The moon surprised him, its fullness casting an unexpected gleam over the rows of barracks and barbed wire fences bordering the prison camp.

Ducked down, he looked for the sweeping glow of the watchtower's spotlight.

Just beyond its reach was the wild vastness of the New Mexico desert — if he wasn't shot, maybe even freedom.

Railroad tracks were definitely past the gates, an estimated four- or five-mile trek. He hadn't noticed them until recently, until after the newspapers started to write about the war's end in more imminent terms.

The slender young soldier, described later in the wanted posters as almost 6 feet tall and 171 pounds — "eyes, blue; hair, brown; nationality, German" — clawed himself under the first fence, then the second.

As the other prisoners reveled inside the camp mess hall, throwing spirited jeers at an American Western movie, 24-year-old Georg Gaertner sprinted into the boundless desert that surrounded their small satellite prisoner-of-war camp.

Just as he'd planned, a Southern Pacific freight train roared past within the hour, right as he reached the tracks.

Running alongside it, he hurled himself inside an open car.

The scene was eerily similar to an event a few years earlier, during Officer Preparatory School for the Nazi Army.

After being taught how to evade the Allies if caught behind enemy lines, hundreds of officer candidates were set loose on the edge of a German town called Heidelberg. Their mission was to make it to the other side of town without being noticed by the instructors.

Some of the soldiers tried jumping from rooftop to rooftop, others slogged underground in the town's sewers. A few disguised themselves as women.

Gaertner was the only one who casually hopped onto a streetcar and rode it through town.

It was as daring as it was simple — blending into the monotonous humdrum of everyday life.

It worked.

He won the challenge that day. And — in a way — he won it again that night years later, as the freight train delivered him across the moonlit expanses of the American Southwest in September 1945.

Daring simplicity would carry Gaertner through his next 40 years as a wanted fugitive — from the migrant farm labor camps of Northern California and the logger-filled forests of Southern Oregon to lush Hawaiian islands and burgeoning Colorado cities.

It would lead him into jobs in sales and on ski resorts. And it would bring him to Jean, who still speaks fondly of him from her Northern Colorado home — about the night a tall, handsome stranger tapped her shoulder at that YMCA singles dance in San Mateo, California.

It was Gaertner's ability to boldly slip out of his prisoner-of-war camp, and into American life, that led him to become the last escaped German POW hunted by U.S. authorities.

Or, as he'd put it in his book 40 years later, "Hitler's Last Soldier in America."

The accent. Everyone asks about his accent.

"Particularly women want to know," said Jean Whiles, now 93 and perched on a kitchen stool in her Northern Colorado apartment last month. "'How could you have lived with him for 23 years and not know?'"

After his escape, Gaertner had tried his best to suppress his accent, and the lilt that remained was indistinguishable to Jean, she said.

Besides, by the time she met him in 1964, Georg Gaertner was Dennis Whiles.

Jean was an auburn-haired, 39-year-old divorcee then, supporting two children with a job at an insurance company in Palo Alto.

"Dennis" was a 43-year-old California salesman working for a San Mateo door and cabinet company.

One night, at that YMCA singles dance, he approached Jean and asked her to dance. Dancing turned to talking.

"We talked and talked," she said. "... Within six months, we were engaged."

One subject Dennis rarely mentioned, however, was his past.

All Jean knew was what he told her: that he was from New York, his parents died in an accident when he was young and, as a result, he grew up an orphan at the Connecticut School for Boys.

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Jean, who had once worked as a social worker in the impoverished migrant labor camps of California's San Joaquin Valley, said she never felt the need to press.

"Because of my social work background, (I) wasn't prepared ... to have him go through any more pain," she said.

Besides, "I never heard anything that caused me any kind of question," she said.

Looking back, there was one little moment when Dennis slipped.

"He talked one time about some kind of food that you don't hear about very much," she said, reaching for the word.

"Marzipan!"

