Abstract:
In October 1915, Karl Hanssen, general manager of a copra production company in Western Samoa, was sentenced by a New Zealand military court in Apia to six months imprisonment for bypassing censorship and internment as a prisoner of war for the duration of hostilities. He was sent to New Zealand, where he served his six-month sentence in the state prison system, before being transferred to a military internment camp. Here he compiled his memoirs of the Great War, outlining his experiences in occupied German Samoa and in the New Zealand prison system. This thesis explores the political and historical background to the events detailed in Hanssen’s memoirs, drawing heavily on the memoirs themselves as a primary text, also relying greatly on archival sources relating to Hanssen’s detention and contemporaneous newspaper accounts. Other first-person accounts of the military occupation of Samoa, and New Zealand criminal prisons and prisoner of war internment camps provide comparisons to Hanssen’s own experiences. This first academic study of Hanssen’s as yet unpublished and unexamined memoirs aims to gain a greater insight into the experiences of the numerous Samoan-German political prisoners who were held in New Zealand’s state prisons during the First World War.
