The German Soldier Who Escaped in 1945 — and America Never Found Him D

A September night in 1945, Camp Deming, New Mexico, movie night. Hundreds of German prisoners watch a Western, and in the flickering dark, nobody notices one man is missing. Outside, a 24-year-old sergeant of Rommel’s Africa Corps slips under the barbed wire and comes up running. He carries nothing but the clothes he is wearing.

His name is Georg Gärtner, and he is never coming back. The railroad tracks run close to the camp today. The road beside them is called Railroad Boulevard. For days, Gärtner has charted the freight schedules from inside the wire. Now, out in the desert dark, his train is coming. By morning roll call, the count comes up one man short.

Search parties scour New Mexico, the roads, the desert, the towns. What nobody searches is the freight train that has already carried him out of the state. The FBI prints a wanted poster, two photographs, front and profile, a full physical description, a set of fingerprints. It will hang in post offices across America for decades. It will never catch him.

Seven years after the escape, that same face appears in Life magazine, not as a fugitive, but as a rescuer on skis, carrying food and medicine to a snowbound passenger train high in the Sierra Nevada. And four decades after the escape, an aging California tennis pro walks into federal custody with a lawyer, a publicist, and a freshly printed book, then surrenders a second time days later live on national television.

Today, a plaque in a Colorado cemetery carries two names for one man, Georg Gärtner, also known as Dennis Whiles. And beneath the dates, a three-word epitaph that explains everything and nothing. A displaced person. He will stay free for 40 years longer than any escaped prisoner in American history. This is how he did it.

It begins in Schweidnitz, Lower Silesia, a German town that today is Widnica, Poland. There, on December 18th, 1920, Georg Gärtner is born to Paul and Emma Gärtner, alongside a brother, Paul, and a sister, Lotta. By his own later account, the boy grows into a champion skier and a strong student with plans to become an architect. Then, at 15, diphtheria.

The illness derails his schooling and the architect’s dream quietly dies with it. What replaces the dream is a uniform. In 1940, at 19 years old, Gärtner enlists in the Wehrmacht. Selected as an officer candidate, he is set to studying a language the army considers useful, English. At the time, it looks like an ordinary soldier’s skill.

It will turn out to be the most valuable thing the German army ever gives him the key to a second life. In 1942, by one account, he volunteers for the Africa Corps under Field Marshal Rommel, partly for the adventure and partly to keep himself far from the Eastern Front and the war against the Soviet Union.

He lands in Libya in early 1943, a sergeant in an artillery unit, and arrives, by his own account, in the middle of a collapse with German forces falling back as much as 50 miles a day. The retreat ends in Tunisia. On May 13th, 1943, the Axis armies in North Africa capitulate roughly a quarter of a million men, laying down their arms at once.

In Tunis, British troops take Sergeant Georg Gärtner prisoner. He is 22 years old, and his war is over after a few months of retreat. What begins instead is a one-way trip across the Atlantic under guard to the United States of America. In 1943, he is shipped across the ocean, one prisoner in a vast captive migration, moving west by sea and then inland by rail deeper and deeper into a continent completely untouched by the war he has just left.

The scale is hard to picture. By the last spring of the war, more than 370,000 German prisoners are held on American soil, spread across 175 main camps and over 500 branch camps. Army Signal Corps photographers document the whole system. Prisoners at roll call, prisoners in mess halls, prisoners picking cotton, cutting timber, working farms.

An entire enemy army transplanted into the middle of America and put quietly to work. Gärtner’s train stops in the New Mexico desert at Camp Deming, a small branch camp sitting directly beside the Southern Pacific Railroad line. The tracks that deliver him into captivity run close enough to the wire to study.

He is far from alone out there. Through the middle years of the war, New Mexico alone holds more than 10,000 Axis soldiers on any given day, scattered across camps large and small throughout the desert state. And camp life is nothing like the war they left. In the New Mexico camps, the food is plentiful and conditions are decent.

