One day a Jehovah’s Witness came to the door. I was on the second floor and overheard Jung telling the man, quite proudly it seemed, that he had a guest from Jerusalem in his home. Jung himself was a member of a Lutheran church, which he joined since it was the closest to his home.

It was spring. Almost every evening, we sat on the deck surrounded by lush greenery, eating and telling each other war stories, sharing opinions and insight on history and politics. Jung was fluent in English and well read, especially with respect to the topic of World War II and its aftermath. He had a habit of repeating word for word what I was saying, like an echo.

I told him about “Herman the German,” the nickname of Gerhard Neumann, a mechanical genius who was lucky enough to accept a job in China just before the war broke out, working there for the U.S. Air Force. One of his most amazing accomplishments was single-handedly restoring a “Zero,” the most feared Japanese combat aircraft in the world, after it had crashed. After the war, Herman immigrated to the United States, where he helped to introduce British jet-engine technology to General Electric. He received citizenship by a special act of the Congress in recognition for his contribution to the war efforts. As he listened, Jung ignored the subject of Herman’s Jewishness but expressed pride in his countryman’s achievements.

Jung was born in a village 15 kilometers (about 10 miles) south of Darmstadt, a city in the state of Hesse that was known, especially in the latter half of the 18th century, for a single, major export: soldiers. Hessian soldiers were mercenaries vilified in the U.S. Declaration of Independence for fighting on behalf of King George III against the revolutionaries in the colonies. Unusually, the Hessians were not paid for their services – instead, their king was. Although courageous and disciplined, they were generally regarded as cannon fodder in comparison to the exalted Prussian officers.

Although Hesse declined and its mercenary army ceased to exist by the early 19th century, the region upheld its military tradition. Indeed, Jung’s family’s hunting rifle business had existed there for over three generations. Among its eight employees during the mid-1920s and early ’30s, most likely, were two Jews: Aron and Hans. The managerial and administrative tasks regarded today as the best corporate jobs in the fields of finance and marketing were delegated to the Jews since Jung’s family preferred to design, select materials and manufacture goods.

Jung thought Jews usually engaged in white-collar professions, but I had learned to use machine tools. ‘Can you handle a lathe?’ he yelled. ‘Piece of cake,’ I said.

During our evening conversations, Jung did not fail to say that Germans felt before the war that their country had “belonged to the Jews.” No wonder, I thought. Over generations, Germans willingly gave the best managerial responsibilities to Jews. I would not be surprised if Aron and Hans knew the business side of hunting rifle manufacturing better than Jung’s family.

I told him that his family business was actually a microcosm of the whole of Germany as far as Jews were concerned. In the 18th century, Frederick II, King of Prussia, sought to develop clothing and footwear manufacturing businesses, among others; to that end he sent emissaries to Poland and Russia to find Jewish businessmen, offering them various financial benefits to start industries in Prussia. Again, no wonder Germans felt 150 years later that Germany “belonged to the Jews.” But Jung seemed slightly confused by my arguments.

Hans, who essentially acted as CEO in the family business, according to Jung, was tall, blond and looked like an Aryan, while Aron was short and dark. Hans fought in World War I and was even awarded the vaunted Iron Cross, which Hitler himself was awarded twice. Jung did not know what happened to Aron. But he knew that his father had been grateful to Hans for his services and in 1937, as the Nazis began to rise to power and targeted Jews, Jung’s father took Hans to the Dutch border and gave him a substantial sum of money. “Most likely he ended up in America,” Jung said.

I asked Jung for more recollections of his time in the Hitler Youth movement. Its members were told repeatedly, he said, that the Aryan master race is Übermensch – superhuman – while the Jews, Slavs and everyone else were Üntermensch – subhuman. He did not elaborate about Jews, probably not wanting to offend me.

The movement was preoccupied with fatigue competitions and other warlike games, including swimming 10 meters under the ice in a frozen lake. Indeed, such warlike tendencies were observed by Julius Caesar some 2,100 years ago, when writing “The Gallic Wars” and describing the Germans. Caesar described the Gauls as warlike, but having some regard for social organization and the rule of law – as opposed to the incorrigible Germanic tribes whom he fought. Centuries later, Machiavelli also noted during his travels to Germany how its inhabitants were also enamored of war games and fatigue competitions. Apparently, Germans had not changed much over the millennia.

