For forty years, Georg Gärtner had lived a lie. He had a wife, a career, and friends who knew him only as Dennis F. Wiles. No one, not even the woman he married, suspected he was the last German prisoner of war still hiding in America.
Finally, at the age of sixty-five, he was ready to surrender. His story began in 1943, when the flood of German prisoners began arriving on American soil. Allied victories in North Africa and Sicily delivered thousands of captured Wehrmacht soldiers into U. S.
custody. By 1945, over 371,000 German POWs were held across America, spread through more than 700 camps in 46 states. From the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to the desert of Arizona, former enemies were housed in hastily built compounds surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. Conditions were surprisingly humane.
The prisoners received the same food rations as American soldiers, which by 1944 was far better than what most Germans at home were eating. They could work for eighty cents a day in canteen coupons, buying cigarettes, candy, and beer. They staged theatrical productions, formed orchestras, and even attended university-level courses taught by fellow prisoners who had been professors in civilian life. American officials treated them well partly out of genuine humanitarian concern and partly out of fear that mistreatment would trigger reprisals against Allied prisoners held in Germany.
But beneath the surface of camp routine, a darker system operated. Hardcore Nazi prisoners enforced their own justice, punishing any German suspected of collaborating with American authorities. In November 1943, Johannes Kunz was beaten to death at Camp Tonkawa, Oklahoma, after passing notes to the camp doctor about his fellow prisoners. Two hundred prisoners participated in what they called a trial, and five men carried out the execution.
A few months later, at Camp Aiken, South Carolina, Horst Gunther was strangled and hung from a tree to look like suicide. The most notorious case came in March 1944, when U-boat veteran Werner Drechsler, who had been cooperating with American interrogators, was beaten and hanged by seven fellow submariners at Camp Papago Park, Arizona. The killers were identified and convicted, but their executions were delayed. President Roosevelt and military commanders feared that executing German POWs would invite reprisals against Allied prisoners in German hands.
So the condemned men waited in military prisons while the war continued. Meanwhile, some prisoners still tried to escape. On Christmas Eve 1944, twenty-five German naval officers tunneled out of Camp Papago Park, having spent months digging through the hard desert soil. All of them were recaptured within three weeks, mostly because they discovered the desert rivers were dry and surrendered to avoid starving.
The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. Within months, the delayed executions resumed. Between July and August, fourteen German prisoners were hanged at Fort Leavenworth, the largest execution in twentieth-century American history. The Reich was already dead, but their deaths served as a reminder that collaboration, even in defeat, carried a price.
Repatriation proved far more complicated than anyone expected. The Americans had promised to send the prisoners home quickly, but Allied politics intervened. Wartime agreements had already allocated these men as labor for nations devastated by German occupation. In February 1946, the first ships departed, and prisoners believed they were finally going home.
Many had written letters expecting joyful reunions in familiar towns. Instead, they discovered they were pawns in a larger geopolitical game. The first wave of 130,000 was designated as British-owned labor. The rest, nearly 740,000, were transferred to French control and reclassified as disarmed enemy forces, a designation that stripped away Geneva Convention protections.
France demanded the largest share of German labor, calculating that Germany owed millions of man-years of work to compensate for the French workers forced into German factories. The French wanted reconstruction workers who would stay until the job was done. In Britain, conditions stayed relatively humane. Prisoners performed agricultural work and were often welcomed into local homes.
Some learned English and attended church with the families they worked for. France was a harsher reality. The prisoners arrived at camps lacking proper shelter, medical care, or winter clothing. They cleared minefields without adequate equipment and rebuilt bombed cities under dangerous conditions.
The last POWs were not released from French custody until 1948, and some waited until 1949. By then, they had spent over 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 even longer, using them for reconstruction work until 1956, eleven years after the war ended.
Of the 371,000 German prisoners held in America, 477 died in captivity. They were buried in military cemeteries from Texas to Kansas, most in unmarked graves. No families ever came to claim them. But thousands of others chose to return to America.
About 5,000 former POWs emigrated to the United States after the war, drawn back by memories of decent treatment and opportunities unavailable in a shattered homeland. Some married American women they had met during captivity. Others simply preferred American life. Georg Gärtner’s story was the most remarkable of all.
On September 21, 1945, four months after the surrender, the twenty-four-year-old former Africa Corps sergeant crawled under the barbed wire at Camp Deming, New Mexico, and hopped a freight train heading west. His hometown, Schweidnitz in Lower Silesia, had fallen under Soviet occupation. Rather than face repatriation to communist rule, he chose to disappear in America. For forty years, he lived as Dennis F.
Wiles. He worked as a migrant laborer, a dishwasher, and a 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 guessed his background. The FBI searched for him periodically, but never came close.
He moved frequently and avoided anything that might require documentation of his past. In 1963, he married Jean Clark, 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, Gärtner confessed everything. With his wife’s encouragement, he contacted historian Arnold Krammer at Texas A&M University. On September 11, 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, and immigration officials confirmed he would not be deported.
Instead, he was invited to become an American citizen. In November 2009, at age eighty-nine, he was finally naturalized. He died on January 30, 2013, in Colorado, having outlived the Reich by nearly seventy years. Some former POWs returned 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.
