Georg Gärtner (; December 18, 1920 – January 30, 2013) was a German soldier who served during World War II and who was captured and held as a prisoner of war by the United States. He escaped from a prisoner of war camp, took on a new identity as Dennis F. Whiles, and was never recaptured. He revealed his true identity some 40 years later. Biography Gärtner was from Schweidnitz, Lower Silesia (now Świdnica, Poland). He enlisted in the Wehrmacht in 1940 at age 19, and fought in the North African Campaign with the Afrika Korps. He was captured by British troops in Tunis in 1943 and was taken to the United States as a prisoner of war. At the end of the war, Gärtner was terrified at the thought of being repatriated to his hometown, which at the time became a part of communist Poland, and decided to escape. Several weeks after the war's end, he escaped from his prison camp in Deming, New Mexico, on September 22, 1945. After crawling under two gates, he jumped aboard a passing freight train whose schedule he had calculated. The train took him to California. Gärtner moved between various towns on the US West Coast, working as a lumberjack, dishwasher, or laborer. Having studied English as an officer candidate, he perfected his command of the language, created a new identity as Dennis F. Whiles, obtained a Social Security card in that name, and invented a biography in which he had been raised in an orphanage after his parents had been killed in a traffic accident. He eventually settled in Norden, California, where he worked as a ski instructor in the winter and in construction and sales jobs during the summer. While attending a YMCA dance, he met Jean Clarke, and the couple married in 1964. He adopted her two children from a previous marriage. After his escape the US Army launched a manhunt which lasted until 1963. The FBI issued "wanted" posters for Gärtner in 1947. According to his autobiography, he joined a ski expedition formed to rescue the City of San Francisco, a train stranded in a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada in January 1952, immediately after which Life magazine took his and the group's picture. Meanwhile, FBI wanted posters for him were in most post offices. For 40 years Gärtner was listed as one of the FBI's most wanted persons.