Hermann Detzner Hermann Philipp Detzner ( 16 October 1882 – 1 December 1970 ) was an officer in the German colonial security force ( " Schutztruppe " ) in " Kamerun " and German New Guinea , as well as a surveyor , an engineer , an adventurer , and a writer . In early 1914 , the German government sent Detzner to explore and chart the interior of Kaiser - Wilhelmsland , the imperial protectorate on the island of New Guinea . When World War I broke out in Europe , he was well into the interior and without radio contact . He refused to surrender to Australian troops when they occupied German New Guinea , concealing himself in the jungle with a band of approximately 20 soldiers . For four years , Detzner and his troops provocatively marched through the bush , singing " Watch on the Rhine " and flying the German Imperial flag . 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 Guinean interior formerly unseen by Europeans and surrendered in full dress uniform , flying the Imperial flag , to Australian forces in January 1919 . Detzner received a hero ' s welcome when he returned to Germany . He wrote a book about his adventures — " Four Years Among the Cannibals in the Interior of German New Guinea under the Imperial Flag , from 1914 until the Armistice " — that achieved notoriety in Great Britain and Germany , entered three printings , and was translated into French , English , Finnish and Swedish . He received a position in the Imperial Colonial Archives , and appeared frequently on the lecture circuit throughout the 1920s . In the late 1920s , scientific portions of his book were discredited . In 1932 , he admitted that he had mixed fact and fiction and , after that time , eschewed public life . Family . Detzner was the son of a dentist in the city of Speyer , in the Bavarian Palatinate , a cultural , economic , and historical center on the Rhine River . His father , Johann Philipp Detzner ( 12 July 1846 – 1907 ) , received his degree from Heidelberg University and was licensed to practice 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 ( Prussian ) , 2nd Pioneer Battalion , in February 1902 . Early explorations . Hermann Detzner participated in a joint British - German scientific and surveying expedition to Kamerun in 1908 and 1909 and again in 1912 – 1913 . He and one Captain Nugent , Royal Artillery , identified and marked the frontiers of Kamerun and explored the Niger valley . Detzner later published a paper on the marking of the boundary . Navigators charted the coastline of the northern and eastern portions of New Guinea in the early 17th century and , later in the century , British Admiralty navigators named the visible mountain ranges . Most German surveying efforts had focused on coastal regions and river basins , where Germans had established plantations , leaving the interior unexplored . In late 1913 , the Imperial Colonial office appointed Detzner to lead an expedition to survey the border between the British protectorate , called Papua , and the German territory , called Kaiser - Wilhelmsland , and to survey and map the interior . Detzner ' s mission was also to be the first serious attempt to explore the unknown interior and to evaluate and describe its contents . The boundary between Papua and Kaiser Wilhelmsland had been broadly established by a joint British - German expedition in 1909 , but the interior had not been mapped and the German colonial administration maintained that the boundary was imprecise . Since then , Papuan gold prospectors may have crossed into the German territory which , from the German perspective , made the accuracy of the border essential . Detzner had had experience in joint operations in Kamerun in 1907 – 08 and could be expected to understand the challenges faced by the previous commission ; he had a reputation as a methodical and precise engineer . Although small , he was tough and wiry , extremely focused and determined , and seemed like the right man for the job . Adventures in New Guinea . In January 1914 , Detzner travelled to Rabaul on New Pomerania ( now New Britain ) . In February , he began his expedition into Kaiser - Wilhelmsland . His survey immediately revealed inaccuracies in the 1909 joint survey ; by March , Detzner had concluded that the border corridor was already showing a discrepancy of more than from the 8°0 ' S parallel . The discrepancy increased the further west he traveled , revealing a widening wedge in the boundary as it was agreed upon , and as it was marked . The discrepancy favored German interests . He was well into the interior when , on 4 August 1914 , Britain declared war on Germany . As World War I spread to the Pacific , Australian troops invaded German New Guinea , taking the German barracks in Herbertshöhe ( Kokopo ) and forcing the defending German colonial troops to capitulate on 21 September after their defeat at Bita Paka . At the beginning of October , still unaware of the state of war that now existed between his country and the Commonwealth , Detzner hiked toward a temporary camp , expecting to find there his second in command , a non - commissioned officer named Konradt . Instead he was met by a messenger sent by Konradt and handed a note that Konradt had found in the hand of a dead native ; the note , written by the Australian commander , informed him of the state of war between Germany and Great Britain , and advised him to surrender . Detzner was horrified to discover , he later wrote , that while he was safe at his base camp in the