Hermann Detzner
Hermann Philipp Detzner was a German engineer and surveyor. He served as an officer in the German colonial security force in Kamerun and German New Guinea. He gained fame for evading capture after Australian troops invaded New Guinea at the start of World War I. He explored areas of the New Guinea’s hinterland formerly unseen by Europeans. He surrendered in full dress uniform, flying the Imperial flag, to Australian forces in January 1919.
About Hermann Detzner in brief
Hermann Philipp Detzner was a German engineer and surveyor. He served as an officer in the German colonial security force in Kamerun and German New Guinea. He gained fame for evading capture after Australian troops invaded New Guinea at the start of World War I. He 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. He explored areas of the New Guinea’s hinterland formerly unseen by Europeans. After finding out that the war had ended, he surrendered in full dress uniform, flying the Imperial flag, to Australian forces in January 1919. In 1932, he admitted that he had mixed fact and fiction and, after that time, eschewed public life. He later published a paper on the marking of the boundary. In the late 1920s, scientific portions of his book were discredited. His survey of the 1909 joint survey revealed inaccuracies in the 1909 Joint Survey of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, showing a discrepancy of more than 650 meters from the 8°’S’ parallel to the 8’0′ parallel. His book, Four Years Among the Cannibals in the Interior of GermanNew Guinea under the Imperial Flag, from 1914 until the Armistice, sold well in Great Britain and Germany, entered three printings, and was translated into French, English, Finnish and Swedish. He was the son of a dentist, Johann Philippdetzner, and his wife, Wilhelmine Katharina Faber, in Speyer, in the Bavarian Palatinate, a cultural, economic, and historical city on the Rhine River.
His large family included nine children. He received his promotion to Fahnrich in the 6 Infantry Regiment, 2nd Pioneer Battalion, in February 1902. He participated in a joint British-German scientific and surveying expedition in 1908 and 1909 and again in 1912–1913. In late 1913, the Imperial Colonial office appointed him to lead an expedition to survey the border between the British protectorate, called Papua, and the German territory, called Kaiser- Wilhelmland. In January 1914, he began his expedition into New Guinea, and in February he travelled to Rabaul on Pomerania. He had experience in joint operations in 1907–08 in the joint operations against Papuan gold prospectors near the border with German territory. In 1907, he had a reputation as a tough and determined wiry, focused and determined, and seemed to be the right man for the job. In 1912, he and one Captain Nugent, Royal Artillery, identified and marked the frontiers of KamerUN and explored the Niger valley. In 1913, he was appointed to survey and map unexplored inland regions and to evaluate and describe its resources. In 1914, the German government sent him to explore and chart central Kaiser- wilhelmland, the imperial protectorate on the island of New Guinea in the Pacific.
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