Disloyalty at Sword-point - COnnecting REpositories · DISLOYALTY AT SWORD POINT 204 art and...

Christine Winter, “Disloyalty at Sword Point: an Ongoing Conversation about Wartime New Guinea,” Journal of Historical Biography 16 (Autumn

2014): 202-222, www.ufv.ca/jhb. © Journal of Historical Biography 2014.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

Disloyalty at Sword-point:

an Ongoing Conversation about

Wartime New Guinea,

1939-1945*

Christine Winter

Righteo, talk to me

Hank Nelson’s regular greeting when he saw me

SPIRING ACADEMICS MUST UNDERGO a process that has been de-

scribed as “ordeal by thesis.”1 This rite of passage—a course of

study extending over several years and culminating in the successful

examination of a dissertation—results in a “union card” or a “meal

ticket.” Without a doctoral degree, one stands little chance in the

academic job market. Dissertations are also important for the persons

supervising them. The successful completion of students’ disserta-

tions is a measurable index of an academic’s standing and compe-

tence, and some biographies of historians contain listings of the per-

son’s graduate students, like so many notches on a belt.2 The “ordeal

by thesis” can be a stressful time for the student—not simply submit-

ting the dissertation, but hoping that it will pass muster, and if so

whether it will actually result in a job. The supervisor can find it

A

http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

203 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY

stressful, too, sometimes being driven to distraction by a student’s

tardiness or obtuseness. Such are the vagaries of the student-

supervisor relationship that its aftermath can range from permanent

estrangement to enduring friendship.

This process of making a new academic requires a shift in

power relationships. A student is transformed into a colleague, and a

supervisor becomes an ex-supervisor. German academic Ulrike

Wagner-Rau, in her analysis of the very hierarchical system of Ger-

man supervisions, came to the conclusion that the process was both

difficult and gender specific.3 She claims that supervisions by male

professors have equal success rates for male and female students in

the first part of the supervision, but differ dramatically after that: su-

pervisors, called doctor fathers in the German system, often had dif-

ficulty letting their “daughters” grow up, to be and think independ-

ently. Her analysis reverberated through the experiences of my peers

in Germany, and through my own. Having relocated from Germany

to Australia, it was thus with some trepidation that in 2000 I went to

my first meeting with my new PhD supervisor at the Australian Na-

tional University. His opening words were: “Use me as long as I am

useful to you. You are most welcome to drop me any time.” This atti-

tude was so different than the rigid formality of the system I had

known in German. The academic who gave me permission to grow

up and leave him behind anytime was Pacific historian Hank Nelson

(1937-2012).4 In this article I will not explore the ins and outs of his

supervision, my progress towards a thesis and a book, or our discus-

sions over four years. Rather, I will examine a historical theme where

our work overlapped, and ask: how does this slow transformation

from student to junior academic to colleague work? Must a student

kill the father? Are elements of ownership on both sides of the super-

vision process unavoidable? Or can a long and respectful dialogue

evolve out of the intensity of teaching and learning?

When I moved to Australia in 1994 for reasons of love, I had

to leave behind an early career in mission history and ecumenical

theology. Working as research assistant at the Centre for Cross Cul-

tural Research (ANU) on Pacific voyages and Australian Aboriginal

DISLOYALTY AT SWORD POINT 204

art and culture, I shifted to history. At the same time, my head

shifted. I left Europe and Germany as the centre of my life and

thought, and entered the Southern world of an Australia linked with

the Pacific. Hank Nelson was the perfect supervisor for my PhD—

research into the transnational political history of a German Mission

in New Guinea. A country boy from Boort in Victoria, he became a

school teacher and went to Papua New Guinea to teach. This move

transformed him: he began an academic career, taught at the newly

founded University of Papua New Guinea, and completed a PhD. It

shaped him into a leading historian of Australian colonialism and of

Papua New Guinea. It shifted his head in many ways. Hank told me

that when he first entered a classroom in New Guinea a thought came

up from deep inside him: “Oh god, they are all very dark.” By the

end of the lesson, Hank realized that everybody was different. One

student was eager and bright, another rather slow on the uptake. They

were just all students. Hank retained from that point on a critique of

racial thought and practice in his histories. This critique expressed

itself in a portrayal of people as people. Humanness, not structural

analysis, was his forte.5 Hank had gone through a process similar to

what I was going through. He understood what it meant to have your

point of view shifted, and to face the challenge to then incorporate

the resulting new vision and outlook into a narrative.