The European confection made from honey, sugar and almond meal is traditionally given out during Christmastime in places like the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

"And I thought, 'Oh, that's interesting. I wonder how he knew about that.'"

Gaertner was born Dec. 18, 1920, in the small German town of Schweidnitz.

His father, Paul, had a government job working for the railroad. His mother, Emma, stayed home to raise Gaertner and his two siblings, Paul and Lotte.

He was 12 in 1933, the final year of Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

In his book, Gaertner recalled his comfortable, middle class upbringing. Then, as a young teen living in a smaller town surrounded by German farmland, he started noticing small changes.

"There were some open-air party rallies, some swastika flags, the occasional government official and whispers about the roundup of Jews in distant, larger cities," he wrote in his 1985 memoir, "Hitler's Last Soldier in America."

By 1939, the year World War II began, Gaertner wrote that Nazi patriotism had deepened as young men started leaving home to join the Nazi army.

In October 1940, he became an artillery man in the Nazi Army. In 1942, he was selected for the army's Officer's Prep School in Heidelberg and, in May of that year, he left for the coast of North Africa to fight in Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps.

Almost a year later, in April 1943, the Nazis fell to the Allies in North Africa and Gaertner was taken into custody, fingerprinted, photographed and processed as prisoner of war No. 81-G80392.

He was then sent to the United States, arriving in Norfolk, Virginia, before being transported to McLean, Texas; Lordsburg, New Mexico, and, finally, to a small satellite camp in Deming, New Mexico.

Because he had studied English in his childhood, Gaertner was given a job as clerk and typist in the camp's administration building. He'd also occasionally serve as a translator for the other prisoners as newspaper reports about the war were delivered to Deming.

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Though treated and fed well, escape among the prisoners was common, according to Arnold Krammer, a World War II historian and author who co-wrote Gaertner's memoir.

"They're ordered to escape, just like (American soldiers) are ordered to escape from captivity," Krammer said in an interview with the Coloradoan in late August. Krammer died suddenly a month later, before publication of this piece.

"What's different about Georg is that (he wasn't found)."

While some men escaped out of patriotic duty, and others out of boredom, Gaertner claimed his motivations were different.

In September 1945, after V-J Day, the prisoners of Camp Deming saw the bulletin about their fate.

With the war officially over, the German prisoners would be returned to Europe. After working for two years on rehabilitation projects in England and France, they would each be sent back to their respective hometowns.

For the men of East Germany, like Gaertner, that meant returning to a part of the country that was now under Russian occupation.

"My fate was sealed," Gaertner wrote in his book.

What fate was that?

"I don't know, but he didn't either, and that's what frightened him," Krammer said.

Before the month was out, Gaertner had come up with his plan, slipped out of Camp Deming and traveled to California.

After the United States finished shipping its Axis prisoners back to Europe, Japan and Italy, Gaertner was one of 12 fugitive prisoners at large.

Harry Girth, a former German paratrooper, was found out by his future mother-in-law.

After seeing a 1953 spread on fugitive German prisoners of war in Collier's Magazine, she recognized her daughter's fiance — a man she knew as Henry Kolmar. At her urging, he surrendered himself to U.S. authorities that year.

Werner Paul Lueck, a former German prisoner who escaped from his camp in Las Cruces, New Mexico, was discovered living in Mexico in 1954.

Richard Westphal, a burly former truck driver, escaped from his Louisiana prison camp in August 1945. He managed to escape to Europe and lived there, under the name Charly King, until he was found in 1954.

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Kurt Rossmeisl, who had escaped from a North Carolina prison camp in 1945, made a life in Chicago under the alias Frank Ellis. After 14 years of looking over his shoulder, he walked into an FBI field office and surrendered in 1959.

By then, the list of a dozen German fugitives was whittled down to one: Georg Gaertner. And in 1963, the year before he and Jean wed, the FBI categorized the search for Gaertner as "inactive."

