Devil’s luck finally ran out
an hour and a half,” the commander of the Iris told the Herald. “As she paid no attention to my signal to stop, I fired a shot across her bows, when she immediately shortened sail and stopped.”
The Germans threw their guns overboard, von Luckner surrendered and they were taken back to Auckland. For the military there was a court of inquiry, a court-martial and a sacking. For von Luckner, there was a return to confinement at Mt Eden Prison, Ripapa Island in Lyttelton Harbour and Motuihe. He and his men and other Germans went home in May 1919, six months after the end of the war.
A raconteur, von Luckner undertook lecture tours and books were written about his exploits, building his reputation as the “Sea Devil”.
That became the English name of his vessel, the Seeteufel in German, in which he made a soft-propaganda world tour for Nazi Germany in the countdown to the start of World War II in 1939.
His stay in New Zealand from February to May 1938 received enormous press coverage and was controversial.
The trip was partly funded by the German Government and its leader Adolf Hitler, but von Luckner repeatedly told the New Zealand press he was just a sailor, he knew nothing of politics, he was not a Nazi Party member, and he had been forbidden to export Germany’s politics. He portrayed himself as an ambassador of peace.
But the trip was a case of bad timing. Germany invaded Austria while he was here. He told the Herald the coup was a wise move, calculated to bring new life to a country that was not enjoying prosperity, and also to help maintain Europe’s peace.
He was attacked in the press by the Federation of Labour and an Auckland University College academic Professor A. B. Fitt.
The Federation of Labour president and later cabinet minister Angus McLagan challenged von Luckner to a public debate — the German refused — and probed what had been meant when his trip was promoted as one of goodwill.
Von Luckner’s crew was thought to include two German Gestapo secret police, according to surveillance results reported by Police Commissioner D. J. Cumming in a 1938 memo to British security service MI5 and quoted by Auckland researcher Emeritus Professor James Bade.
Cumming noted that one crewman, Gregor Riethmaier, was trying to leave the boat and live in New Zealand and another, cameraman Hans Oesterreich, wanted to stay for two months to shoot a film. Oesterreich was “very friendly” with one of the suspected Gestapo men.
Riethmaier stayed, was interned during the war, became a successful photographer, had a family, and died in 2004 aged 90. One of his three children, Paul, said Gregor spoke of von Luckner sometimes.
“They fell out. That’s one of the reasons why he jumped ship in Auckland.”
Gregor Riethmaier told Bade that von Luckner had once threatened him with violence.
He also said von Luckner had ordered that hundreds of propaganda books be thrown overboard when they were near the Panama Canal.
Oesterreich, who was a Nazi agent, dobbed von Luckner in after they returned to Germany, according to Bade’s research paper. As the trip had progressed, the agent noted in a report, it became clear it was a purely private cruise, not a propaganda mission.
“All the claims that he published in German newspapers about his propaganda for the new Germany are based on untruths.”
In a special court of honour, von Luckner was accused of not having “kept the National Socialist attitude expected of him and treated this trip, undertaken primarily in the interests of propaganda, as a private pleasure cruise”.
But the case was shelved because of the war and von Luckner was told to shut up. He died in 1966.
The Australian police thought that among Germans in Queensland von Luckner had “won many to the Nazi cause” and New Zealand Labour movement paper the Standard, believed his visit had given “fresh stimulus to Nazi activities”.
Fiona Alexander remembers her mother saying she went to one of von Luckner’s talks in Auckland in 1938.
“She thought he was wonderful.”