Hauptman Detzner WW I Holdout
World War I German guerilla fighter on New Guinea
When the Allies occupied the German colony of New Guinea at the opening of WW I a German officer led a four-year expedition to retain the island, surrendering in 1919.
The European countries of the 19th century were deeply involved in becoming imperial powers and establishing colonies around the world. Imperial Germany entered the game late but was still able to acquire far-off lands in Africa and the Pacific. The German Pacific colonies included the Caroline Marshall and Marianas islands, Samoa, the treaty port of Tsing-tau in China and New Guinea. The defense of the islands was left to small police forces with the powerful German Asiatic Squadron roaming the Pacific in reserve. At the beginning of WW I the German Asiatic Squadron fled the Pacific, raided the Falkland Islands and was in turn hunted down and destroyed within the first few months of the war. The Allies swept the now-defenseless Pacific and quickly took possession of the Kaiser's far-flung isolated colonies. Samoa was captured without a shot by a force from New Zealand. Tsing-tau was placed under siege and captured by Japan, which also took easy possession of the Carolines, Marshalls and Marianas. An Australian force landed at Rabaul on New Guinea and fought a brief engagement with a German force one-tenth its size, made up of native police and military reservists, before the colony surrendered on September 21, 1914. This ended the German military presence in the Pacific--- that is except for Lieutenant Herman Detzner.
Lieutenant Herman Detzner, (sometimes spelled Dentzner in references) was a regular German army officer and had been sent to New Guinea to survey the interior of the brand new German colony in 1914. Born in 1882, Detzner became an engineer, specializing in topography and mapmaking. He was a member of the German army expedition to Cameron in 1907 and spent five years surveying and making maps there before being assigned to New Guinea. When the war erupted in Europe in August 1914, Detzner was deep in uncharted jungle on the other side of the globe as his army mobilized and invaded France. It wasn’t until he came to a mission near the hamlet of Morobe in December that he found out both his country was at war and the colony he was working in was now occupied. Detzner felt honor bound as an officer of the Kaiser to refuse surrender and mobilized his small force for war. He left behind an elderly medical attendant and took to the interior of the colony with a force of twenty men made up of professional German non-commissioned officers and local native police.
For four years Detzner roamed all over the eastern part of New Guinea, flying the Imperial German flag as high as he could and generally making his point known. He made contact with scattered German colonists and Lutheran missionaries who supplied him with food, books and medicine. The small force fluctuated in size as he recruited fresh native policemen but then lost men to malaria and desertion. Three times during the war Detzner tried to make for the neutral Dutch East Indies but was thwarted by the impassable Hagen Mountains. Australian troops were in occupation of the coastline and large settlements of the colony and knew of Detzner’s band but never made contact with it. On several occasions the small German band would come into a village on the coast only to find an Australian warship, the HMAS Una (itself the former German governor's yacht), sitting at anchor and rapidly have to make their escape back to the mountains.
News of the end of the war in Europe on November 11, 1918, reached Detzner ten days later at his mountain base from a Lutheran missionary. With his duty done he sent word to the Australian forces that he was ready to surrender. He released his native policemen and presented himself and his remaining German troops to the allies in their carefully preserved full uniforms at Rabaul on January 5, 1919. He found out he had been decorated and promoted to Hauptman (Captain) during the war and was briefly interned in a POW camp in Britain before returning to civilian life in Germany. Detzner later published several books including 'Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen' (Four Years amoung the Cannibals) detailing his experiences and the flora and fauna in Africa and Oceania. He died in 1970. To this day pidgin German is spoken in parts of New Guinea and several German words have found their way into the vocabulary.
Sources
'Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen' -von 1914 Bis Zum Waffenstillstand Unter Deutscher Flagge Im Une rforschten by Detzener, Hermann (Berlin, 1921) isbn 0028-1042 (Print) 1432-1904 (Online)
German Colonial Uniforms- War in the Pacific.
