Hermann Philipp Detzner (16 October 1882 – 1 December 1970) was a German engineer and surveyor, who served as an officer in the German colonial security force (Schutztruppe) in Kamerun (Cameroon) and German New Guinea. He gained fame for evading capture after Australian troops invaded German New Guinea at the start of World War I.
In early 1914, the German government sent Detzner to explore and chart central Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, the imperial protectorate on the island of New Guinea. When World War I broke out in Europe, he was far from civilisation 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 New Guinea's hinterland formerly unseen by Europeans.
After finding out that the war had ended, Detzner surrendered in full dress uniform, flying the Imperial flag, to Australian forces in January 1919. He 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 sold well 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, Johann Philipp Detzner (1846–1907) and his wife, Wilhelmine Katharina Faber, in Speyer, in the Bavarian Palatinate, a cultural, economic, and historical city on the Rhine River. His 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. His large family included nine children. 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. During World War I, military authorities transferred his commission to the 1st Bavarian Pioneer Battalion.
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 hinterland 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 unexplored inland regions.
Detzner's mission was also to be the first serious attempt to explore the hinterland and to evaluate and describe its resources. The boundary between Papua and Kaiser Wilhelmsland had been broadly established by a joint British-German expedition in 1909, but the terrain had not been mapped and the German colonial administration maintained that the boundary was imprecise. From the German perspective, an accurately defined boundary was essential to monitor and control the activities of Papuan gold prospectors near the border with German territory. 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.