In the early 1980s, Moshe Alamaro was living in the United States without legal status, moving quietly through Boston on the margins of American life. Trained as an engineer and newly arrived from Israel, he had entered the country on a tourist visa after being invited to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to present a clean-energy invention designed to replace fossil fuels with electricity. The idea never gained traction, and MIT had not yet offered him formal employment. Unable to return home and unwilling to give up, Alamaro stayed, supporting himself through odd jobs while trying to keep his intellectual ambitions alive.
What followed, recounted years later in Haaretz and excerpted from his book “The Reluctant Israeli: And Other Casual Essays,” was an encounter that placed him face-to-face with one of the most unsettling legacies of the 20th century. Through a chance meeting with an American businessman connected to U.S. Navy contractors, Alamaro was offered a job and a place to live. The catch was not financial or legal, but historical: the man who would employ and house him was a former Nazi soldier.
The businessman, David Kesselman, explained that his subcontractor, Dietrich Jung, owned a machine shop that manufactured parts for underwater listening devices used to track Soviet submarines. Jung lived alone in a large house and might be willing to rent a room. Before arranging a meeting, Kesselman issued a blunt warning. Jung had served in the Wehrmacht during World War II. Alamaro, a Jew and a former Israeli soldier, did not recoil. Instead, he was intrigued. For someone fascinated by history, sociology, and the mechanics of ideology, the prospect of living with a living relic of the Third Reich was disturbing but compelling.
Jung was born in 1922 in Germany, during the economic collapse and food shortages that followed World War I. Raised in a family that had manufactured hunting rifles for generations, he became a master machinist. At age 12, he joined the Hitler Youth, where discipline, racial hierarchy, and so-called Prussian virtues were drilled into him as moral absolutes. Too short to qualify for the SS, he nevertheless fought for Nazi Germany, first on the Eastern Front and later with the Afrika Korps in North Africa. These experiences shaped him permanently.
When Alamaro met Jung, he was struck by the man’s rigid physical presence and emotional containment. Jung stood squarely on both feet, spoke only when necessary, and maintained an immaculate home governed by routine and order. Despite Kesselman’s concerns, Jung offered Alamaro both a job in his machine shop and a room in his house without hesitation. The arrangement quickly evolved into a strange domestic coexistence between a Jewish Israeli engineer and a former Nazi soldier.
Their daily lives were marked by mundane rituals: grocery shopping, shared meals, evenings spent talking on the deck. Jung displayed moments of kindness and paternal concern, advising Alamaro to check eggs for cracks or commenting approvingly on his work. Yet ideology lingered in the background. Jung spoke openly of German superiority, of Aryan civilization, and of his belief that Jews had once “owned” Germany. He avoided explicit discussion of the Holocaust but retained the language and assumptions that had made it possible.
Alamaro listened carefully, sometimes arguing, sometimes letting the statements hang in the air. He challenged Jung’s claims by explaining the historical role Jews played in building German industry and commerce, noting the irony of blaming Jews for Germany’s success while benefiting from their contributions. Jung seemed unsettled by these arguments, unable to reconcile them with the worldview instilled in him as a boy.
The conversations grew darker when Jung spoke of the war. He analyzed military campaigns with technical detachment, discussing logistics, strategy, and failure. He explained Germany’s push into North Africa as a flawed attempt to reach Middle Eastern oil and described the African campaign as a logistical nightmare that doomed the effort. He spoke contemptuously of some allies and admiringly of others, always through a lens shaped by hierarchy and discipline.
One evening, Jung recounted a battle against American soldiers who had taken shelter in their barracks and surrendered. He described the moment with unusual intensity, then stopped abruptly. When Alamaro asked whether the Americans were taken prisoner, Jung left the room without answering. The silence was chilling. For Alamaro, it was clear that the soldiers had not survived. The realization transformed abstract ideology into moral certainty. This was not merely a man with objectionable views, but someone who had likely participated in war crimes and never confronted them.
The fragile coexistence unraveled the next day. A minor accident in the machine shop escalated into anger, and Jung muttered the word Üntermensch, the Nazi slur for subhuman. Alamaro confronted him directly, exposing the hierarchy Jung still carried within him. By noon, Alamaro resigned and left, driving back to Boston with a mix of rage, clarity, and exhaustion.
In reflecting on the experience, Alamaro wrote that he did not regret meeting Jung. The encounter confirmed what history books alone could not fully convey: that Nazism did not vanish with defeat in 1945. It survived in individuals who carried it quietly into new lives, democratic societies, and polite conversations. Jung became an American citizen, tended his garden meticulously, and spoke occasionally of retreating to a romantic cabin overlooking the Pacific. He never went. He died in 2018, having lived decades without publicly reckoning with his past.
As reported by Haaretz, Alamaro’s story is not one of reconciliation or redemption. It is a warning about the persistence of ideology and the ease with which atrocity can be buried beneath civility and routine. History, the story suggests, does not always return in uniforms or slogans. Sometimes it opens its home to you, shares a meal, and avoids the questions that matter most.