The crafted narrative was for him the endpoint of a historical

analysis.On another level, Hank Nelson was very unsuitable as a su-

pervisor for my PhD research. He was not interested in religious in-

stitutions, nor their traditions. The finer points of doctrinal differ-

ences and their effect on missionary relationships eluded him. In ad-

dition, he had no knowledge of German, the language of most of my

research subjects and historical sources. The Lutheran missionaries I

analysed, even the ones born in Australia, corresponded in German,

the language of the cradle of the Reformation. The German language

was their cultural, emotional and religious home. Despite this double

disadvantage, Nelson had written one of the most insightful articles

on the complex situation of some of these missionaries during the

Second World War. When I arrived in Australia, Nelson’s article


“Loyalties at Sword-Point: The Lutheran Missionaries in Wartime

New Guinea, 1939-1945” was my first guide through the collections

in the National Archives of Australia. Going beyond historical ac-

countability, Hank Nelson had crafted footnotes with an eye to future

researchers, setting out which files contained additional material. He

was keen for others to join and contribute to the argument. At its

heart was a refutation of allegations that Lutheran missionaries and

New Guineans connected to them had been disloyal to Australia.6

Disloyalty

Australian government officials, journalists and historians have

tended to discuss the role of Australian Lutherans during both world

wars within the concept of “loyalty.” The question of whether Lu-

therans were pro-German during World War I, or patriotic and loyal

Australians, became more complex in World War II.7 The central lo-

cation of inquiry moved from mainland Australia to the margins,

New Guinea, and the problem of Lutheran loyalty merged with a re-

lated debate about the loyalty of Australia’s colonial subjects.

Three and a half decades after the Japanese occupation of New

Guinea, Nelson tried to disentangle myth from reality in “Loyalties at

Sword-Point.”8 He gave a detailed account of Australian war hysteria

and its expression in newspaper reporting, and drew conclusions that

exonerated three German Lutheran missionaries, Stephan Lehner, Jo-

hann Decker and Adolf Wagner, who stayed behind on the Huon

Peninsula during the Japanese occupation. Nelson’s answer to the ac-

cusations of journalist George Johnston and others was that the Lu-

therans were not disloyal to Australia but apolitical and loyal to their

religious mission.

While I was researching a political history of the Lutheran

Neuendettelsauer Mission in the Lutheran Archives in Adelaide, I

was shown the first and second edition of George Johnston’s book

New Guinea Diary. In January 1942, Johnston, mostly known today

for his semi-autobiographical novel My Brother Jack, went to New

Guinea as a war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, The


Age, and the London Daily Telegraph. In 1943, Angus and Robertson

published his observations of war in New Guinea as the New Guinea

Diary, in which he wrote:

The most interesting feature of this advance [of the Japanese

up the Markham Valley from Lae] is that certain Lutheran

missionaries—of Australian, British or American national-

ity—have been acting as guides for the Japs, and our guerril-

las over the other side are very anxious to meet some of the

white traitors.9

Mixing elements of truth with rumour and fantasy, Johnston went on

to claim that Lutherans were the leaders of “a little network of Nazi

espionage and fifth-column activities” who were printing swastika

flags and armbands, keeping airstrips ready in case of an Axis inva-

sion, and sending information to the Japanese in the Caroline Islands

via a secret transmitter. Johnston added accusations about “native

traitors” to the ones he had made about “white Lutheran traitors”:

There are stories of native children in the area round

Finschhafen being taught the Nazi salute and the Horst Wes-

sel song. Some of these natives, no doubt, are now acting as

guides for the Japs.10

Immediately, the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Australia

(UELCA) took legal action to remove this passage from the book.

The second edition was printed without the passage on Lutheran trai-

tors guiding the Japanese. Despite this, such accusations persisted

and found their way into numerous publications. In 1984, the Na-

tional Library sponsored the publication of Johnston’s original diary,

including the section on Lutherans and National Socialism, without

explanation or critical footnote.11

Hank Nelson’s intervention had been ignored, as had the court

injunction the Australian Lutheran church initiated. When we talked

about the paragraph and the missing critical footnote in the newly

published New Guinea Diary, Hank shrugged his shoulders. Winning

or being right was not that important to him. Not everybody will take


notice, or listen, but there were ways to expand one’s potential read-

ership. In this vein, Hank advised me to send out any new article of

mine to everybody who might be interested. Not many people will

pick up a journal and read it, he said philosophically.

My research on the Lutherans took a different angle from Nel-

son’s. I started with the transformation of ex-German New Guinea

into a Mandate of the League of Nations in 1921, while Nelson had

concentrated on the war years, particularly 1942 to 1945. I analyzed

the mission as a transnational institution; Nelson focused on the three

remaining German missionaries in Japanese-occupied New Guinea.

For Nelson’s 1978 exploration, the history of the three missionaries

seemed ideally suited to be a means to revisit and counter allegations

of disloyalty. Both Stephan Lehner and Johann Decker had resided in

New Guinea for four decades. (Lehner was in his mid-sixties, and

Decker in his early seventies.) Their commitment to their mission

flock seemed beyond doubt. The young missionary Adolf Wagner

was shot by Japanese soldiers when he attempted to flee a group of

New Guinean villagers who had been forced to undertake work for

the Japanese. When Australian newspapers were accusing Wagner of

treason, he was already dead.

The two problems Hank Nelson faced, however, were how

Wagner managed to remain in New Guinea when his fellow mission-

aries were interned, and why. Before the capital of New Guinea, Ra-

baul, fell in 1942,12

Australian officials retreated, and (white) civil-

ians (mostly women and children) were evacuated. Lehner and

Decker were permitted to stay, but Wagner had been sent a letter to

leave his mission station and report to an evacuation point on the

coast. Instead of following these orders, Wagner went into hiding.

