Hitler’s Last Soldier: How a Nazi POW Hid from the FBI and Lived in the U.S.

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History you may not know. 

Unfortunately for Gartner, his wife -who had convinced him to come clean in the first place- was overwhelmed by the decades of secrets, and filed for a divorce while he was visiting long-lost relatives in Germany. He remained very close with her children and kept in touch with him until his passing in 2013.

After the end of World War II, there were many individuals of the Axis powers who held out, from Japanese Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda -who didn’t come out of hiding until 1974- to the German SS officers who allegedly fled to South America.

There is one curious case of a Prisoner of War who fled an American camp back in the 1940s and remained on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for some time by hiding in plain sight until he finally gave up four decades later.

Born in modern-day Poland in 1920, Georg Gartner was an athletic young man who aspired to become an officer in the German Wehrmacht, enlisting in 1940. He entered a cadet program that made him a non-commissioned officer until he had enough combat experience to enter the officer ranks, Gartner soon found himself at a crossroads: despite wanting to be a good soldier, he was also a skilled skier and winter sportsman which doomed him to the Eastern Front.

Seeing an opportunity to see combat while avoiding freezing to death and being crushed by Soviet tanks, Gartner joined the Afrika Korps. He saw a considerable amount of combat with the Korps that earned him a right to go back to Germany for officer training. Unfortunately for Gartner, he was quickly captured in Tunis, and in 1943, was sent to the United States to a prisoner of war camp in New Mexico.

Able to speak English and far from the horrors of war, Gartner rather enjoyed being a prisoner of war in America. He noted that his treatment was fair and his food better than anything the German military ever served him. As the war drew to a close and evidence of the Holocaust became public knowledge, his captors soon changed their demeanor towards the German POWs, despite many POWs being disgusted by what Germany had done.

Learning he would be sent back to his now Soviet-occupied hometown, Gartner had no desire to be repatriated with what might have been certain death and made a critical decision: he was going to make a run for it and attempt to live among the Americans.