In a couple of my previous posts I have talked about the lauded successes of the Allied prison breaks from German POW camps and the few who made it all the way home. This story, however, is of a soldier from the other side and has a far less pleasant ending. His name is Georg Gaertner, and his name is Dennis Whiles. One identity is real, the other fake. Today, even the man himself has a hard time reconciling which is which.
Gaertner was a soldier serving in the Afrika Korps and was captured in Tunis in 1943. He was sent to a POW camp in Deming, New Mexico where he spent the remainder of the war. Upon the war's end, the Germans were going to be shipped to their homes. However, Gaertner knew that his home was in the Soviet zone of occupation and later ceded to Poland, where Germans in the region were pressured out.
Gaertner managed to escape in May of 1945 and spent the next 40 years on the run, assuming the identity of Dennis Whiles. He spent these years trying to live a quiet American life, even marrying. His circumstances finally forced him to confess his true identity to his wife, and later to the country in 1985. Until that point, Gaertner/Whiles was one of the top fugitives on the FBI Wanted list, with his POW picture posted in almost every post office in the country.
Whiles, having spent 40 years suppressing his birth identity, has spent the last 23 years trying to rediscover his past life. He is 93 now, and lives alone in Boulder, Colorado. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.
(For further details on Georg Gaertner, watch "Hitler's Lost Soldier" from 2006.)