There was no denying that Wagner understood the letter. Since the

first rounds of internment of German Lutheran missionaries in Sep-

tember 1939, those who remained had a suitcase packed at all times,

aware that internment might eventuate at any time.

Hank Nelson approached some of the Australian Lutheran

missionaries who had remained on the Huon Peninsula under Japa-

nese occupation as coast watchers and who had had contact with


Adolf Wagner, and asked them for their memories and observa-

tions.13

With no answers forthcoming, Nelson set out a narrative

based on the archival documents available and sent the draft article to

the former colleagues of Wagner. He received several long replies

that corrected some of his assertions.14

The letters to Nelson set out

the following narrative: informed by New Guineans that a letter was

on the way, Wagner had gone into hiding. Nelson was told that, as it

never reached him, Wagner had not been disobedient or disloyal.

Wagner had also shared information with coast watchers, actively

aiding the Allies. Finally he died as a result of his interventions on

behalf of New Guineans. He had attempted to ameliorate Japanese

demands for food and labour the villagers were struggling to meet.

Exonerating Wagner mattered to the men who had lost a number of

their fellow coast watchers, and who counted Wagner as one of their

own. Their sincerity convinced Hank Nelson, and he incorporated

their tales into his narration. In addition, the argument about Wagner

not disobeying orders but avoiding formal disobedience exhibited a

larrikinism that was dear to Hank. The men had every right to speak

up for their dead mate, and Hank gave them the space to do so.

Exonerating Lehner, Decker and Wagner had a bigger pur-

pose: if the argument about Lutheran “treason” could be revealed as

weak, or even wrong, and emotions invested in this story turned from

hostility to empathy, then an opening was made to further question

the argument and emotions entangled with it, namely that of the dis-

loyalty of New Guineans.

Loyalties

By the time I went down to Adelaide in 2000 to interview Hank Nel-

son’s informants, Hank was already announcing that he had been

misled. I was investigating the founding by mission staff of the

NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) stronghold in

Finschhafen in 1936. The conclusions of my research stripped away a

central assumption of Nelson’s, namely that these three missionaries

were representative of all German Lutherans, and that the mission


had been apolitical and only interested in the spreading of the gos-

pel.15

Internment of members of the mission, Nelson had asserted in

1978, was linked to Australian war hysteria, and had no justification

in the behaviour of the missionaries. “I was wrong,” he said, before I

embarked down South to Adelaide to meet these old men. Hank de-

clared: “My lack of knowledge of German is to blame.”

The old men in the Lutheran retirement home made me re-

evaluate Hank Nelson’s somewhat disingenuous assessment that lan-

guage problems were to blame. “Another researcher from Canberra,”

they exclaimed. “The last one we gave some good stories.” And they

laughed. As I was researching the politics of the mission, especially

in regard to National Socialism, the men gave me good stories, too.

Adolf Wagner had avoided internment because he was an anti-Nazi,

afraid to share captivity with pro-Nazi missionary colleagues. Eager

to deflect attention and clear the men, one informant offered me a

name: a female missionary was described to me as a top Nazi. Fur-

ther, she had refused a marriage proposal by my informant. And his

disappointment at her rejection was clear as he cast aspersion on her

morality, describing her wearing thin cotton skirts, which showed her

legs against the light. Dignity returned when our meeting ended, and

a retired missionary took me to the closed section to meet his wife.

He introduced me to a frail woman who gave no sign of recognition,

encouraged me to shake her hand and talk to her. On leaving the re-

tirement home he gave me his memoir, Missionary Turns Spy, dedi-

cated to “the honoured memory of my mates who didn’t survive.”16

I

understood then that he and his colleagues were not misleading Hank

and me. They were protecting Adolf Wagner’s honour, defamed by

newspapers during World War II and later Australian war historians.

Wagner’s diary, however, the typescript of which I read later in the

Lutheran mission archives in Germany, revealed a far more complex

and problematic positioning and sense of loyalty than the men in

Adelaide were letting on or perhaps even understood.17

As I worked through my material, a more complex Stefan

Lehner also emerged. The superintendent of the mission announced

to the captain of a visiting German cruiser in Rabaul in 1933 that


Finschhafen, the centre of the mission, was still the most German

place in New Guinea. At the same time, he, a German patriot, op-

posed a return of the mission field to sole German control, and sup-

ported the continuation of collaboration of American, German and

Australian mission staff. “The thought that in the future the unified

organisation will be separated ... is terrible for me.” I concluded that

both sets of emotionally loaded identities, namely exclusive German

nationalism and inclusive transnational Lutheranism, were contradic-

tory, and led to contradictory desires. Lehner had compartmentalised

his patriotism from his religious core, Lutheranism, and neither iden-

tity challenged or transformed the other.18

In reviewing Stephan Lehner’s attitudes toward the war, I

came to re-evaluate Nelson’s proposition that Lehner prioritized his

religious duties and remained apolitical. On the contrary, I argue he

became even more fiercely political. In unsent letters to his Ameri-

can-born wife Sophie, who had been evacuated to Australia, he la-

mented the bombing of villages by Allied planes. After the return of

Australian troops and the defeat of the Japanese, Lehner was brought

to the mainland. His letters were handed over to mainland authorities.

