A GOOD NEIGHBOR

For nearly fifty years, a Nazi war criminal lived openly in a Patagonian paradise. No one was looking for him. Three strangers would bring him down.

In Patagonia, on the shores of one of the world’s most beautiful lakes, an abandoned villa is being swallowed by vegetation. Locals call it “the Nazi’s house.” In Bariloche, everyone remembers that Nazi, Erich Priebke, known as “Don Erico”: headmaster of the German school, a doting grandfather, a respected local figure—a good neighbor. Unlike so many Nazis who found refuge in South America by living on the run, Priebke felt so safe that he did not even change his name. Yet his past would eventually catch up with him and bring him before the courts. He died in 2013, at the age of one hundred, in an apartment in Rome. His grave, hidden away in the cemetery of a military prison, bears no name, no date—only a number.

How could one of the perpetrators of the Ardeatine Caves massacre, the largest mass killing of civilians carried out by the Nazis in Italy, have found such a safe haven in this peaceful resort town at the foot of the Andes? And what finally brought his past to light?

Years apart, three strangers would unwittingly follow in one another’s footsteps, each playing a part in exposing him. Estaban, a young journalist investigating a local painter and former Belgian collaborator, crosses paths with Priebke and documents it in a book. Dalila, a translator from Buenos Aires, chances upon one of the last remaining copies of that book and persuades journalists from ABC News to travel to Bariloche, where she manages to expose Priebke and corner him on camera. A scandal erupts.

Then Giulia enters the story. She was seventeen when seven members of her family were murdered at the Ardeatine Caves. Fifty years later, she crosses the Atlantic, rallies public opinion, and demands that Priebke stand trial in Rome. After three extraordinary trials, he is finally sentenced to life imprisonment. Bariloche, his “little paradise in the Andes,” is a place the former SS officer will never see again.

Decades later, Thibault de Montaigu comes across the Nazi’s house. He picks up the trail and tracks down the last surviving witnesses to this extraordinary story. The culmination of ten years of investigation spanning Patagonia, Israel, and Rome, A Good Neighbor combines the pace of a spy novel with the sweep of historical narrative. It tells the story of three strangers, never destined to become Nazi hunters, who gradually discover that their own pasts hold what will lead them to bring down a perpetrator of the Ardeatine Caves massacre. It is also a book about the elusive quest for Eden—about the lies buried beneath the paradises we build for ourselves.