Georg Gärtner, the last German POW in America.

in 1985 there was a small splash in national newspapers about a fugitive turning himself in to federal authorities it wasn't a lot of press given that he had been a federal fugitive one of the most wanted men in the nation for 40 years but was most surprising was not just that he was able to avoid an FBI manhunt for four decades what was really most surprising about the man named George Gardner was his crime your Gartner was an escaped German prisoner of war and the story of his life on the lam is history that deserves to be remembered your Gartner was born in the town of sh Wyden it's in what was then the Prussian province of Lower Silesia in 1920 Schweddy Mnet's was a town of about 35,000 a relatively rural remote part of the post-world War one Weimar Republic perhaps best known as the childhood home of the famous fighter pilot ace Manfred von Richthofen the son of a railroad official Gartner was an accomplished athlete who had when local championships and tennis and skiing and a proficient student who dreamed of becoming an architect however a near-fatal bout of diphtheria at the age of 15 prevented his graduating over ill Shula essentially high school by 1940 Germany was engrossed in war with few prospects outside of war he volunteered to join the army there he faced more health issues first pneumonia and then a training injury and it was nearly two years before he could get a combat assignment he was not able to apply directly to be an officer because his failure to graduate over real Shula but distinguished himself enough to be promoted to KOB designation meaning War Officer Candidate he attended officer preparatory school and then was sent to a combat unit as a sergeant after serving enough time in combat he could be called back to finish officer training and become an officer finally ready for service in 1942 he saw a poster calling for volunteers for the Africa Corps commanded by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel Nazi propaganda had portrayed the Africa cores ever victorious heroes and Rommel as an undefeatable legend Gardner from rural Silesia was excited about the prospect of adventure of travel of certain Loree with the vaunted Africa core and of course of warm weather having been a skiing champion and even having instructed German troops in cross-country skiing he had a very real chance of being assigned to the brutal Eastern Front so volunteering for service in Africa seemed the best alternative gartner arrived in Libya in January of 1943 only to find that the military situation did not match the propaganda after their defeat the previous November at the hands of the British Eighth Army in the Second Battle of El Alamein the Africa Corps was in headlong retreat Gartner's first dose of reality came when the airfield at which he landed was shelled by British artillery less than an hour after he arrived and three days later that airfield was in allied hands Gartner a sergeant in an artillery unit of the 15th Panzer Division had arrived just in time to participate in a grueling hopeless desert battle in which the Africa Corps was retreating as much as fifty miles a day Rommel was called back to Germany the Africa Corps was cornered and the following May the yun sergeant became one of some 220,000 German and Italian soldiers of the African campaign forced to surrender only the week before he had received his orders to return to Germany complete his officers training but of course by then Escape was impossible in his memoir he recalled upon being taken to an American camp how well-equipped the Americans were noting the nonchalance which which they let their engines idle without any concern for a shortage of fuel he concluded at that moment I realized that we would lose the war most of the prisoners captured in North Africa were taken to prisoner of war camps in the United States there were many reasons to ship the prisoners to the US the Geneva Convention of 1929 required that prisoners be kept safe and fat that was relatively easy to do in the US but nearly impossible in North Africa keeping prisoners near the war zone say in France would mean that escaped prisoners had a reasonable chance of returning to their own lines-- and rejoining the fight that was much harder to do from New Jersey or New Mexico Britain was facing a significant housing shortage and so it asked the u.s. for assistance enlisted prisoners of war could be compelled to work although according to the rules of the Geneva Convention they had to be compensated and the US had need of extra labour productively farm labor with so many of its own fighting in the war finally Germany and Italy would eventually hold nearly a hundred thousand u.s. POWs during the war while they were also bound by and generally followed the rules of the Geneva Convention the Germans held in the u.s. were essentially a guarantee of good care for Allied prisoners held by the axis US Liberty ships were arriving daily with supplies and reinforcements so prisoners were simply put on the ships for their return voyage although that placed him at risk of sinking by their own u-boats your gartner was now off on another adventure taking on one of those Liberty ships in June the man from a small town in Silesia where most people would never see more than 50 miles from home was now on his way to the United States he did have an advantage of most of his fellow POWs in school he had studied English and spoke the language passively German POWs in the United States have been called nearly forgotten history eventually some 450,000 Germans and 51,000 Italian prisoners of war were kept in the United States there were over 700 POWs camps in 46 states still Americans were largely unaware of the camps which by rule were kept away from urban areas and industrial centers for security purposes and there was an imperative to build the camp's in areas where the climate was mild to reduce construction costs so many of the camps were in the south gartner was moved between camps in Texas and New Mexico eventually winding up at a camp outside the small town of Deming New Mexico German POWs in the United States were treated well Gardner know that the food was not just better than they'd had in the German army but generally better than what the American public was getting in the time of rationing camp suffered athletics books movies and college courses and even occasionally alcohol or Bill beer at the camp canteen paid in the script that prisoners got for work Gardner mentioned that there were risks of confrontation with the guards but a larger risk of confrontation with a few hardcore Nazis in the camp and in Texas and New Mexico an occasional risk of running into rattlesnakes the largest problem he recalled was boredom while German POWs did occasionally escape as many as a couple thousand over the course of the war there also his caught within the first 24 hours generally non-political and happy to be out of the war Joerg was not the type of prisoner who would even consider escape but that changed in 1945 the war in Europe ended in May and the POWs began to wonder at how they would be repatriated camp conditions declined as the US POWs were coming home and the u.s. no longer had to worry about their treatment of German POWs the guarantee of the treatment of Allied POWs to the guards have become more hostile as concentration camps are becoming liberated in