The feindliche Schurken (“hostile scoundrels”), the Australian secu-

rity service interpreters read, did not even respect the big white cross

the villagers had painted on the roof of their church where they had

sought shelter. Burying four New Guinean victims of Allied bomb-

ing, Gejammei-I, his wife, and two other members of the congrega-

tion in Lae, Lehner wrote, “The dropping of bombs seems sometimes

to be a sport or else senseless bombing of native villages would

surely be incomprehensible.”19

The fact that Lehner had also handed

over a map to Japanese soldiers sealed his fate. It was decided that he

had been disloyal to Australian interests, and he was denied re-entry

to New Guinea. The censors downplayed Lehner’s passionate rejec-

tion of a Japanese take-over. Japanese officers had come to his mis-

sion one day, enquiring about maps. As they were armed, he decided

refusal would be unwise. The officers then sat on his veranda bond-

ing with him by singing the Horst Wessel song. In his retelling of the

visit, Lehner concluded that the yellow race was not capable of colo-


nisation. For Lehner the missionary, the war was a disaster for his

flock and for his prospects of spreading the gospel: “One would only

like to see peace, for the sake of the natives, for the sake of our peo-

ple and of all the oppressed.”20

New Guineans needed guidance, not

destruction: “without resolute leadership the native is lost.”21

He sup-

ported no side, opposed all elements of war, and longed for peace.

His vision for the villagers, driven by religious motives, nevertheless

assumed that mission work and transformation occurred within a

frame of colonialism, best undertaken by whites, be they German,

American, British or Australian. Nelson was right: labelling Lehner

as disloyal to Australia did no justice to the man.

Among the post-war appeals on Lehner’s behalf is a letter by

the Australian anthropologist H. Ian Hogbin to the Department of Ex-

ternal Affairs, praising Lehner’s knowledge of native customs and

languages. Hogbin referred to his own knowledge of New Guinea

during war service with the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs

(DORCA), an unconventional think tank within the Australian

Army.22

Invoking the discourse of double disloyalty (a subversive

missionary will make the natives subversive) he exonerated Lehner:

“During the war years I was closely associated with a large number

of his ex-pupils and teachers, and, despite careful investigation on my

part, failed to discover the slightest evidence that they had ever been

indoctrinated with enemy propaganda.”23

Sadly, Stephan Lehner died

on 25 May 1947 in Brisbane, before his case could be reconsidered.24

Loyalties, disloyalties and colonialism

Hank Nelson maintained that he had misrepresented the missionaries.

I defended his portrayal of Lehner, Decker and Wagner. In 2009,

Nelson summarized his tale in a discussion paper, combining the

loyal and the disloyal in one story:

At the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939 some Lutheran

missionaries known or suspected of being members of the

Nazis [sic] party were interned in Australia, more followed,

but by December 1941 there were still nominally Axis and


Allied Lutheran missionaries in New Guinea. The few Ger-

man Lutherans who were there when the Japanese arrived,

may have aspired to be neutral, but in practice were more

inclined to assist the Allies than the Japanese.25

I read this with exasperation. I had earlier put it to Hank that while

his answers were right, he had asked the wrong questions. I argued

that exoneration from disloyalty implicitly validated the concept of

loyalty. Hank tolerated my critique, and my right to set it out. I had

argued this in my thesis, and Hank had refrained from comment on

this section. I had asserted that

the term “loyalty”, and the anxiety about (German) Lutheran

traitors are most dominant during the period of World War

II, [and] they accompany the period of Australian Admini-

stration like a leitmotiv from the beginning, when Australia

took over the German colony. Looking after One’s Own fo-

cuses on the concept of loyalty as an affirmation of colonial

rule by Australia, beginning with an insistence of loyalty as-

serted by Australian officials in 1921 soon after the estab-

lishment of New Guinea as a C Mandate of the League of

Nations.26

To underline this point I continued with a critique of Australians de-

manding loyalty shortly after New Guinea was “liberated.” In 1947

Kenneth E. (Mick) Read, an Australian anthropologist and during the

war a member of the DORCA, who had visited the Markham Valley

shortly after the Australian army regained control, set out his obser-

vations on the apolitical religious endeavours of Lutheran missionar-

ies, which contained one of the central arguments developed by Nel-

son three decades later. Sent by DORCA to investigate the effect of

the war on indigenous people, Read reported that a number of Ger-

man Lutheran missionaries “who were suspected of being actively

engaged in work for the Nazi Party were interned in Australia,”27

and

that administrative officials were “concerned with the possibility that

anti-British propaganda had been disseminated.” While Read con-

ceded that it seemed “fairly certain that in some areas attempts were

made,” he dismissed the charge for the area he had visited: “In Naga-


rawapum, however, I was unable to elicit any information which

pointed to subversive activities.”28

Thus, while Read stayed within the parameters that Europeans

in the Mandated Territory were to be at least politically neutral, he

formulated a far more radical critique of the demand for loyalty to

Australian rule in regard to New Guineans: “Even granted a maxi-

mum humanitarianism in those who govern, it is still conceivable that

... to the governed ... self-determination should seem preferable to

outside interference.”29

Discussing the dilemmas of “loyalty” the Ngarawapum, a

group inhabiting five villages in the Markham Valley, faced during

the Japanese occupation, Read dismissed the concept as inappropri-

ate:

If we use this term [loyalty] as a basis for moral judgment

we imply that the natives’ political aims and experience are

the same as ours—and there is no more baseless assumption.

