Province reporter turned foreign correspondent Lukin Johnston had just scored the biggest coup of his career — a one-on-one interview with newly appointed German chancellor Adolf Hitler.

As his Canadian readers digested the veteran scribe’s impressions of the Nazi leader in November 1933, the 46-year-old Johnston was heading back to his London offices on an overnight steamer from Holland across the English Channel.

He never made it. Johnston was nowhere to be found when the ship docked at the British port of Harwich. To this day, his B.C. family is convinced that someone pushed Johnston into the Channel, while news accounts at the time speculated that the correspondent was “giddy or tired” and simply fell.

“Highly unlikely,” said Colin Castle, author of a new biography of Johnston. “He was a very experienced ship traveller. He was never seasick.”

Castle, whose wife Val is Johnston’s granddaughter, said his best theory “is that he was pushed, I’m afraid.”

The new book, titled Rufus for the childhood nickname that stuck with Johnston as an adult, follows the British-born Johnston to Canada as a teen, where he crossed the country working jobs ranging from farming to banking before landing at The Province in 1910 as a 23-year-old rookie reporter.

He learned journalism quickly, reporting from all over B.C., his journalistic rise interrupted by First World War service as a Canadian Army officer.

Johnston came back to the paper after the war, wrote several books on his travels in Europe and B.C., and eventually became the Southam newspaper chain’s correspondent in London.

Castle’s book hits its dramatic high point recounting Johnston’s reporting in Europe starting just before the Nazis took power. In 1932, Johnston headed to Munich where he at first couldn’t get an interview with Nazi leader Hitler.

Johnston filed his first impressions of the Nazis’ Munich party headquarters in a Province story that year: “They raised the right hand and said ‘Heil Hitler’ ... the whole atmosphere of the place seemed to me like that just before the curtain goes up on an amateur theatrical show.”

But by the following year the Nazis were solidly in power, and Johnston realized these men weren’t just comic actors.

“Rufus couldn’t believe that all this militarism that was going on in Germany meant nothing,” said Castle, a retired history teacher in West Kelowna. “Hitler would say it was just a way of providing discipline. Rufus didn’t buy that and it comes through in his articles.”

Johnston visited a German camp holding 1,600 political dissidents, where he talked to a jailed social democrat.

“It was suggested to me that whatever I wrote must be submitted to the authorities for the correction of any ‘misunderstandings.’ I could only refuse the suggestion point blank,” Johnston wrote in one dispatch. He added: “Such visitors as myself are only shown the best side of such places.”

In a story published in The Province 10 days before the Nov. 12 German election in 1933, Johnston wrote: “Never in history has propaganda been mobilized on such a vast scale or with such crushing efficiency to bend the will of a nation ... opposition parties have ceased to exist, and the watchful eyes of the storm troopers will check voters in thousands of small electoral districts.”

All of which was the backdrop to Johnston’s big scoop on Nov. 15, 1933 — a half-hour interview with Hitler in the chancellor’s Berlin office.

“He’d shaken Hitler’s hand, he’d been relatively cordial,” Castle said. “He’d asked him some pretty tough questions.”

As Johnston left Hitler’s office, then-Gestapo head Hermann Goering was waiting in the anteroom.

“Goering leaned toward Rufus and said in English, ‘You’re damned lucky to get out,’” Castle said, adding that Johnston related that encounter afterwards to fellow foreign correspondents at a favourite Berlin bar.

“Rufus was a little bit upset because of the aggression, Goering’s attitude.”

Also around that time, another foreign correspondent had been accused by the Germans of being a spy — ominous times for foreign journalists.

“I don’t think Rufus was worried (after the encounter with Goering), but he wasn’t happy about it.”

Johnston headed back to England, his work on the continent done for the moment. His disappearance from the ship came two days after the Hitler interview.

“I suspect it was one of Goering’s minions,” Castle said. Goering had founded and at the time was in charge of the Gestapo, the German secret police. “No way was Rufus going to fall off a ship.”

Johnston had first crossed the Atlantic when he came to Canada at 18, and among his many other maritime travels was a 1923 scoop for The Province, when he was the only Canadian journalist accompanying U.S. President Warren G. Harding on a three-week voyage from Oregon to Alaska and back to Vancouver — thumbing his nose at competitors as he filed his dispatches enroute via telegraph.

Johnston had the good reporter’s talent for schmoozing the right people, which helped him get close to both Harding and Hitler.

“He drank a bit,” Castle said. “He had a reasonable-sized bar bill.”

Val Castle and her two siblings, the children of Johnston’s only son Derek, were never to meet their grandfather. They were all born after his disappearance.

Colin Castle, who was Glen Schaefer’s high school history teacher more than 30 years ago, asked Schaefer to write the foreword for the book Rufus.

gschaefer@theprovince.com

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