German New Guinea Passports: A Colonial History
Part IV: German New Guinea: The Passports Behind a Colonial Dream That Died in Rabaul
Two passports, issued in 1907 in the colonial outpost of Herbertshoehe, are among the rarest survivors of German colonial document history. One belonged to a government official named Dr. Joseph Seibert. Both give us a rare paper trail into a colony that Berlin never really wanted to run, and never managed to make pay.
A Berlin Banker’s Gamble in the Pacific
Germany’s presence in New Guinea began not with the state, but with a private banker’s ambition. In the early 1880s, the German government remained skeptical of the colonial scheme pushed by Adolph von Hansemann, a Berlin business counselor and director of the Disconto Bank. At best, the Foreign Office in Berlin was willing to offer consular protection, nothing more. Hansemann pressed ahead anyway, founding the New Guinea Company (NGC) in May 1884, with the goal of establishing a sovereign territory in the South Seas under the protection of the German Empire. He put the Bremen naturalist Dr. Otto Finsch, heading the German Trade and Plantation Company, in charge of carrying it out.
Politics in Berlin shifted around the same time. Electoral considerations pushed the Reich Chancellor toward a more favorable view of colonial expansion, and with Britain showing no apparent claim to the territory in question, the Foreign Office telegraphed the German consul in Sydney on August 19, 1884, with instructions to raise the imperial flag over the still-independent lands in northeastern New Guinea. By the time Finsch’s expedition actually planted the flag, on the island of Matupi and at several other points that November, London’s position had changed. Britain had staked its own claim to the islands north of Australia, and the dispute went to a conference in London in early March 1885. The outcome gave Germany the northeastern portion of New Guinea, named Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, along with the Bismarck Archipelago: New Pomerania, New Hanover, New Mecklenburg, and the Admiralty Islands. Bougainville and Buka, in the Solomon Islands, followed a year later.
No Paradise: Malaria, a Thousand Europeans, and a Failed Idea of Civilization
German New Guinea never resembled the tropical paradise its promoters had sold to investors back home. The imperial letter of protection dated May 17, 1885, granted Hansemann’s company a territory of some 240,000 square kilometers. The colonial capital moved twice, from Finschhafen to Herbertshoehe on New Pomerania, and finally, from 1910, to Rabaul. Berlin promised military protection, but left the administration and development of this enormous territory to the NGC’s own expense. Settlers never arrived in the numbers the company hoped for. Malaria was a relentless threat, forcing officials, businessmen, and missionaries alike to cut their postings short. “In this climate, the stomach remains eternally spoiled by disease and quinine,” reads a line attributed in the historical record to Stefan von Kotze, a relative of Bismarck writing around 1905.
By the eve of the First World War, after roughly thirty years of German administration, the colony’s total population stood at around 480,000, of whom no more than 1,000 were Europeans. The imperial letter of protection had spoken hopefully of “civilizing” the indigenous population, a population whose animist practices reportedly included forms of ritual cannibalism tied to their death cults.
Missions, a Massacre at St. Paul, and a Frontier That Stayed a Frontier
Seven Christian missions, including one French order, worked to convert the population of German New Guinea, with limited but real success. Orphaned children, often the casualties of tribal conflict, became the missions’ main focus. Missionaries bought them from their tribes in the hope that they would grow into cultural intermediaries, and some were even sent to Germany. By 1914, the missions counted around 30,000 regular churchgoers, a genuine achievement given the circumstances.
The relationship was not without violence. On August 13, 1904, at the St. Paul mission station on New Pomerania, ten mission members, including the station’s head, were killed by their own followers in an uprising the historical record attributes at least partly to the harsh methods of mission leader Matthias Rascher. Beyond episodes like this, German administrative reach rarely extended past the coastal regions. The interior belonged to the protectorate only on paper, visited mainly by mapping and archaeological expeditions. The last major one of these, aboard the steamer Kolonialgesellschaft on the Kaiserin-Augusta River (the Sepik), took place in December 1912, and came back with disappointing conclusions about the region’s economic prospects.
Coconuts, Coercion, and a Colony That Never Paid Its Way
The New Guinea Company’s entire business model depended on native labor, and that labor was reluctant to show up. Wages on the coconut plantations were low, usually paid only at the end of a three-year contract, and rarely in cash. Recruitment, mostly carried out from ships along the coast, regularly met armed resistance, and neighboring villages were pressured to supply workers under threat of punishment. The physician Wilhelm Wendtland described a typical recruitment trip in 1897: while the first boat landed, the second stayed 20 to 30 meters offshore to cover the retreat in case of attack. When his party moved inland, spears and arrows flew without hitting anyone, and the Germans withdrew.
Native police volunteers fared somewhat better. Trained from the early 1890s by a German police master, they received better pay and rations than plantation workers, and by the outbreak of the First World War numbered 650 men under fewer than two dozen European commanders. When serious unrest broke out, as it did in 1910 on Ponape, German naval forces stepped in. Chinese and Javanese laborers, along with native servants and hunting guides, rounded out the colony’s workforce.
Germany’s acquisition of Spain’s Pacific islands in 1899 brought the whole South Sea colony under one unified administration, with a governor at its head. The New Guinea Company, its investors long since disillusioned, was glad to hand over its rights to the imperial government in exchange for four million Reichsmarks. Even Kaiser Wilhelm II and his State Secretary Bernhard von Buelow, both enthusiasts of German world policy, had to admit the colony’s economic balance sheet was dismal. Strategically, it was effectively undefendable.
The End at Rabaul
The German dream of the South Seas ended on September 12, 1914, when roughly 3,000 Australian soldiers marched into Rabaul. About 700 Germans were interned in Australia for several months before being repatriated to Germany by way of the United States. Barely thirty years after Hansemann’s first flag-raising, German New Guinea was gone.
The Passports That Survived
to government official Dr. Seibert
Only a small number of individual German New Guinea passports are known to have survived, which is what makes the two documents at the center of this piece so significant. The first was issued at Herbertshoehe in 1907 to Dr. Joseph Seibert, a government official in the colonial administration. The second, also dated 1907, is a German New Guinea Reisepass in its own right. Together they represent a fleeting category of document, issued by a colonial government that lasted barely three decades, in a territory most of its own administrators never fully controlled.
Further reading: German Colonial Empire’s Aftermath: Passport History (Part V: Last part)
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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