NP? Georg Gaertner, Hitler's last soldier

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

... this was the title of a German documentary film about Georg Gaertner, a 
German soldier who escaped from a POW camp in 1945 in New Mexico; the FBI 
searched for him 40 long years, Edgar Hoover made out of him one of the most 
dangerous criminals in the US, in 1985 he surrendered to the US authorities.
He now lives under the name Dennis Whiles in Boulder/Colorado.

Gaertner was born in 1920 (?) in a little town in the near of Breslau, 
Silesia, now Poland. In 1942 he came to Nothern Africa for fighting in 
Rommel's Africa Corps. He was only a soldier for a half year, then he was 
captured by the Allied. He came to a POW camp in New Mexico near the border 
to Mexico; he escaped from there shortly after the end of the war. Later he 
worked as a migrant worker in California, runned a ski school, managed a 
tennis club. In the beginning of the sixties, he fell in love and married a 
woman who already had two children from her first marriage. Dennis 
Whiles/Georg Gaertner married a woman who was deeply engaged in the civil 
rights movement. He told her and all the other people that he grew up as a 
poor little boy in an orphanage in New York City. He always lived in fear to 
get discovered. So he decided to move (together with his wife) to Hawai in 
1975. But in the long run he couldn't resist the psychic pressure. Ten years 
later, he had a breakdown and confessed his wife his real identity. Shortly 
after that, he surrendered to the US authorities. The FBI interrogated him, 
but after six months they decided that he could stay in the US. His wife 
persuaded him to go with his life story into tv shows to make money out of 
it; but she also arranged contacts to his sister in Germany. 
In 1986 he travelled back to Germany and saw his relatives after 45 years for 
the first time; his parents had already died. He wanted to build up a new 
existence in Germany, tried to work as a painter (he still is paiting, mostly 
pictures of waves and surfs). He broke off all contacts to his American wife, 
so 1 1/2 years after he went back to Germany they got divorced. His German 
niece tried to arrange a pension in Germany for him, but the German 
authorities rejected the application.  "I belong to nowhere", he said about 
the behaviour of the German authorities. Because he saw no way how he could 
live in Germany any longer, he went back to the States, where he's now living 
in Boulder and is still paiting his waves and searching his identity. The 
last words of him in the film: "I'm not a happy man", "ich bin kein 
glücklicher Mensch".

kwp
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