A FUGITIVE IN SOUTH-WEST AFRICA, 1908 to 1920

Bound in light brown cloth with 290 pages. Clean text with no inscriptions. Translated from the German. Bookplate of Andrew Fleming on fep. Frontispiece map of German- Southwest Africa.

He emigrated to German South-West Africa and acquired the Leipzig farm (5000 hectares), southeast of Grootfontein. In addition to farm work, Wilhelm Mattenklodt worked as a freight driver, but also went on extensive hunting trips to southern Angola and the Caprivi area. At the outbreak of war in 1914, he was assigned to the 2nd Schutztruppenkompanie and took part in the battles of Naulila, Jakalswater and Trekkopje, most recently in the rank of vice-weaver. In July 1915, when the protection force surrendered to Khorab, Wilhelm Mattenklodt was released as a reservist on his word of honor and returned to his farm. Several weeks later, he received a proposal from five German protection force officers interned in the Okanjande prison camp, who were well known to him. They planned an outbreak and wanted to make their way to German East Africa in support of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck's campaign. Wilhelm Mattenklodt should participate. Before the plan could be implemented, the project was betrayed and Wilhelm Mattenklodt was arrested by the South African police on his farm in February 1916. He managed to escape while being transported to the prison. For the next three years, Wilhelm Mattenklodt, as a bush runner, lived a life on the run and underground, hunted and declared bird-free by the South African administration and supported by numerous friends and farmers in the north of the country. He was temporarily hidden on farms, stayed in the Okavango area, in the Kaudom, in the Kaokoveld and even, although disguised, in Windhoek. For a long time, Wilhelm Mattenklodt was on the wanted lists for the South Africans and would undoubtedly have been shot under legal protection if he had been got hold of. This threat was issued by Colonel de Jager, the commander of the South African troops in South West Africa, and transmitted to the hunted by the German military commissioner, Captain Trainer. In the meantime, the South Africans suspected Wilhelm Mattenklodt of having influenced the Ovambo uprising of 1917 and of stoking resistance among the natives against the new rulers in the Caprivi summit and in northern Rhodesia. Under increasing search pressure, Wilhelm Mattenklodt decided to return to Germany via an Angolan port. With two other wanted Germans, whom the bird-free Karl Raif had freed from Windhoek prison, the farmer Georg Voswinckel and the former post office official Karl Alfred Feuerstein, he broke up on horseback in May 1919 and reached Benguella and Lobito in August. There they were recognized by a British agent, reported and arrested by the Portuguese authorities. However, the Germans managed to escape and struggled to the north of the country on foot and with great effort, where they were again arrested by strong forces at Calulo in October 1919 and taken to the Luanda prison. Wilhelm Mattenklodt was soon released from prison as innocent and returned to Germany via Angola in January 1920, where he successfully campaigned for his comrades to be released and wrote his very successful book, Lost Home, which was also translated into English. In the mid-1920s, he returned to Angola on a hunting train, then traveled back to Germany to return to Angola in 1929 for a hunting trip to northern Rhodesia. During the course of his illness he fell ill with sleeping sickness, was taken to the Angolan port city of Vila Luso by ship, it was the German steamer Toledo, on which Paul Ritter happened to be, to Swakopmund and the Antonius Hospital there. Wilhelm Mattenklodt died there, unmolested by the South African authorities, on June 4th, 1931 and was buried in the Swakopmund cemetery. As a person and in his involuntary role as a resistance against the South African occupation power, Wilhelm Mattenklodt already enjoyed a good reputation during his lifetime and numerous contemporary witnesses attested to him virtues such as courage, perseverance, tenacity, comradeship, honesty and love of the fatherland. However, his early death gave rise to legends and lasting memories of his name, and at the end of the 1960s a street in the Pioneers Park in Windhoek was named after him. 

(https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/209640601/ernst-wilhelm-mattenklodt)