vicinity of Mount Chapman , in an idyllic setting filled with flowers , his fellow Germans were dying at Bita Paka . Four years in the unexplored interior of New Guinea . Detzner refused to go into captivity . He led his party , consisting of four other European officers , and about 200 well - armed natives — a formidable jungle force — south toward the Sattelberg on the Huon peninsula , narrowly escaping from Madang ahead of an Australian patrol . His second in command , Sergeant Konradt , who suffered from frequent bouts of malaria , and another German officer , were captured by the Australians by spring 1915 . Eventually , Detzner found his way to the vicinity of Lutheran mission at the Sattelberg , at a foggy , cool area at , above Finschhafen . The Sattelberg mission was one of the Neuendettelsau Mission Society enterprises established by the Old Lutheran missionary , Johann Flierl , in 1885 . This station , and additional mission stations in Heldbach , Simbang , Tami Islands , and Simbu , were an important evangelical presence in the Morobe Province . The missionaries had signed oaths of neutrality for the Australians , who allowed them to remain at their Stations and continue their work . Once Detzner reached the vicinity of the Sattelberg Mission , nearby villagers in the Borrum valley housed him and his remaining men , which had dwindled to about 20 soldiers , plus four European officers and , on his behalf , the villagers sought assistance from the Sattelberg director , Christian Keyser , and another missionary , Otto Thiele . They reluctantly agreed to keep Detzner ' s presence a secret . Among the villagers , Detzner established a base camp from which he could mount his expeditions . The valley was relatively secure for him , and inaccessible for the Australians , but if they ventured too close to his base , Detzner and his men would retreat into the mountainous Saruwaged , or , if necessary , further into the Finisterre mountains . These were rugged and remote locations , accessible to Detzner , who had the help of native guides , but which the Australians , who usually traveled in larger patrols , could not penetrate . For four years , Detzner and his band roamed throughout the eastern jungles of the island , eluded the Australian patrols , and maintained contact with the few remaining German colonists and missionaries , who supplied them with food , books , and newspapers . Reportedly , he recruited the indigenous population to help him , but he apparently made little effort to hide : he flew the German flag ( sewn from dyed loincloths ) in villages throughout the bush , and marched his command through the jungle , loudly singing such patriotic German songs as " Watch on the Rhine " ( " Wacht am Rhein " ) and such popular , sentimental ones as " The Linden Tree " ( " Der Lindenbaum " ) . Escape attempts . Detzner made three attempts to reach West New Guinea , which was then neutral Dutch New Guinea , and in doing so , became the first European to see the central highlands . In 1915 , and again in 1917 , Detzner and some of his men tried to escape along the coast in two canoes . In 1917 , they reached the vicinity of Friedrich - Wilhelmshafen , which today is Madang . There lay anchored the Australian ship , HMAS " Una " , which earlier had been the German imperial yacht , the , designated for use by the German governor of the colony . The ship blocked any further travel , and ended any notions they had of a water escape to Dutch Guinea . On this escape attempt , Detzner also learned the Australians had orders to shoot him on sight . He made one further attempt to escape overland to Dutch New Guinea , but had to be carried back suffering from an internal hemorrhage . He spent the remainder of the time investigating the island ' s inhabitants and its flora and fauna , particularly in the Huon peninsula and Huon gulf . Surrender . In late November 1918 , Detzner received the news of the end of the war from a worker at the Sattelberg Mission Station . He wrote a letter to the Australian commander in Morobe in which he offered his capitulation . On 5 January 1919 , he surrendered at the Finschhafen District headquarters , marching with his remaining German troops in a column , and wearing his carefully preserved full - dress uniform . He 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 . Book and honours . On his arrival home , Detzner received a hero ' s welcome . The press likened him to the successful commander of German East Africa , " Major General " Paul Emil von Lettow - Vorbeck , who tied down British forces in Africa for the duration of the war . Detzner had been promoted to the rank of captain during the war ; upon his return , he was promoted to major . In that year , he wrote " Kaiser - Wilhelmsland , nach dem Stande der Forschung im Jahre 1919 " , ( Kaiser - Wilhelmsland , According to the State of Research in the Year 1919 ) , which was widely read in scientific circles . The information that the Geographical Society of Berlin honored him with the Nachtigal medal , named after the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal , in 1919 is false ; this misinformation may have been planted by Detzner himself . Nevertheless , the Geographic Society of Hamburg awarded him their gold medal in 1921 ; the University of Bonn granted him an honorary degree ; and the military awarded him the Iron Cross ( 1st Class ) . He received a position in the colonial administration ' s archive in Berlin . To satisfy the public curiosity about his adventures , Detzner wrote " Four Years among the Cannibals , from 1914 to the Armistice , under the German Flag , in the Unexplored Interior of New Guinea " . The book brought him fame in Germany and Britain , and he became a sought - after speaker on the lecture circuit . In the 1920s , in addition to several articles and two maps of New Guinea , Detzner published a memoir of his adventures in the Niger valley — " In the land of the Dju - Dju : travel experiences in the eastern watershed of the Niger " — in 1923 , but it did not achieve the popularity of his previous work . Book reception . 