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PARTISAN REVIEW
Nazis than the Dirty War. Last Spring, when the Dirty War kept com–
ing up during his successful re-election campaign, Menem would periodi–
cally make harsh statements about Priebke, demanding his rapid depar–
ture.
Priebke was a well-trained, well-mannered obsequious European
hotel staffer - helpful in several languages, friendly but impersonal. When
Hitler came to power in 1933 he joined the Nazi party and left the ho–
tel business. As well as charming women, he interrogated and tortured
with a terrifying coldness at SS headquarters on the Via Tasso in Rome.
When Hitler was finished he got another hotel job, this time in Buenos
Aires, never to be seen brutalizing, or for that matter womanizing,
agam.
Survivors were able to acquire two floors of the Via Tasso building
to preserve as a museum. They could not get the rest because other cells
had already been sold off as apartments at bargain prices. The late direc–
tor of the museum, Arrigo Paladini, described the three times Priebke in–
terrogated him. "He hit me in the chest with the brass knuckles that he
used habitually on prisoners.. . . Distinct from the others, his language
was not offensive or vulgar and he did not easily lose control."
According to Paladini, Priebke's "appearance and behavior were stiff and
cold and to those who didn't know he was a killer, this made him ap–
pear less ferocious and more humane than the others. In truth it was a
more refined ferocity."
In the Andean town of San Carlos de Bariloche, Priebke and his
wife and two sons opened a mom-and-pop deli. A thousand miles south
of Buenos Aires, Bariloche was not founded until the end of the last
century, by Germans from Chile, after the last of hostile indigenous
tribes were defeated. On the shore of a sprawling cold mountain lake
called Nuhuel Huapi, the architecture is Swiss and Bavarian, resembling
an Alpine resort. In the lakeside village center is a small shopping mall.
Its fountain is decorated with a circular concrete maze-like design of
upside down crosses. The center of this geometric pattern is a large
swastika.
The German community, which is the most talked-about, is com–
prised of only a few hundred citizens of Bariloche's total population of
eighty thousand. There are larger Italian, Spanish and Croat communities
- also nations with Fascist pasts. There are indigenous Indians and other
South Americans, though they and the small Jewish community are never
invited to participate in the annual cultural festival .
Priebke was always a little rigid with his old-fashioned German heel–
clicking courtesy, but he was good with children . As a child Claudio
Pezzuoli, who is now the president of the Italian community in
