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

Brian Garfield

A compelling read about a flamboyant rogue. 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 piston 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. While he truly was a key player in Middle Eastern events after World War I and represented Zionism's interests in negotiations with Germany in the 1930s, he also set up Nazi front organisations in England, committed a half-century of major and costly scientific fraud in the field of ornithology and may have murdered his wife to boot. 354 pages.

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