Throughout his first two decades as a fugitive, Gaertner eked out a living with odd jobs across the West Coast.

He first picked fruit as a migrant laborer traveling across Northern California. It was during that time that he met the real Dennis Whiles, a rugged field worker whose name he later stole.

He subsisted on jobs as a logger, cafeteria worker and seasonal ski instructor at a California resort. Later, he'd find steadier work as a salesman for an Oakland-based pre-hung door company.

He boldly applied for a driver's license and Social Security card as Dennis Whiles and, to his surprise, received both.

After he married Jean in 1964, the two settled down in Palo Alto and purchased their first home.

In retrospect, it makes sense why Gaertner never wanted to sign paperwork or be attached to any of their properties, Jean said. Everything was always in her name.

While Gaertner owned a car, Jean was always the one in the driver's seat — literally and figuratively.

In the early 1970s, with both of Jean's children grown and out of the house, the couple moved to a home off of the central California coast and opened a racquet club, where Gaertner worked his dream job as a tennis pro.

After a few years, though, "the emotional deprivation started really getting more and more to me," Jean said.

Gaertner, decades into being a wanted fugitive, had become more withdrawn from any kind of exposure, and Jean felt disconnected from her husband.

"For those years at the racquet club, I was more and more aware that something was just not fulfilling," she said.

The couple would soon make another move — this time to Hawaii.

There, Gaertner took a construction job, and Jean eventually worked for the Hawaiian Refugee Resettlement program, providing job training and health services to refugees coming to the islands.

Jean was fulfilled with her work, and Gaertner was promoted to a construction superintendent job.

In the early 1980s, as Gaertner reached into his 60s, Jean started getting documents together for the couple's retirement plan.

For almost the first time since they wed, she was asking questions about her husband's past — and he was brushing them off.

On sending off for a copy of his birth certificate: "We'll do it later."

On information about his parents: "I can't remember."

He had told her he was born in New York, but after writing to officials in Albany, Jean discovered there was no record of him there.

He had told her that he was educated in Connecticut as an orphan, but there was no record there, either. In fact, the Connecticut School for Boys didn't exist.

Faced with his wife finding out his true identity, Gaertner withdrew emotionally. Jean threatened to leave him.

With her bags packed and a cab driver waiting, she turned to her husband and asked one final question: "Are you some kind of criminal?"

"That's when he broke down and told me," she said, remembering sitting on their kitchen counter that night as his long-held secrets poured out in sobs.

"It explained so much."

As Jean had done before, she took control of the situation.

She traveled out to New Mexico to learn more about Camp Deming and Gaertner's escape.

In researching Nazi POWs, she stumbled upon Krammer's 1979 book, "Nazi Prisoners of War in America," and connected the professor and writer with Gaertner — "I practically had to hand the phone to him and stand over him."

She hired an attorney who facilitated Gaertner's surrenders to the FBI and the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. Because he was in a unique situation and it had been so long, authorities decided not to pursue legal action against Gaertner. Instead, he was granted permanent resident status.

His public surrender, which included articles in the New York Times and interview's on NBC's "Today," coincided with the September 1985 release of his and Krammer's book.

By that time, Gaertner and Jean were living in Boulder, Colorado.

"Ex-P.O.W. ends 40 years of hiding," the Times wrote in response.

"World War II finally came to an end today," a United Press International headline read.

Gaertner was invited onto "Today," where he "surrendered" on-air to co-host Bryant Gumbel.

"It was designed to sell books, of course," Krammer said.

According to Jean, Gaertner was largely embraced by the Boulder community — a sentiment echoed in a Boulder Daily Camera article from that time.

"This town is kind of crazy, anyway," a neighbor told the paper with a shrug.

"There were, of course, those who did not agree...," Jean added. But, largely, "he became quite the attraction."

Between the spate of TV appearances and book signings, Jean felt her grip on the reins of their life loosening.

For the first time in 20 years, "he was out of my control," Jean said.

"I couldn't protect him."