Europe and the extent of the horrors of the Holocaust were coming clear according to Gartner most of the POWs were shocked and repelled as the Americans but the guards became more openly hostile as a result worst of all the POWs found out in the summer of 1945 the u.s. plan to eventually repeat create them directly to their hometowns they'd hoped to be released in the American zone in Germany daunting enough prospect even the devastation and shortages following the war but for POWs like Gartner being directly repatriated meant sending them to territories now occupied by the Soviet Union where Gartner suspected he would not be treated as well as he had been in the United States what's more your Gartner simply wanted freedom he had gone from the regimented society of Germany to the German army to the POWs camp the age of 24 he wanted for the first time in his life to feel free to make his own choices he became determined to escape when he had attended officers preparatory school in Germany they had done an exercise where the students had pretended to be escaped prisoners their instructors dropped them off on one side of town and they had to make it to the other side without being caught by their instructors while the other students came up with elaborate plans sneaking through sewers or across rooftops Gardner had chosen a simple and direct approach he simply pretended to be a normal citizen caught a streetcar and was across town ahead of his instructors he was the only student to successfully make it his plan on September 24th 1945 was all so simple he could see a train track from the camp he studied the schedule and one night when the rest of the camp was watching a movie he waited for a break in the searchlights crawled under two sets of wire and ran for the train he hopped on and rode in a freight car the same way many people rode at the time and the Train took him to San Pedro California the Train turned out to be a stroke of luck as soon as he was found missing at bed check there was a massive search the army interrogated the other prisoners but he hadn't revealed his plans to any of them the army guessed that he would lie low in the area and concentrated their search in New Mexico it does not seem to occur to them that he might have ridden off on the train as another stroke of luck the FBI considered his escape to be the Army's problem and it was another year before they started a nationwide manhunt by that time he'd improved his English and learned apart his hair and hold his fork like an American in the booming multicultural California that followed the second world war he was able to blend in lay low and learn how to become an American at first he travelled with migrant farm workers itinerant jobs where a few questions were asked he claimed to be a Norwegian immigrant named Peter Peterson he later took the name Denis Wiles derived from the names of a migrant farmworker family he had met he was eventually able to acquire a Social Security card and then a driver's license under that name he worked as a salesman as a ski instructor and as a tennis pro at one point he played tennis doubles with actor lloyd bridges and piled around at a ski lodge with Robert Stack when the passenger train city of San Francisco was trapped in an avalanche in the Sierra Nevada mountains in January 1952 as the head of the ski patrol for a local ski area he was the first to reach the Train a blurry photo of him ran in papers nationwide even while another photo of him on wanted posters hung in post offices nationwide after repatriation only 15 of the nearly 450,000 German POWs in the United States were unaccounted for one by one that had all been found after a merchant seaman named Kurt Richard Westfall was found in West Germany in 1964 Gardner was the last missing German POWs the FBI had run out of leads they were reduced to searching phone books to find names close to York Gardner one way that Dennis wiles managed to avoid capture for four decades was that he never shared his secret with anyone in 1964 he married a divorcee named Jean Clark after 18 years of marriage she still did not know his real name in the end it was his wife that convinced him to come clean she had finally become exasperated with his unwillingness to talk about his past and when he refused to travel with her internationally and wouldn't say why in reality he didn't have a birth certificate so he couldn't get a passport she decided it was time to leave him she packed her bags and called a cab and it was in that moment that he realized they had to tell her the truth the first person to which he had told his terrible secret in 37 years his wife then took control the situation she found a historian named Arnold Kramer who the authored a book on German POWs in the United States and Kramer agreed to co-author a book detailing Gartner's story it is called Hitler's last soldier in America she then hired an attorney to manage his turning himself over to authorities he concluded his book saying how lucky I am to have her after searching for him for nearly 40 years the FBI decided they weren't interested anymore as a matter of fact it wasn't even clear he committed a crime since his escape had come technically after the war had ended similarly the Immigration and Naturalization Service decided to pursue no charges since he had been brought to the United States against his will as a prisoner of war he hadn't entered the country illegally and having been married to a u.s. citizen for 18 years Jeanne could petition for his citizenship after his book was finally published in 1985 he went on The Today Show September 11th 1985 and officially surrendered to bryant gumbel the United Press International headline for the day was world war two finally came to an end today he later found out that his sister was still alive in Germany and had managed to immigrate from East Germany to West Germany and was able to go visit her because of bureaucratic delays he didn't become a naturalized citizen until 2009 jerk Gartner or Dennis Wiles whichever name you prefer passed away in 2013 at the age of 92 I hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy short snippets a forgotten history between 10 and 15 minutes long and if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes please write those in the comment section I will be happy to personally respond be sure to follow the history guy on Facebook Instagram Twitter and check out our merchandise on teespring com and if you'd like more episodes on forgotten history all you need to do is subscribe [Music]

Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 1,185,139

Keywords: history, the history guy, prisoner of war, california, world war ii, us history, wwii, history guy

Id: BecF_NEWeQ8

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/9bikes]

Thank you! Well worth watching.

[u/so_thats_what]

Great story. Worth a movie.

[u/FatMagic]

Excellent story and definitely ALYB! Worth watching!

[u/Piyh]

ALYB until YB

[u/strawberry]

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Gärtner

[u/indil47]

Could the host at least try to pronounce the guy’s name correctly?

ETA: like the commenter below said below with the proper pronunciation. Not sure why downvoted?

[u/mrobfish]

At the end dude looked like Mitch McConnell

[u/sometimeforever]

Bonus: very cool stories in the youtube comments

[u/Nickyflicks]

What a great story. Thanks for posting.