Value judgments of this kind, nevertheless, are frequently

made by the press and the European population. “The Brit-

ish are humanitarian,” they reason. “They have the welfare

of the natives at heart and have set up an Administration

which protects their interest and gives them the benefits of

British law. British law and British rule are undoubtedly the

best; it would be impossible for us to live under any other

system. It is only right that the natives should be grateful to

us and willing to support our Administration in favour of

any other.” This means that we are loyal to our form of gov-

ernment because we consider it best, and that ipso facto the

native peoples on whom we have forced it should be loyal to

it also.30

The demand that New Guineans be loyal to Australia was in Read’s

view a longing for the implementation of “our form of government”

as well as a justification for colonial rule. In the light of Read’s cri-

tique, today’s histories, forty years after the independence of Papua

New Guinea, show a remarkable resilience of narratives about Nation

and Empire in Australia.


Building on Read’s insights, I explicitly criticized a central

plank of Nelson’s argument:

Nelson not only put a problematic Lutheran (theological)

concept at the centre of his argument, but also indirectly

gave validity to the Australian concept of loyalty.31 Why, I

wonder, should German Nationals during World War II in

the Mandated Territory of New Guinea occupied by Japa-

nese troops have remained loyal to Australia, or politically

neutral?32

In two articles on the first visit of the German navy to New Guinea

after World War I, I expanded on this analysis. Juxtaposing demands

by Germans for a return of their former colony with Australian de-

mands for “loyalty” as two colonial discourses, I argued that these

political tensions, legacies of World War I, were openly discussed on

the Australian mainland and in Germany during the much-publicized

good-will tour of a German cruiser in 1933, but suppressed in New

Guinea.33

In the colonial space shared celebrations of Australians and

Germans prevailed. I wrote:

In New Guinea the brotherhood of whiteness still overrode

the political concerns, which were voiced strongly in publi-

cations of mainland Australia in the wake of the German

elections in March and the boycott of Jewish retailers in

April.34

Hank Nelson quietly picked out the phrase “brotherhood of white-

ness,” and put it to good use in a submission by the Montevideo

Maru Memorial Committee that urged government to bring closure to

the families of the civilians who died when the Japanese ship sank

after Allied attacks. In a section on the pre-war history of colonial

New Guinea the submission stated that:

Under Australian Administration, Rabaul continued to pros-

per as a vibrant regional headquarters and the largest town

in New Guinea. It boasted every conceivable civil and social

amenity during a period Christine Winter has termed “a

brotherhood of whiteness.”35


I argued that tensions brought about by the rise of Nazi Germany

were the defining feature of the relationship of Germans and Austra-

lians in New Guinea by 1935. A colonial sense of shared whiteness

had merely delayed a rift that already characterized German-

Australian relations on the mainland from early 1933.

Nelson broadened the term “brotherhood of whiteness” from a

brief moment of fraternity beyond politics into a characteristic of the

whole interwar period.

I have never understood why Hank Nelson persisted in stating

that the German Lutherans were either neutral or pro-Allied in their

loyalties. For New Guineans he made no such demand. I went to

Hank to discuss my research for the Official History of Australian

Peacekeeping and Post-Cold War Operations. In one village in Bou-

gainville during the civil war two young men had taken the opposite

side to the rest of the village. Wise move, Hank said. Depending who

visits the village the two will either be hidden away or trotted out.

Hank continued: during World War II an Allied plane went down.

Two airmen survived and were picked up by locals. They were sepa-

rated. One was handed over to the Japanese; the other was nurtured

back to health and smuggled out to the Allies. I so wish, Hank said,

that I could have listened to the discussions that preceded this deci-

sion.

A tale of brothers

Hank Nelson, the storyteller from country Victoria, evoked people,

dialogue and suspense, just by sitting and telling a tale. For one story

Hank told in his office, he stood up. “I was never promoted during

national service and am proud of it,” Hank said. He moved a step

away from his office chair and rearranged his feet. In front of me

stood a lanky gangly figure, standing to attention with slightly droop-

ing shoulders and an air of defiance that was just enough to be no-

ticed and not enough to attract a reprimand. One evening Private Nel-

son and a friend left Puckapunyal Army Base after dark without per-


mission, retrieved a car strategically parked nearby, and went out to

have a night on the town. Caught on return, Hank’s friend alone got

punished. The reasoning was that he held a superior rank and there-

fore had led the man of lower rank astray. With a mischievous grin

Hank concluded, “and it had all been my idea.”

Hank was fascinated by the story of the two Wagner brothers

Adolf and Emil, another story he wanted me to tell. Both were born

in New Guinea. One grew up in Australia, the other in Germany.