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 . His 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 . His vivid descriptions brought to life the images Germans had seen on postcards ( such as the one to left ) , newspapers , and in school books . Furthermore , he had defended Germany ' s " place in the sun " when others had failed to do so . His book was translated into English , Finnish , Swedish and eventually French . ( See below . ) In a speech at the Berlin Geographical Society in 1919 , Detzner claimed that the natives of New Guinea had opposed Australian domination and resisted a military recruitment that amounted to slavery , that even the English plantation holders wished to remain independent of Australia , and that the natives were collecting money to build a war memorial for the Germans . The report on 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 . An angry letter to the editor from another Australian source , who claimed to have been in service in Morobe from 1914 – 1915 , received little attention . In the scientific world , several of his descriptive passages generated excitement and curiosity . In early 1914 , he had been surveying a portion of the international boundary in the Upper Waria River between the German and British protectorates . By late September , he had passed into a different portion of the highlands , where the clay - slate mountains changed into limestone highlands . In this geologic transition , he said , he also found a change in the ethnographic character of the population , whom he described as a " new " people . They were stocky , powerfully built , and long – limbed ; they wore their hair in knots on the centre of their heads , which were otherwise shaven , and painted yellow and black lines across their chests . They also wore grass skirts , so he called them " the skirted ones " . They used bows and arrows , slings and stone axes . As he pushed west to Mount Joseph , Detzner claimed , he had found the southern hills of the central watershed cut by numerous rivers flowing north to south . He had surmised that there were no insurmountable obstacles between him and the Sepik river . In 1917 , he had travelled through the Ramu valley into the Bismarck range , northwest of the Kratke Mountains , and had continued on that route for . He also described the presence of an indigenous variation of German , called " Unserdeutsch " ( our German ) , in several Guinean dialects . Controversy . In 1919 , after an account of Detzner ' s speech in Berlin to the Geographical Society was published in Australia , an angry Australian wrote anonymously to the editor of " The Argus " , a Melbourne newspaper , and described what he claimed were Detzner ' s lies . " There was no mystery about the disappearance of Captain Detzner and his party " , he claimed . The writer attributed Detzner ' s success at staying ahead of the Australians to the perfidy of the German missionaries , who had agreed to remain neutral and in return for such agreement were allowed to continue their mission work . 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 , 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 . The writer dismissed Detzner ' s claims about Australian recruitment of the natives as " in keeping with his dozens of other lying statements in all cases endeavoring to belittle Englishmen or British officers , in every case pure fabrications and typical scurrilous Hun lies " . While such criticism of Detzner ' s adventures might have been dismissed as post - bellum bellicosity , in 1929 , Detzner ' s assertions came under more serious assault . Two of the German missionaries in the Finschhafen District , Christian Keyser ( also spelled Kayser or Keysser ) and Otto Thiele , claimed 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 : Detzner had appropriated his own scientific observations . Keyser ' s claims carried some weight . He had published a dictionary of the Kâte language , and was a reliable expert on Guinean dialects , and the German - based creole languages that had arisen in New Guinea ; he was also a " bona fide " explorer and adventurer , having lived from 1899 to 1920 among the mountain peoples of the island . In 1913 , Keyser climbed the Saruwaged Massif ; over the course of his 21 years in New Guinea , he had identified hundreds of new plant and animal species , and had maintained a regular correspondence with the German Geographical Society in Berlin . Ernst Mayr , a rising star in ornithology , had heard about Detzner from Australians on a research trip to New Guinea . In Germany , during a meeting with Keyser , they discussed Detzner ' s claims , and Mayr lost no time in broadcasting the discrepancy to his scientific contacts in Europe and the United States . More problematically , Detzner had no documentation of his findings . As he explained in his many