37 Facts About Hermann Detzner

Hermann Philipp Detzner was a German engineer and surveyor, who served as an officer in the German colonial security force in Kamerun and German New Guinea.

In early 1914, the German government sent Detzner to explore and chart central Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, the imperial protectorate on the island of New Guinea.

Hermann Detzner led at least one expedition from the Huon Peninsula to the north coast, and a second by a mountain route, to attempt an escape to the neutral Dutch colony to the west.

Hermann Detzner explored areas of the New Guinea's hinterland formerly unseen by Europeans.

Hermann Detzner received a hero's welcome when he returned to Germany.

Hermann Detzner received a position in the Imperial Colonial Archives, and appeared frequently on the lecture circuit throughout the 1920s.

Hermann Detzner was the son of a dentist, Johann Philipp Hermann Detzner and his wife, Wilhelmine Katharina Faber, in Speyer, in the Bavarian Palatinate, a cultural, economic, and historical city on the Rhine River.

Hermann Detzner's father received his degree from Heidelberg University and was licensed to practise by the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1867; Detzner's father pioneered innovations in dental prosthetics.

Hermann Detzner was trained as a topographer, surveyor, and an engineer, and received his promotion to Fahnrich in the 6 Infantry Regiment, 2nd Pioneer Battalion, in February 1902.

Hermann Detzner later published a paper on the marking of the boundary.

Hermann Detzner's mission was to be the first serious attempt to explore the hinterland and to evaluate and describe its resources.

In January 1914, Hermann Detzner travelled to Rabaul on New Pomerania.

Hermann Detzner had progressed well inland when, on 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany.

Hermann Detzner could have made attempts to reach West New Guinea, which was then neutral Dutch New Guinea, but his claims to have been the first outsider to enter the Papua New Guinea highlands can be discounted.

On this escape attempt, Hermann Detzner learned the Australians had orders to shoot him on sight.

Hermann Detzner made one further attempt to escape overland to Dutch New Guinea, but had to be carried back suffering from an internal hemorrhage.

Hermann Detzner spent the remainder of the time investigating the island's inhabitants and its flora and fauna, particularly in the Huon Peninsula and Huon Gulf.

On 11 November 1918, Hermann Detzner received the news of the official end of the war with the German defeat from a worker at the Sattelberg Mission Station, he wrote a letter to the Australian commander in Morobe in which he offered his capitulation.

Hermann Detzner was brought to Rabaul, the Australian headquarters, and on 8 February 1919, was transferred to Sydney aboard the Melusia; after a brief internment in the prisoner of war camp at Holsworthy, he was repatriated to Germany.

Hermann Detzner had been promoted to the rank of captain during the war; upon his return, he was promoted to major.

Hermann Detzner received a position in the colonial administration in Berlin and in the imperial archive in Potsdam.

Hermann Detzner's book was wildly popular among the general population for its incredible tales of stubborn patriotism and its narratives describing the exotic locales of the lost imperial colonies.

Hermann Detzner's descriptions touched a chord in the German imagination: one of their own had explored the colony, walked its paths, seen its mountains and valleys, and met its people.

Hermann Detzner's book was translated into English, Finnish, Swedish and eventually French.

The report on Hermann Detzner's speech, transmitted from a news agency in London, caused a small flutter in Australian government circles, but generally was dismissed; an earlier report by the Australian judiciary had absolved the Australian force of improper recruiting or treatment of the New Guineans.

Hermann Detzner had surmised that there were no insurmountable obstacles between him and the Sepik river.

Hermann Detzner described the presence of an indigenous variation of German, called Unserdeutsch, in several New Guinean dialects.

Hermann Detzner was a civilian [emphasis in the original] surveyor, the writer claimed, not a soldier and he survived on mission station rations supplied by public subscription from the German plantation owners.

Furthermore, this writer asserted, Hermann Detzner's movements were so well known to the district officer at Morobe that he was prevented from escaping; they could have shot him several times, but did not.

Two of the German missionaries in the Finschhafen District, Christian Keyser and Otto Thiele, claimed Hermann Detzner had not spent the war roaming the jungle, one step ahead of the Australians, but had been under the Mission's protection the entire time.

Keyser's additional accusations were particularly specific: Hermann Detzner had appropriated his own scientific observations.

Hermann Detzner implied that what remained of his notes had been confiscated when he surrendered.

Hermann Detzner's narrative was rife with contradictions and omissions: Hermann Detzner named few villages or streams and stated that the valleys he discovered were thinly populated, whereas they actually contained large populations, at least by New Guinea standards.

Hermann Detzner stated that the highest point in the range was 3,600 meters, a 1,200-meter miscalculation, which, for a mapmaker and a surveyor, needed to be explained.

Hermann Detzner made attempts to explain away specific ambiguities, contradictions, and errors.

Hermann Detzner died there in 1970, at the age of 88.

Hermann Detzner worked for the Abwehr, in July 1939 he was reactivated by the Wehrmacht as a major.