Both came back to New Guinea, then the war started. Hank had a soft

spot for the older one, Emil. In early 1942, Johann Emil Wagner,

thirty-one years old, was evacuated from New Guinea, brought to

Loveday internment camp in South Australia and finally allowed to

appeal against his internment. With a brother on the run, suspected of

treason and guiding the Japanese up the Markham Valley, and with

just under half of his missionary colleagues exposed for joining the

NSDAP and organizing a Nazi stronghold in New Guinea, Emil’s

statement to the South Australian National Advisory Committee

about his loyalties was not bad at all. When his missionary parents

got ready to send their three children via Australia to Germany to

continue their education, Emil begged to remain in Australia. He had

wanted only some basic schooling and then to work on a farm, be-

cause he was a slow learner. That is how it came to be that he stayed,

and got naturalized: Australia “is the only country I’ve known” and

“I have always been loyal in word and actions.”36

During his intern-

ment, Emil wrote letters to his in-laws and his wife, which he knew

would be read by the censor. I find some formulae excessive, such as

his claim that he loved “our king and country as much as I’ve loved

you,” but in early 1942 the tone was probably just right. Emil was

released shortly after his interrogation in November 1942, after

which he lobbied on behalf of his brother, against whom there was an

order to shoot on sight.

There is always a story yet to be told, even when the events

have been narrated over and over by those who lived through them

and those who came after. The story of Adolf Wagner has been put

into print by the mission as a tale of service and martyrdom. Thilde


Wagner, Adolf’s widow, published a shortened version of his diary,

Es kommt die Nacht (The Night Cometh) which cites a verse from the

gospel of John and gives meaning to Adolf’s life in New Guinea dur-

ing World War II: “I must work the works of him that sent me, while

it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.” (John 9:4)37

The coast watchers—Australians who moved behind enemy

lines to observe and report—have told Adolf Wagner’s story in a

wider narrative of survival and death. (A.P.H. Freund, for example,

devotes a separate chapter to him.) “They watched and warned and

died that we might live,” reads the inscription on the Coastwatcher

Memorial at Madang.

Each narration carries meaning. Pondering what differentiated

a story from information or sensation, Walter Benjamin wrote that “a

story sinks into the life of the narrator to be transmitted to those who

listen as experience. A trace of the narrator sticks to it like the trace

of a potter’s hand to an earthen bowl.”38

I look at the story of Adolf Wagner in a slightly different way

than did Hank Nelson, and arrange the pieces and images in a slightly

different pattern. I, too, see men sitting together, exchanging food

and information. There is the Australian Lutheran pastor and mis-

sionary Harold Freund, next to “Mac” McColl, who had joined the

navy in order not to be placed under army authority. Nearby are

“Blue” Harris and Lloyd Pursehouse, both patrol officers in peace

time, the latter accompanied by his faithful dog. For a brief time they

are joined by Adolf Wagner, who is hiding with his pupils, continu-

ing the training of future mission teachers. But where Hank saw a

German undeterred by politics of national allegiance, assisting the

Allied coast watchers, I see Australian soldiers, under orders to shoot

Adolf Wagner, sharing food with him. Raiding supplies left behind at

the Finschhafen mission station supply house, Harris decided, so

Freund recalls, “that a fair share should be left for Rev Adolph Wag-

ner.”39

Especially close and supportive of Adolf Wagner was Lloyd

Pursehouse, who died a month after Adolf, in January 1944. His

widow burned her engagement letters, but kept his, and deposited


them at the National Library in Canberra, where I read them. He was

a taciturn man, but fearless, and he asked her about a change he had

noticed in her tone. Had she changed her mind? If so, would she let

him know? In mid-1943, he travelled on sick leave to Adelaide,

where they married. In the National Archives in Melbourne amongst

military cables from Townsville to Melbourne is a short report by

Pursehouse, given in transit. Wagner had given invaluable assistance

to the Allies, and the order to shoot him on sight should be revoked. I

was moved when I read the report about Pursehouse’s action. And

then a thought crept up from within a German upbringing where or-

ders are binding, obedience valued, and rules count. Why, I asked

myself, did nobody comment on Pursehouse’s disobedience. When

he reported on Wagner’s help, he admitted to having met him, and

not having shot him. Would this not be disloyal? What, I would like

to ask Hank, would the story be if it was not about Wagner’s loyalty,

but about Pursehouse’s?

Epilogue

When I walk along the corridors of the former Division of Pacific

and Asian History of the former Research School of Pacific and

Asian Studies in the Coombs Building at the Australian National

University, I slow at the corner where Hank Nelson’s office was. I

wish I could have a talk from time to time. After hostilities ceased,

New Guineans showed Allied troops Adolf Wagner’s grave. Buried

with his body, his diary was found. It is so sad, I would like to say to

Hank, that returning to the field the missionaries used Adolf Wag-

ner’s diary entries to identify and punish villagers who during Japa-

nese occupation had been disloyal to the Christian congregations.


