German troops in New Guinea surrender

On 21 September 1914 at Herbertshöhe, today’s Kokopo on the island of New Britain, the last armed units of German New Guinea laid down their arms. They surrendered to the Australian expeditionary force of Colonel William Holmes. This was the military end of a campaign whose outcome had been sealed four days earlier by Governor Eduard Haber’s acceptance of the terms of capitulation.

The ceremony at Herbertshöhe

The terms of 17 September provided that the German and Melanesian units would lay down their arms at Herbertshöhe on 21 September at ten in the morning, with military honours. And so it happened. The rest of the colony’s forces, which had earlier made a stand near Toma, were brought in by their commander, Captain Carl von Klewitz, a cavalry officer. According to various accounts about 40 Germans and about 110 Melanesian police surrendered. The German officers were taken prisoner and their men disarmed.

On New Britain the war was over, but the colony was vast, and the Australians still had to occupy its remaining parts. On 24 September they landed at Madang on New Guinea, and over the following weeks they occupied New Ireland, Nauru, the Admiralty Islands and the northern Solomon Islands. In most places they met no resistance.

The officer who did not surrender

One man, however, did not submit to the capitulation. When war broke out, the German surveyor and officer Hermann Detzner was deep in the interior of New Guinea, surveying the course of the border with neighbouring Papua, administered by Australia, on the instructions of the Reich Colonial Office. He had no intention of laying down his arms. With a group of about twenty Melanesian police he roamed the unexplored mountains and valleys of the island’s interior, evading Australian patrols for the whole war.

Detzner came out of the jungle only when he learnt of the armistice. In full uniform he surrendered at Finschhafen in January 1919. After returning to Germany he described his adventures in the book “Vier Jahre unter Kannibalen” (“Four Years among Cannibals”), which became a bestseller in 1921. Years later he himself admitted that he had mixed genuine observations with fiction in it.