Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener - Death - Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theories

The suddenness of Kitchener's death, combined with his great fame and the fact that his body was never recovered, almost immediately gave rise to conspiracy theories which have proved long-lived.

The fact that newly appointed Minister of Munitions (and future prime minister) David Lloyd George was supposed to accompany Kitchener on the fatal journey, but cancelled at the last moment, has been given significance by some. This fact, along with the alleged lethargy of the rescue efforts, has led some to claim that Kitchener was assassinated, or that his death would have been convenient for a British establishment that had come to see him as a figure from the past who was incompetent to wage modern war.

After the war, a number of conspiracy theories were put forward, one by Lord Alfred Douglas, positing a connection between Kitchener's death, the recent naval Battle of Jutland, Winston Churchill, and a Jewish conspiracy. (Churchill successfully sued Douglas for criminal libel, and the latter spent six months in prison.) Another claimed that the Hampshire did not strike a mine at all, but was sunk by explosives secreted in the vessel by Irish Republicans.

In 1926, a hoaxer named Frank Power claimed in the Sunday Referee newspaper that Kitchener's body had been found by a Norwegian fisherman. Power brought a coffin back from Norway and prepared it for burial in St. Paul's. At this point, however, the authorities intervened and the coffin was opened in the presence of police and a distinguished pathologist. The box was found to contain only tar for weight. There was widespread public outrage at Power, but he was never prosecuted.

General Erich Ludendorff, Generalquartiermeister and joint head (with von Hindenburg) of Germany's war effort, stated that Russian communist elements working against the Tsar had betrayed Kitchener's travel plans to Germany. He stated that Kitchener was killed "because of his ability", as it was feared he would help the tsarist Russian Army to recover.

Captain Fritz Joubert Duquesne, a Boer Army officer and later a spy in the Second Boer War, hated Kitchener because of his scorched earth policy, and he hated the British in general for abusing his family in the concentration camps. He was captured and sent to Lisbon as a prisoner of war, but he soon escaped and returned to South Africa via London as a Captain in the British Army. He attempted to kill Lord Kitchener in Cape Town, but was betrayed by the wife of one of his co-conspirators. Duquesne was sentenced to life in prison and sent to Bermuda, but he escaped to the United States and became a U.S. citizen, and even served as a consultant on African big-game hunting to President Theodore Roosevelt and others. In World War I, Duquesne became a German spy and planted explosive devices on British ships in South America, sinking 22. He claims to have posed as the Russian Duke Boris Zakrevsky in 1916 and joined Kitchener in Scotland. While on board HMS Hampshire with Kitchener, Duquesne supposedly signalled the German submarine that sank the cruiser, got off by using a life raft before the ship sank, and was rescued by the submarine. He was apparently awarded the Iron Cross for his efforts. Duquesne was later apprehended and tried by the authorities in the U.S. on the charge of sabotage, but he managed to escape yet again. In World War II, Captain Duquesne ran a huge German spy ring in the United States until he was caught by the FBI in what became the biggest roundup of spies in U.S. history: the Duquesne Spy Ring.

The role of Captain Fritz Joubert Duquesne in Kitchener's death has been hypothesised/documented in several books and movies:

• The Man Who Killed Kitchener; the Life of Fritz Joubert Duquesne, 1879–, by Clement Wood (New York, W. Faro, Inc., 1932).
• Sabotage! The Secret War Against America, by Michael Sayers & Albert E. Kahn (Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1942).
• The House on 92nd Street, which won screenwriter Charles G. Booth an Academy Award for the best original motion picture story in 1945.
• Counterfeit Hero: Fritz Duquesne, Adventurer and Spy, by Art Ronnie (Naval Institute Press, 1995), ISBN 1-55750-733-3.
• The Man Who Would Kill Kitchener, by François Verster, a documentary film on the life of Fritz Joubert Duquesne that won six Stone awards, 1999.
• In Fräulein Doktor, a Dino DeLaurentis film, 1969, a woman spy informs the Germans of Kitchener's travel plans. Duquesne is not depicted.