* Acknowledgments: My first thanks are to Heinz Schuette, who over twenty years ago gave me a copy

of Hank Nelson’s article “Loyalties at Sword-Point: The Lutheran Missionaries in Wartime New Guinea, 1939-1945,” Australian Journal of Politics and History,

24:2 (1978), 199-217, and encouraged me to talk to its author. I would also like to thank colleagues who have commented on earlier versions of this chapter, in par-ticular Robert Cribb, Donald Denoon, Bill Gammage, Helga Griffin, Tanja Ham-

mel, David Horner, Ken Inglis, Brij Lal, John Moses, and Gabriele Richter. A special thank you is owed to Peter Hempenstall for his insights, comments and intellectual generosity. As always, Geoffrey Gray has been part of this conversa-

tion from the first tentative plans to the last written word. I use Hank Nelson’s first name when referring to direct interactions with me. Nelson adopted the name Hank when he entered university and left home, where he was known as Neil.

Notes 1 W.K. Hancock, “Ordeal by Thesis,” in Postgraduate Studies in the Humanities

in Australia: Three Essays, eds. W.K. Hancock, P.H. Partridge and R.W.V.

Elliott (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967). 2 John Herbert Roper, C. Vann Woodward: Southerner (Athens/London: Univer-

sity of Georgia Press, 1987), 309-13; David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An

Intellectual Biography (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2006),

281-82. 3 Ulrike Wagner-Rau, “Doktorväter und ihre Töchter,” Wege zum Menschen, 44

(1992), 474-84. 4 Hank Nelson’s greeting when he saw Geoffrey Gray and me was “Hello tu-

pela,” a Tok Pisin greeting, literally “two-fellows,” meaning “you two.” Geoff

had been a student of Hank’s at the University of Papua New Guinea. For an-

ecdotal stories about Hank Nelson, see Christine Winter and Gabriele Richter,

“Über Professor Hank Nelson: Erinnerungen; Remembering Hank Nelson,”

online Festschrift recording, ANU channel April 2013,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8VOlDoLQCQ. Other on-line tributes in-

clude Teresa Morris-Suzuki and Keiko Tamura, “Remembering Professor

Hank Nelson,” http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/news-events/video/remembering-

hank-nelson; Ken Inglis and Bill Gamage, “Sitting on a Tractor Reading a

Book,” Inside Story, February 28, 2012: http://inside.org.au/hank-nelson/; Ga-

van Daws, “Vale: Hank Nelson (1937-2012),” March 5, 2012

http://pacificinstitute.anu.edu.au/outrigger/2012/03/05/vale-hank-nelson-

1937-2012/. A lengthy obituary in print format is Ian Howie-Willis, “Hyland

Neil (Hank) Nelson (23 October 1937–17 February 2012,” Journal of Pacific

History, 47:2 (2012), 227-32. See also Bill Gammage, Brij V. Lal, Gavan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8VOlDoLQCQ

http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/news-events/video/remembering-hank-nelson

http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/news-events/video/remembering-hank-nelson

http://inside.org.au/hank-nelson/

http://pacificinstitute.anu.edu.au/outrigger/2012/03/05/vale-hank-nelson-1937-2012/

http://pacificinstitute.anu.edu.au/outrigger/2012/03/05/vale-hank-nelson-1937-2012/


Daws, eds., The Boy from Boort: Remembering Hank Nelson (Canberra: ANU

Press, 2014). 5 Hank thought that being criticised as a ‘poststructuralist’ was the biggest joke.

He declared himself with mischievous and self-deprecating pride a theory-free

zone. 6 Hank Nelson, “Loyalties at Sword-Point: The Lutheran Missionaries in War-

time New Guinea, 1939-1945,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 24:

2 (1978): 199-217. It is significant that Hank Nelson left the material related to

this article (drafts, interviews etc.) on open access in the National Library. In

the Hank Nelson Papers, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), MS

5388. 7 See Gerhard Fischer, Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront Experience

in Australia, 1914-1920 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1989);

John F. Williams, German Anzacs and the First World War (Sydney: Univer-

sity of New South Wales Press, 2003). 8 Nelson, “Loyalties at Sword-Point,” 199-217. 9 George Johnston, New Guinea Diary (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1943), 55.

See also Garry Kinnane, “Johnston, George Henry (1912–1970),” Australian

Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National

University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/johnston-george-henry-

10632/text18893, accessed online 21 April 2014. 10 Johnston, New Guinea Diary, 56. 11 George Johnston, War Diary, 1942 (Sydney: Collins, 1984), 35. 12 For Australians, the capture of Rabaul by the Japanese imperial forces is signif-

icant in a number of ways. Firstly it signified a take-over of Papua and New

Guinea by Japan, though both were never fully controlled in their entirety by

Japan. Secondly in the mind of a wider Australian public it foreshadowed a

possible attack and occupation of the Australian mainland. This fear, though

historically unrealized, permeated a wider Australian public at the time. Third-

ly, few of the captured European and Australian residents of Rabaul survived

the war. They were put on a Japanese ship for a transfer from New Guinea to

civilian internment camps in Japan. However, the Montivideo Mauru was at-

tacked by the Allies, and most people on board died. For details see Montevi-

deo Maru Memorial Committee, The Tragedy of the Montevideo Maru. Time

for Recognition, A Submission to the Commonwealth Government, November

2009. http://asopa.typepad.com/files/_submissionfinal.pdf 13 The classic account is Eric Feldt, The Coast Watchers (Melbourne: Oxford

