In September 1985, a 64-year-old man named Dennis F. Whiles walked into a federal office in San Pedro, California, and calmly told the authorities who he really was. For forty years, he had been living under a stolen identity. He was not Dennis Whiles.
He was Georg Gaertner, the last German prisoner of war still hiding in America—and even his own wife had no idea. His story begins in 1943, when the tide of World War II turned and Allied victories in North Africa and Sicily delivered thousands of captured German soldiers into American hands. By 1945, roughly 371,000 German POWs were being held across the United States, scattered through more than 700 camps in 46 states. From the mountains of Colorado to the deserts of Arizona, these men were housed in compounds surrounded by double rows of barbed wire and guard towers.
The treatment of these prisoners followed the Geneva Convention. They received the same rations as American soldiers, which by 1944 was a far better diet than most German civilians were eating. Work was optional but encouraged, paying 80 cents a day in canteen coupons that could buy cigarettes, candy, or beer. Many prisoners found work on farms, in canneries, and in logging operations, filling critical labor shortages while American men fought overseas.
Some became so valuable that farmers lobbied to keep them after the war ended. Behind the wire, an unlikely cultural life flourished. Prisoners staged theatrical productions, formed orchestras, and published camp newspapers in German. The most ambitious camps offered university-level courses taught by fellow prisoners who had been professors in civilian life.
Americans called it the “barbed-wire college,” and prisoners could earn credits later recognized by German universities. But beneath this orderly surface, a darker system operated. Hardcore Nazi prisoners maintained their own courts, investigating fellow Germans suspected of collaborating with American authorities. The punishment for betraying the Reich was death, and there were willing executioners.
One night in November 1943, Johannes Kunze, a 39-year-old Afrika Korps veteran, was beaten to death at Camp Tonkawa in Oklahoma. He had been passing notes to the camp doctor during sick call, providing information about his fellow prisoners. Two hundred German POWs took part in what they called a trial. Five men carried out the execution.
His bloodied uniform was found the next morning, and investigators quickly identified the perpetrators. A few months later, at Camp Aiken in South Carolina, 23-year-old Horst Günther was strangled by two fellow prisoners who hung his body from a tree to make it look like suicide. American authorities weren’t fooled. The killers were arrested within days.
The most notorious case came in March 1944, at Camp Papago Park in Arizona. Werner Drechsler, a U-boat veteran who had been cooperating with American interrogators, was beaten and hanged by seven fellow submariners. All seven were identified through confessions and witness testimony. The trials began immediately, but the executions were delayed.
President Franklin Roosevelt and military commanders feared that executing German POWs would trigger reprisals against Allied prisoners held in Germany. The condemned men waited in military prisons while the war continued around them. Meanwhile, escape attempts reminded officials that not all prisoners had accepted their fate. In December 1944, twenty-five German naval officers tunneled 178 feet out of Camp Papago Park’s officers’ compound, hiding the excavated dirt under a volleyball court.
The breakout went undetected for hours, but the Arizona desert proved as effective as any guard. All twenty-five were recaptured within three weeks, most turning themselves in after discovering the Salt and Gila Rivers were dry. The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. Within weeks, the delayed executions resumed.
Between July and August, fourteen German prisoners were executed at Fort Leavenworth—five for Kunze’s death, two for Günther’s, and seven submariners for Drechsler’s murder. It was the largest execution in United States history during the twentieth century. Their bodies were buried in the military prison cemetery. The Reich had fallen three months earlier, but for these men, the war was finally over in the most final way.
Repatriation proved far more complex than capture. Wartime agreements had already allocated these prisoners as labor resources for war-damaged nations demanding compensation. In February 1946, the first ships departed East Coast ports. Prisoners believed they were finally going home.
Many had written letters to families they hadn’t contacted in years, expecting joyful reunions in bomb-damaged but familiar towns. Instead, most discovered they were pawns in a larger geopolitical game. The first wave involved 130,000 German POWs designated as “British-owned,” sailing to camps in Britain. But the majority faced a different fate.
Nearly 740,000 were transferred to French control and redesignated as “disarmed enemy forces,” a classification that stripped away Geneva Convention protections. France demanded the largest share of German labor, calculating that Germany owed four million man-years of work to compensate for French workers forcibly sent to German factories during the occupation. In Britain, German prisoners performed agricultural labor and infrastructure repair until late 1947, with conditions generally matching American standards. Some prisoners learned English, attended local churches, and were invited to family dinners.
France offered a harsher reality. Prisoners arrived at camps lacking adequate shelter, medical care, or winter clothing. They rebuilt destroyed railways, cleared minefields without proper equipment, and reconstructed bombed cities under minimal supervision and maximum danger. The last German POWs remained in French custody until 1948, with some not released until 1949.
By then, many had spent four years in captivity—longer than America’s entire participation in the war. When they finally reached Germany, they found a divided country they barely recognized. The Soviet Union held its German prisoners until 1956, using them for reconstruction work in territories devastated by the German invasion. The final prisoner train from Soviet captivity arrived in West Germany eleven years after the war ended.
Of the 371,000 German prisoners held in America, 477 died in captivity from illness, accidents, and violence. They were buried in military cemeteries from Fort Bliss, Texas, to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Most graves remain unmarked. No German families ever traveled to claim the bodies.
But roughly 5,000 former German POWs chose to return to America after the war, drawn back by memories of their treatment and opportunities unavailable in devastated Germany. Some married American women they had met during captivity. Others simply preferred American life to the reconstruction struggles at home. The most remarkable postwar story belonged to Georg Gaertner.
On 21 September 1945, four months after Germany’s surrender, the 24-year-old former Afrika Korps sergeant crawled under the barbed wire at Camp Deming, New Mexico, and hopped a freight train heading west. His hometown of Schweidnitz in Lower Silesia had fallen under Soviet occupation. Rather than face repatriation to Communist rule, he chose to disappear into America. For forty years, Gaertner lived as Dennis F.
Whiles. He worked as a migrant laborer, dishwasher, and construction worker before settling into careers as a ski instructor and tennis pro in California and Colorado. He organized celebrity tennis tournaments, mingling with Hollywood stars who never suspected his background. The FBI searched for him periodically but never came close.
He lived quietly, moved frequently, and avoided anything that might require documentation of his past. In 1963, he married Jean Clarke, an American woman who knew nothing of his true identity. For twenty-one years, she lived with a husband who refused to discuss his background, could not travel abroad, and became agitated whenever she pressed him about his mysterious past. In 1984, she packed her bags and called a taxi, threatening to leave unless he finally told her the truth.
That night, Gaertner confessed everything. With his wife’s encouragement, he contacted historian Arnold Krammer at Texas A&M University. On 11 September 1985, exactly forty years after his escape, he surrendered to federal authorities in San Pedro, California. The FBI announced it had no further interest in him.
Immigration officials confirmed he would not be deported. He was invited to become an American citizen. Gaertner co-authored his autobiography and appeared on television talk shows as a curiosity from another era. In November 2009, at age 89, he was finally naturalized as a United States citizen.
He died on 30 January 2013 in Colorado, having outlived the Reich by nearly seventy years. Veterans of American POW camps continued returning to visit the small towns where they had spent the war, often bringing their families to see where their American experience began. The camps themselves were long gone, replaced by housing developments and shopping centers.
But the men who had lived behind the wire never forgot the country that had treated them, even as enemies, with unexpected dignity.