One German prisoner writes home the verdict in his diary. The food is first-rate. There is paid work, two farm and construction labor at 80 cents a day in canteen script plus sports fields, classes, and movie nights. For a captured soldier of a losing army, it is a strangely comfortable captivity. Gärtner’s English earns him a position as camp translator, and Camp Deming supplies its prisoners with American newspapers, which he reads closely page after page, year after year, a private education in the country waiting beyond the wire. On paper, the system is airtight. The Provost Marshal General’s Office files inspection reports, labor reports, and rosters for every camp in the country. Every prisoner counted, every prisoner accounted for, including one Georg

Gärtner, Camp Deming, New Mexico. In May 1945, Germany surrenders, and the war in Europe is over. For the hundreds of thousands of German prisoners scattered across American camps, only one question matters anymore. When do we finally go home? The answer comes quickly. Beginning that fall, Washington plans to ship the prisoners back at a rate of roughly 50,000 men a month.

For most of them, home is simply home. For Gärtner, home has become a trap. September 1945. Working as a translator, Gärtner learns the detail that changes everything. Every prisoner of war will be repatriated to his registered hometown. His registered hometown is Schweidnitz, Silesia, but Schweidnitz no longer sits inside Germany.

The map of Europe has been redrawn, and Silesia now lies inside Soviet-controlled Poland. For Gertner, repatriation does not mean going home. It means being delivered east into Soviet hands. Somewhere in the files, his future already exists as paperwork. A name, a serial number, and a ship with his name already on the manifest.

He has read enough American newspapers to decide he does not intend to wait for it. He makes his decision inside the wire, quietly, alone. He will not board that ship, which leaves exactly one alternative. Get out of Camp Deming and disappear completely into the country he has only ever read about.

Escape in this system is common and almost always futile. During the war, German prisoners make more than 2,200 escape attempts in America. Nearly all end the same way. Recaptured within days, returned to the wire. Gertner does not intend to run blind. His advantages are unusual. Fluent English, years of American newspapers absorbed line by line, and a Southern Pacific Railroad line running within sight of the camp fence.

From inside the fence, he watches the freights pass. For days, he charts their schedules, which trains, which direction, what hour, until he can predict them almost to the minute. His way out runs past the camp every single day. The night he chooses is movie night. Sources disagree on the exact date, the 21st, the 22nd, or the 24th of September, 1945, but on every account, his fellow prisoners are inside watching a Western.

While the film runs, Gertner moves. By the account in his own memoir, he rolls under the camp’s barbed wire fences, comes up in open desert, and sprints for for railroad tracks empty-handed, wearing everything he owns. A freight is coming through right on schedule, his schedule. He swings aboard in the dark.

Behind him, the lights of Camp Deming and the flicker of the movie screen. Ahead, a country of strangers moving away at freight train speed. At morning roll call, the count comes up one short. The pursuit machinery starts. Searchers, alerts, descriptions. They comb New Mexico for a German prisoner on foot.

He is no longer in New Mexico, and he was never on foot. In the Provost Marshal General’s files, the escape becomes paperwork of its own. Reports filed, notices circulated, a prisoner’s record stamped as an escapee. The file will stay technically open for 18 years. By one account, he rides the rails west for 3 days and steps off in California, starving and parched, but free.

The one train the searchers never checked has carried him clean across the American Southwest. He surfaces in San Pedro, the harbor district of Los Angeles, a working port full of shipping traffic, day labor, and new arrivals from everywhere. A place where one more stranger with an accent draws no attention at all.

There, he becomes Peter Peterson, a Norwegian immigrant. The accent explains itself. He washes dishes, cooks, and works as a laborer, the kind of jobs that pay in cash, ask few questions, and let a man stay invisible. Meanwhile, the FBI builds its file. In the years after the escape, a wanted poster goes out, the mugshots, the description, the fingerprints, and takes its place on post office walls across the country.

The hunt is now national. He is not alone out there, but nearly. Of all the German prisoners who escaped in America, roughly a dozen remain at large when the war ends. Year by year, that number falls. Eventually, it falls to exactly one. Peterson the Norwegian drifts inland into the San Joaquin Valley around Fresno and disappears into the migrant harvest, one more fruit picker among thousands, following the crops from field to field, sleeping wherever the work is.

In the fields, he falls in with a migrant family from Arkansas and lives and travels alongside them. The father of that family has a plain, sturdy, unremarkable American name, Dennis Wiles. Gärtner borrows it. Peter Peterson the Norwegian quietly ceases to exist, and a second Dennis Wiles takes his place.

It is the name he will answer to without interruption for the next four decades of his life. The new name gets its paperwork. A social security card is issued to Dennis Wiles, backed by an invented life, parents killed in a traffic accident, a childhood spent in an orphanage, no relatives for anyone to check.

