[mighty_plant]

After the war he lived four years in the same small village as my grandmom, breeding chicken and working in the woods until he saved enough money for his escape to Argentina. He supposedly even sold his eggs to the Jewish survivor community of the closeby concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.

https://www-weser--kurier-de.translate.goog/niedersachsen/ei...

[leobg]

So did your grandma interact with him? How come people in the article are/were so reluctant to talk about him?

[mighty_plant]

There were definitely some interactions but of course Eichmann tried to keep social activities to a minimum just so much that he didn't give rise to any suspicion.

I assume that people don't want to talk to reporters because of the bad image cast on them. I mean having a mass murderer in your community and not identifying him people may think that you're either dumb or you were actively ignoring it. After the war people mostly tried to forget about the Nazis as a coping mechanism for their common guilt.

[leobg]

This is one thing in Germany that makes me feel like I’m living in the Matrix:

You think you’ve learned about World War II and the Nazis in school. You think the lessons are all to clear. But then you read Sebastian Haffner’s “Geschichte eines Deutschen“, or Stefan Zweig‘s „Die Welt von Gestern“. And you look around. And you recognize those very same characters. The Eichmanns. The SA henchmen. People who would probably be very happy in that regime, even though they have no idea that they would - because what they’ve learned about it is a very different story. A fairytale almost.