“PRINCE” WHO HOAXED NOBILITY OF COBURG

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 538, 15 December 1928, Page 27

“PRINCE” WHO HOAXED NOBILITY OF COBURG

HAD ONLY ONE SUIT TO MAKE WORLD LAUGH Harry Domela, the false Hohenzollern prince who two years ago fooled the nobility of Coburg, where every other man is an expert on German royalties, gives a very amusing account of the hoax in "A Sham Prince,” published in London last month. He wrote the book while awaiting his trial in prison at Cologne. This young adventurer—he is now only 24—was the son of German middle-class parents living in Lettland, whence he was driven by the Bolsheviks. He drifted into the underworld of Berlin. In despair he adopted a title and was received in the best Potsdam society as a Baltic count. At Heidelberg, which he next visited, the rumour got about, how or why is still unknown, that he was Prince William of Prussia, the son of the ex-Crown Prince. He did not contradict the rumour, which followed him to Erfurt and Gotha. Nobody doubted him. His exiguous wardrobe—he lunched, dined, shot and danced in a single not very new grey suit—excited no suspicion, says the “Daily Mail.” He despised these credulous people, and his descriptions of the banalities of country-house conversation are as entertaining as they are ungrateful. Danger seemed only to encourage him in his impudence. I was itching (he says) to give these people a lesson which would make all the world laugh. Let them have their prince and wallow before him in the joys of servile abasement. Had not paragraphs begun to appear, at first in local and then in Berlin papers, Domela might have duped these good people indefinitely. The real Prince William was safe miles away in Bonn. But when the Agent-General of the Hohenzollerns appeared on the scene the impostor realised that the game was up and fled to Weimar, where a maudlin master baker paid 35 bottles of champagne for seven words in the false prince’s handwriting. From Weimar Domela went to Cologne, where he was arrested.