By the late 1940s, two versions of the same man exist on paper in America. Dennis F. Wiles, working man, and Georg Gärtner, escaped prisoner of war, staring out from every post office wall. Only one can last. The 1950s find Dennis Wiles in northern California, working his way upward, first a salesman of pre-hung doors, then a construction estimator and architectural consultant.

The boy who once dreamed of designing buildings is at last near the work. In winter, he becomes something else entirely, a ski instructor at Sugar Bowl, the resort at Norden, high in the Sierra Nevada near Donner Pass. The champion skier from Silesia teaching Californians to turn under a borrowed Arkansas name.

In the warm months, tennis. He works as a tennis professional in the East Bay. Between the ski slopes and the courts, the escaped prisoner has assembled something dangerously close to an ordinary, even enviable, American life. Then comes January 1952. In the mountains near Donner Pass, a blizzard buries the Streamliner City of San Francisco in the snow, a luxury passenger train more than 200 people aboard cut off from the world for days.

Ski rescue teams assemble, and Gartner joins the very first one in. The skiers carry food, medicine, and hot drinks across the snow to the stranded passengers, and news photographers record every step of the operation. Life magazine publishes the rescue photographs on January 28th, 1952, and his face runs in the press as a hero of Donner Pass.

The most wanted escaped prisoner of war in America photographed, printed, and entirely unrecognized. The next year brings a stranger mirror. By one account, in 1953, he opens Collier’s magazine to a feature on escaped German prisoners of war and finds his own mug shot, the FBI photograph, staring back up at him. He closes the magazine and nothing happens.

Nobody around him connects the smiling ski instructor with the young sergeant on the poster. By now, the disguise is barely a disguise at all. It is simply the life he lives. There are close calls all the same. By one account, he even crosses paths with a former German soldier who recognizes him from the war.

But the years keep passing and the knock on the door never comes. And here is what he cannot know. In 1963, after 18 years, the United States Army officially calls off its manhunt. The file goes dormant. Nobody is hunting Georg Gärtner anymore and nobody thinks to tell Dennis Whiles. Nobody thinks to tell Dennis Whiles.

On post office walls, the posters quietly fade. 1964, at a YMCA dance in California, he meets a woman named Jean Clark. By her own telling, the courtship moves fast, engaged within 6 months, and they marry that same year. Jean brings two children from an earlier marriage and he adopts them both.

The fugitive with the invented orphan childhood now has the thing his cover story claimed fate had taken from him, a family of his own. But even inside the marriage, the cover holds. Jean knows the orphan story, the car crash, the orphanage, and almost nothing more. Her questions about his past keep arriving and his concrete answers, year after year, keep not arriving.

The 1970s are the good years, his 10th, 15th, 20th year of not being caught. He runs the tennis club and pro shop at Aptos Country Club near Santa Cruz, hosting tournaments in the California sun, the club professional with the faint unplaceable accent. The club also brings famous partners.

He plays tennis in doubles with the actors Robert Stack and Lloyd Bridges, a man wanted under one name, trading volleys with Hollywood royalty under another. 1972 brings his most American ventures yet. He sponsors a Junior Davis Cup tennis team and invents an aluminum racket he names the Dennis racket. It is never successfully marketed.

But this good life has a locked door. Dennis Wiles holds no passport and will never apply for one. He never leaves the country. He has no childhood photographs, no relatives, no history anyone can visit. A falling out with the management at Aptos finally ends the long California years. The family packs up and moves on, this time far out across the Pacific Ocean to the islands of Hawaii.

In Hawaii, he works as a construction estimator on military building projects and escaped German prisoner of war, calculating costs for the American armed forces. Jean, meanwhile, works for the state’s social services. The strains sharpen with the years. Jean travels the world. Her husband always refuses to come along because leaving the country means a passport and a passport means questions.

The excuses pile up, trip after trip, for years. By 1984, the marriage reaches its breaking point. As the story is later told, Jean’s bags are packed and a taxi is waiting outside when Gertner, after 40 years of silence, finally breaks. He sits up on the kitchen counter, in tears, and lets all of it go.

Schweidnitz, the Africa Corps, Camp Deming, the freight train, the wanted poster, the four invented decades of Dennis Wiles. All of it at once. Jean later described that night. I remember him being in tears. I remember him sitting up on the kitchen counter, pouring out this story, just like an avalanche, a waterfall coming out.