speeches , although he had kept notebooks with drawings of plants , animals , maps , and people , and journals recounting his day – to – day experiences , some of his notebooks and journals had been destroyed by the Australians as they over – ran his hiding places ; others , which he had buried to keep them from being destroyed , had rotted beyond repair in the jungle humidity . He implied that what remained of his notes had been confiscated when he surrendered . Detzner ' s narrative also was rife with contradictions and omissions : 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 . He also stated that the highest point in the range was , a miscalculation , which , for a mapmaker and a surveyor , needed to be explained . These specific ambiguities , contradictions , and errors were explainable . In 1915 , he had lost his surveying instruments while eluding an Australian patrol , which explained why many of his assertions were vague and inconclusive , and his calculations inaccurate . There was , furthermore , some independent verification that this was indeed true . The Australians had found a box of Detzner ' s equipment in the location where the missionary Johann Flierl ' s oldest son , Wilhelm , had kept ( or stored ) his small canoe . Although Wilhelm denied helping Detzner and his men , the Australians arrested and incarcerated him . This event coincided with one of Detzner ' s narrow escapes from Australian patrols in 1915 and was inadvertently corroborated in 1919 by the angry letter to " The Argus ' s " editor . Some of Detzner ' s assertions could be sustained through observable physical evidence : he had reportedly wasted to a mere while roaming in the bush , which should not have happened , some supporters claimed , if he had indeed been under the protection of Keyser and Thiele , but this weight loss could also have been due to his debilitating illness in 1917 . Despite his explanations , the missionaries Thiele and Keyser , whose own autobiography appeared in 1929 , and the widely respected Mayr , who by this time had become the leader of the Whitney South Seas Expedition s , continued to challenge the bulk of Detzner ' s scientific " discoveries " . Detzner ' s position became increasingly untenable . In 1932 , he admitted that he had mixed fact and fiction in his book , explaining that he had never intended it to be taken as " science " , but rather at its face - value , as the story of his adventurous years in the jungles of New Guinea . The following year , Detzner resigned from the prestigious Geographical Society of Berlin . I wish to state that my book , " Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen " , contains a number of misrepresentations regarding my journeys in New Guinea . The book in question is a scientific report in part only ; it is primarily a fictional account of my experiences in New Guinea and owes its origin to the unusual circumstances prevailing in Germany at the time of my return . Some of the journeys I had actually undertaken are not described at all ; on the other hand it contains passages that do not correspond with the facts . After this , he withdrew entirely from public life , although he retained his position in the colonial archive . He lived in Schmargendorf , Berlin , on " Auguste - Viktoria - Straße " , and later became the director of the Carl - Pfeffer Verlag , a publishing house in Heidelberg . He died there in 1970 , at the age of 88 . Legacy . The ambiguous wording of Detzner ' s resignation from the Geographical Society of Berlin — the use of such phrases as " contains misrepresentations " , " scientific report in part only " , " primarily fictional " , " unusual circumstances in Germany " , and so on — misled later scholars , many of whom remained unaware of the controversy surrounding his book . Consequently , his work continued to inform the geographical , linguistic , and anthropological investigations of New Guinean culture and geography well into the 1950s and 1960s , much to the dismay of Ernst Mayr , who had been instrumental in discrediting Detzner in the 1920s . Since the mid – 1970s , references to " Four Years Among the Cannibals " have continued to appear in studies on New Guinea . In the 1990s , Detzner ' s work received some rehabilitation from ethnographer Terence Hays , who placed Detzner ' s work in its contemporary context : " Four Years Among the Cannibals " , he wrote , " paved the way for me [ to become an ethnographer ] by creating romanticized images that served as a backdrop for more serious readings " . Since then , geographer Robert Linke has raised some important questions : " Why did Detzner resort to lies to embellish his wonderful story ? The unadorned truth would have been enough to establish him as one of the great figures in New Guinea history . " Detzner had remained at large for four years , as a fugitive in enemy - held territory : surely , Linke concluded , this was an exceptional feat . No doubt the Australians could have made a more broadly organized attempt to capture him , and probably would have succeeded , but they did not make the effort ; they preferred instead the more convenient " shoot - at - sight " method . " It is impossible " , Linke wrote , " not to admire his [ Detzner ' s ] sheer " elan " , his courage and tenacity . " In 2008 , Detzner ' s book was retranslated , reprinted , and marketed as a modern translation of a rare and valuable book about the exploration of the Guinean interior during World War I .