At one point, Jung startled me by saying that “the Aryan race made the world rich and for the past 300 years it has carried the torch of civilization.”

“How is that?” I asked.

“All the big, significant inventions and cultures of the past three centuries, and in fact, in all of human history, were made by Aryan Germanic people,” he said, adding that Germanic peoples are not only Germans per se, but also include the Dutch and English and others populating northwestern Europe.

As a technologist, I was inclined to agree, but I did not continue this line of discussion. I wanted to ask him why Germany plunged so abruptly into barbarism in the first half of the 20th century.

“Did you see Hitler then as we see him now, a sort of Charlie Chaplin clown?” I asked.

Jung hesitated. “We regarded him as a messiah, especially because of the global recession starting in 1929 that Hitler correctly predicted.”

During one conversation, Jung expressed a profound sense of irony, saying: “We [Germans] are the best in any political system. Our democracy in West Germany is the best, our communism in East Germany is the best. Our fascism was the best, and our feudal system was one of the best, our Prussian monarch was the best, and as barbarians, we brought Rome to its knees.”

Jung had had a lot of combat experience, but seemed to be reluctant to talk about his brief stint on the Eastern Front where the Germans killed, mostly by starvation, more than 2 million Russian POWs between June 1941 and February 1942. Some experts believe that was the highest-ever number of wartime fatalities in such a short period, and among the worst war crimes ever committed in history.

When the Afrika Korps was formed, Jung was transferred to its armored division. He was only 19.

“Why did Germany invade North Africa?” I asked.

“Germany wanted to capture the oil in the Persian Gulf.”

“So why invade North Africa?”

“How else could we reach the Persian Gulf? The British Navy controlled the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal. We did not have a navy that could reach the Persian Gulf. Invading the Gulf through Iran was out of the question. So, we thought that starting in North Africa and advancing eastward through Egypt would be the way to go,” he said, adding, “Our beachhead in North Africa was close to Italy. Italians were our allies, taking part in the African campaign.”

“How were the Italians as soldiers?” I asked, noting that they had a reputation for being poor soldiers. Having been born in Italy myself, in 1948, I have always had an interest in everything Italian.

“They were poor soldiers when they fought for the Italian Army,” Jung explained. “Their officers were abusing them and stealing their food. But then Italian divisions were handed over to the German Army. We treated them as equal; they were so grateful and fought admirably.”

He told me how Italians were masters of improvisation and evasion, and how they hated the British who, in some instances, did not even bother taking Italians as POWs, but rather left them, abandoned and naked, in the African desert. For the Italians, that was worse than being executed.

I left and drove back to Boston. I did not regret having met Jung, although I was angry. At last, I had personally validated what I had heard about the Nazis, as if I had ever doubted it.

“We also had some Arabs fighting with us. They also hated the British,” he said.

“How were they?” I asked.

“The Arabs,” he said, contemptuously, “abandoned the battle in the middle, and started to collect useless booty, carrying it away on their backs in blankets. We were really shocked.”

“How come in the movies,” I asked, “we see SS and German soldiers dressed impeccably during battle?”

Jung laughed: “What cameras were there to record the German troops’ conduct? Of course, they were German cameras, orchestrated by Goebbels’ propaganda machine. And how else would you present German troops if not as clean, organized and immaculate in comparison to the disheveled Russian and American soldiers?”

“Why did you lose the African war?” I continued.

Jung: “The African expedition was a logistical nightmare. We needed 6,000 tons of supplies per day. Food, munitions and spare parts were transported to Italy from Germany, France and other occupied countries by trains, then loaded onto ships in Italian ports before crossing the Mediterranean Sea, while under attack by the Royal Air Force. When the supplies arrived, they needed to be unloaded at a port in Africa and then transported by trucks to the troops. This, together with [fighting on] the Russian front, was just too much for Germany. We were really overextended. Even if we reached the oil in the Gulf, how were we supposed to extract it and ship it to Europe?”