miles through an arid desert, repeatedly incurring imminent risk of death and enduring unspeakable suffering. At length, he said, he had reached the coast, where he had induced a ship's captain to smuggle him off French territory. He gave the name of Oscar Daubmann. and said that he had hailed from Endingen, in Baden. Inquiries showed that a native of this village named Oscar Daubmann had been reported missing on the Western front during the war. and had ultimately been entered among the dead on the local war memorial.

As soon as his journey could be arranged he was brought back to the grateful Fatherland. He was received at the frontier by a deputation with flowers and speeches. He was accepted by the Daubmann parents as their son, just as Arthur Orton was accepted by Lady Tichborne. His regimental comrades unhesitatingly identified him as Daubmann, just as fellow officers of Roger Tichborne found him again in the swollen body of “the claimant.” He even went on a lecture tour throughout Germany. But cold and sceptical people began to scrutinise the antecedents of the supposed Daubmann. As a result he was arrested at Freiburg, not as Oscar Daubmann. but as Karl Hummel, who until May of this year followed the calling of a tailor at Offenburg and who has a not very edifying police record. Hummel promptly confessed everything. He says that the story of his imprisonment was invented with the object of getting a free journey back to Germany from Naples.