University Press, 1946, and numerous subsequent editions). 14 Copies of the letters are in the Nelson Papers, NLA, MS 5388. 15 Christine Winter, “The Founding of the NSDAP Stronghold in Finschhafen,”

in National Socialism in Oceania: A Critical Evaluation of its Effect and Af-


termath, ed. Emily Turner-Graham and Christine Winter (Germanica Pacifica

series, 4. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2010), 31-47. 16 A.P.H. Freund, Missionary Turns Spy (Adelaide: Lutheran Publishing House,

1989). 17 The original diary is in the possession of the family. A slightly shortened type-

script is in the Mission Archive in Neuendettelsau. The published version

contains only selective passages. Thilde Wagner, Es kommt die Nacht…: aus

dem Tagebuch meines Mannes Missionar Adolf Wagner, Neuguinea, 1942-43

(Neuendettelsau: Freimund-Verlag, 1964). 18 Christine Winter, Looking After One’s Own: The Rise of Nationalism and the

Politics of the Neuendettelsauer Mission in Australia, New Guinea and Ger-

many (1921-1933) (Germanica Pacifica series, 9. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang

Verlag, 2012), 192. This is the published version of my dissertation. 19 30 September 1943, Memo Security Service, Brisbane, Subversive Activities:

Stephan Lehner, Hopoi, New Guinea, p. 4, translation of 9 December 1942

Stephan Lehner to Sophie, NAA (hereafter National Archives of Australia)

Brisbane, BP242/1, Q24767. 20 Translation extracts from unposted letter of 5 October 1942 Stephan Lehner to

Sophie, NAA Brisbane, BP242/1, Q24767. 21 Translation extracts from unposted letter of 1 November 1942 Stephan Lehner

to Sophie, NAA Brisbane, BP242/1, Q24767. 22 See Geoffrey Gray, “Managing the Impact of War: Australian Anthropology,

WWII and the Southwest Pacific,” in Science and the Pacific War: Science

and Survival in the Pacific, 1939-1945, ed. Roy M. MacLeod (London: Klu-

wer Academic Publishers, 2000), 187-210. 23 Ian Hogbin to Under-Secretary, Department of External Territories, 7 Novem-

ber 1946, NAA Brisbane, BP242/1, Q24767. 24 The majority of those German Lutheran missionaries who had also been re-

fused re-entry to New Guinea after 1945 were readmitted in 1951. 25 Hank Nelson, Mobs and Masses: Defining the Dynamic Groups in Papua New

Guinea, Discussion Paper 2009/4, State, Society and Governance in Melanesia

(Canberra: Australian National University, 2009), 3. 26 Christine Winter, Looking After One’s Own, 14. 27 See Christine Winter, “The Long Arm of the Third Reich. Internment of New

Guinea Germans in Tatura,” Journal of Pacific History 38:1 (2003), 85-108.

See also John Perkins, “The Swastika among the Coconuts: Nazism in New

Guinea in the 1930s,” in Fascism Outside Europe, ed. Stein Ugelvik Larsen

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 287-309. 28 K.E. Read, “Effects of the Pacific War in the Markham Valley, New Guinea,”

Oceania 18:2 (1947), 95-116 (quotation, 111). 29 Read, “Effects of the Pacific War,” 97.


30 Read, “Effects of the Pacific War,” 100. See also H. Ian Hogbin, Transforma-

tion Scene (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 11-12. 31 See also correspondence between Nelson, Harold Freund, Emil Wagner and

David Rohrlach, Nelson Papers, NLA, MS 5388; Freund, Missionary Turns

Spy, esp. 74-76. 32 Winter, Looking After One’s Own, 16. 33 Christine Winter, “‘A Good Will Ship’: The Light Cruiser Köln visits Rabaul

(1933),” Australian Journal of Politics and History 54:1 (2008), 44-54; Win-

ter, “Inadvertent Emissary of the Third Reich: The German Navy and the

Mandated Territory of New Guinea,” Journal of Australian Naval History 5:1

(2008), 37-52. 34 Winter, “‘A Good Will Ship,” 53. 35 Montevideo Maru Memorial Committee, The Tragedy of the Montevideo

Maru. Time for Recognition, A Submission to the Commonwealth Govern-

ment, November 2009. http://asopa.typepad.com/files/_submissionfinal.pdf, 9-

10. 36 NAA Brisbane, BP242/1, Q31877, transcript 4 November 1942 South Austra-

lian National Advisory Committee re Emil Wagner. 37 Wagner, Es kommt die Nacht. 38 Walter Benjamin: “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (1939), in Gesammelte

Schriften, 1:2 (Frankfurt am Main 1974), 605–53. Translation by the author. 39 Freund, Missionary Turns Spy, 71.

Disloyalty at Sword-point - COnnecting REpositories · DISLOYALTY AT SWORD POINT 204 art and...

Documents

Transcript of Disloyalty at Sword-point - COnnecting REpositories · DISLOYALTY AT SWORD POINT 204 art and...