The flight had started grandly enough. On 29 February 1932, four men — pilot Bertram, co-pilot Thom, mechanic Klausmann, and cameraman Alexander von Lagorio — had flown out of Cologne on a round-the-world attempt intended partly to find markets for Germany's aviation industry. Over ten weeks they flew through Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iraq, India, Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. In Jakarta, the group split: Bertram and Klausmann would continue down the Indonesian archipelago to Australia while the others would meet them later in Shanghai. Their engine was overhauled at the Dutch naval aerodrome in Surabaya. They departed for Darwin expecting a five- or six-hour flight across the Timor Sea. Instead they encountered a severe storm and, low on fuel, landed their seaplane in the first sheltered bay they found. They thought they were near Melville Island, north of Darwin. They were actually at Cape St Lambert near the Berkeley River mouth, 370 kilometres from where they thought they were.

Isolated and surrounded by harsh bush, the men tried to signal for help and found none. With only 15 litres of fuel, Bertram attempted a takeoff and flew another 35 kilometres before the engine quit for good. Unable to find water, they tried to walk back to a bay where an Aboriginal man had briefly appeared. They were plagued by heat, thirst, and flies. Swimming across an inlet, they were chased by a crocodile and lost their clothes entirely. Barefoot and naked, they made it back to the seaplane. Thirteen days in, they drained the engine radiator for water, removed one of the aircraft's floats, and began paddling west. The ship MV Koolinda passed within 500 metres and did not see them. They paddled for four days and nights. When the float was damaged, they cut a section off it, found even that too dangerous, and retreated to the shore. There, under a rock ledge at Cape Bernier, they waited.

The search for the two men mobilised ships, aircraft, and overland parties from multiple countries. A Dutch gunboat sailed from Surabaya. West Australian Airways chartered a de Havilland DH.50 mail plane for the search. The seaplane was located on 15 June on a beach near Rocky Island, but the men were gone — leaving behind only a handwritten note: "27 May 1932. Australia. Today we left the plane in float as a boat in a westerly direction. Bertram." On 22 June, a group of Aboriginal people — identified in later accounts as Balanggarra — found Bertram and Klausmann sheltering in a cave near Cape Bernier. The men had been lost for 39 days. Klausmann had become so mentally incapacitated by the ordeal that he needed to be restrained. A police overland party arrived a week later and took both men by boat to Wyndham Hospital, arriving 6 July.

Bertram recovered and became a celebrity. He flew into Perth's Maylands Aerodrome to a crowd of 6,000. He retrieved the Junkers seaplane in September, fitted a new float, and flew it to Matilda Bay on the Swan River. Klausmann went home by steamer and never fully recovered. Bertram returned to Berlin on 17 April 1933 to a hero's welcome and later wrote a book — Flug in die Hölle, Flight into Hell — about the ordeal. A four-part television series based on the book was produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1985. The makeshift float-canoe was recovered by the Western Australian Museum in 1975. In 2018, Australian adventurer Michael Atkinson retraced the journey with Balanggarra permission, carrying no more supplies than the German aviators had. The country that nearly killed them had preserved itself almost exactly as they left it.