Following his surrender, Georg Gaertner finally went home.

Though he had corresponded through a few letters with his family while imprisoned in Deming, he claims to have convinced himself they were dead.

On the contrary, they had survived the war by fleeing to Allied-occupied West Germany.

Gaertner's parents lived into the 1960s. A family photo shows they kept a photo of Georg on their dining table decades after his escape in hopes that he was still alive.

By 1985, when he publicly surrendered, the lone surviving member of his immediate family was his younger sister, Lotte. He and Jean traveled to Germany to visit her.

In the late 1980s, Gaertner would once again return to Germany. This time, though, he stayed. For almost two years, Jean didn't hear from her husband and, in response, filed for divorce.

Gaertner later returned to the United States, where he'd live out his final years in Boulder, Longmont and Loveland.

He and Jean reconnected as friends, and when he needed help finding a place to live or getting to the hospital for a medical treatment, she was there.

"(My family) was basically his support group, his medical power of attorney," Jean said.

To her grandkids, "he was always Grandpa Dennis," she said.

Looking around her apartment, landscapes Gaertner painted for her still dot the walls. Photos from their marriage and memorabilia from their life together still fill Jean's spare room.

In his final years, Jean said her ex-husband had trouble reconciling his two identities.

While he went by Dennis Whiles for the rest of his life, he'd occasionally slip up and sign documents as Georg Gaertner.

When he and Krammer would talk on the phone, Gaertner started alluding to having some sort of split personality after living the first half of his life as one man, and the second as another.

Krammer also said Gaertner was always sensitive to his reputation as a former Nazi soldier.

When writing the book together, Krammer would send final drafts of each chapter for Gaertner to approve, sign and send off to the publisher. After sending a chapter to him, Krammer and the publisher didn't hear from him for weeks.

After finally reaching him, Krammer asked what was wrong.

"Well, you made me look like a Nazi," Krammer recalls him saying.

"Well, Georg, you were a Nazi," he replied.

"Looking back, (these men say), 'Oh no, we weren't Nazis,'" Krammer continued. "Well, at the time, they were. That's generally true for most of these men. They were Nazis at home, and once they lost (the war) ... they lost their Nazism."

"I've met these guys by the ton. I've interviewed them by the bunch. And today — with big beer bellies and grandchildren — today, they can't remember who Hitler was."

On a recent November afternoon, the hunt was somehow back on for Georg Gaertner.

Or should I call him Dennis Whiles?

Either way, the pleasant man on the other end of the phone had never heard of him.

There was no record of Gaertner or Whiles in Longmont's Foothills Garden of Memory, the cemetery's new owner told me.

"Are they buried together?" he asked, not realizing they were names for the same man.

After a spate of health problems in his final years, Gaertner died in 2013 and was cremated. His remains were then interred at Foothills Garden of Memory, or so I was told.

Jean was sure that was the place. She remembered visiting it with a documentary film crew after Gaertner's death.

But walking along the rows and rows of gravestones set against the cemetery's mountain backdrop one recent Wednesday afternoon, Georg Gaertner was nowhere to be found.

A couple of hours into the search, the cemetery's new owner pulled up, equally puzzled as to why Gaertner's stone was missing. As it turns out, Gaertner was indeed at Foothills Garden of Memory.

His cremains were in a columbarium toward the front, in box 41. The documentary crew had removed his plaque from it for filming purposes and never put it back, leaving a blank tile in its place for the past four years.

It was safe at the mortuary and would be returned within the week, the cemetery's new owner assured me. Later, he texted me a picture of the mysterious plaque.

"Georg Gaertner A.K.A. Dennis F. Whiles," it reads. "Dec. 18, 1920 – Jan. 30, 2013, Schweidnitz Silesia Germany. A displaced person."

My eyes had unknowingly passed over box 41 twice that day — a fitting coincidence too good to ignore.

All these years later and Georg Gaertner was still hiding in plain sight.