The confession saves the marriage and creates an entirely new problem. Inside the house, the truth is out. Outside it, Dennis Wiles is still a fiction, and Georg Gärtner is still on paper an escaped prisoner of war. So, he reaches for the one man in America most likely to understand what he is. From a payphone around 1984, still calling himself Dennis Wiles, he places a call to a history professor in Texas.

Arnold Krammer of Texas A&M University is the author of Nazi Prisoners of War in America, the definitive history of the camps, the labor program, and the escapes, including a certain escape from Camp Deming, New Mexico. The caller gives his name as Dennis Wiles. He praises the book warmly, and then, as Krammer later recounted, the voice on the line admits something more.

That he himself had once been a German prisoner of war. Out of those calls grows a collaboration, a memoir written with Krammer telling the whole story under both names. And folded carefully inside the book project is something far more delicate, a plan for Georg Gärtner to surrender. It is a gamble.

Nobody can say what the government will do with the last German prisoner of war in America. Prison, deportation, or nothing at all. There has never been a case like his. In the second week of September 1985 accounts differ on the exact day Georg Gärtner walks in to federal authorities in San Pedro, California, accompanied by his lawyer, his public relations representative, and his brand new book, The Geography is its own quiet ending.

San Pedro is the same harbor district where his escape ended in 1945. The town where Dennis Whiles first drew breath is the town where Georg Gärtner finally publicly reappears. The Immigration and Naturalization Service answers with a news conference in San Pedro, led by Regional Commissioner Harold Ezell.

Spokesman John Belwardo sums up the government’s position in seven words, “We’re not going to lock him up.” The government’s reasoning, Gärtner was brought to the United States against his will, so he is not an illegal immigrant. And by the time he escaped, the war was over. Four decades of hiding and no crime to charge.

The story lands on front pages coast to coast. In New York, the Times reports an ex-prisoner of war ending 40 years of hiding. In Los Angeles, the papers call him Hitler’s last soldier in the United States. Days later, he surrenders all over again, this time on NBC’s Today Show, live on air with Jean beside him, formally giving himself up to host Bryant Gumbel, almost 40 years to the day since Camp Deming.

Asked why he finally came forward, Gärtner answers, “I have to give Jean credit for that, because she finally got tired of asking me questions about my past without getting any concrete answers.” That same year the memoir appears, Hitler’s Last Soldier in America, written with Arnold Krammer and published by Stein and Day, the fugitive’s own account with 16 pages of photographs, among them the old FBI wanted poster itself.

The federal government then goes one step further. Instead of prosecution, an invitation. The last German prisoner of war in America is told he is welcome to apply for United States citizenship. First though, Germany. In the late 1980s, he goes back for roughly two years and in Hamburg, he finds his sister, Lotte, alive.

The family he had long ago written off had fled Silesia West into West Germany. His parents, it turns out, had never stopped hoping in the other direction. Into the 1960s, they kept his photograph on their kitchen table waiting for a missing son while he had long since convinced himself they were dead.

While he is away in Germany, Jean files for divorce and the marriage ends. The friendship does not. By every account that survives, Georg and Jean remained friends for the rest of his life. The citizenship, meanwhile, vanishes into bureaucracy. Paperwork is filed. The government later says it was lost.

The invitation extended in 1985 takes 24 years to make good on its word. November 2009. In Denver, Colorado, at the age of 88, the man born Georg Gärtner in Schweidnitz, Silesia, raises his right hand and becomes, at last, a citizen of the United States. His final years are quiet ones in northern Colorado near Boulder.

An old man with two names and, for the first time since 1940, papers that are real. On January 30th, 2013, Georg Gärtner dies in northern Colorado at the age of 92, 67 years after he rolled under the wire at Camp Deming. And not once in all that time was he ever caught. His remains rest at Foothills Gardens of Memory in Longmont, Colorado in a section named, of all things, freedom.

The plaque carries both of his names, the Silesian town of his birth, and one final, carefully chosen phrase. Historian Matt McClechen put the whole life in one line. The story of Georg Gärtner is almost the antithesis of the escape story. A man who was doing everything he could to stay in the country.

Every other escape story of that war runs toward home. His ran away from one because the war had erased the home behind him. He did not break out of America on that September night. He broke into it. The plaque in Longmont gets the last word, under both his names, not soldier, not prisoner, not fugitive.

Georg Gärtner, also known as Dennis Whiles, rests under the three words that told the truth, a displaced person.