Herbert Straehler Fritz Sachsse
About the Talk:-
This is a fascinating but little-known escape story of two German naval officers, who spent a year on the run covering an astonishing five thousand miles and almost circumnavigating the globe. Korvettenkapitän Sachsse and Oberleutnant sur Zee Straehler were among the 4,700 Germans captured after the Siege of Tsingtao in China in November 1914 and sent to the POW camp at Fukuoka in Japan. In January 1916, five officers escaped individually from the Fukuoka camp with the aim of returning home to Germany to re-join the war effort. Two of them - Sachsse and Straehler - met up in Shanghai and made plans to travel along the 'Silk Road' west through China, Afghanistan, Persia and Turkey. A detailed diary of the journey has recently been found by the family of one of the men, providing an intriguing insight into the experiences of German officers in Japanese captivity during the First World War and into life in China a century ago.
About the Speaker :-
Anne Buckley is an Associate Professor in the German Department of the University of Leeds, where she teaches and researches in German and Translation Studies. Her research focuses on the Great War training and POW camp in Skipton. She led the translation for the book 'German Prisoners of the Great War: Life in a Yorkshire Camp', published in hardback February 2021. She also co-translated Holger Afflerbach's book 'On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War'.
