April Chill

We'd had enough of snow. We looked forward to spring in 1961. A time of warmth and the colors of flowers and buds on the trees. That fresh air smell and the calm of it all. Easter and candy and the promise of a brand new year.
The world would come knocking that April. Easter and Springtime would be put aside this year; a monster from the not too distant past would be on display for all the world to see, and a secret little war would come to an end in a bay on the coast of Cuba.
Adolf Eichmann, a former Nazi concentration camp bureaucrat had been captured by the Israelis in Argentina in 1960. They brought him to Israel to stand trial for crimes against humanity. The trial would begin that April of 1961, and all the horrors of World War II would be on the minds of people all over the world once again.
The trial was broadcast live, and Eichmann was put in a bulletproof glass booth for all the world to see.
We would listen and learn that Eichmann was responsible for the deportation of Jews and other people the Nazis deemed undesirable. His task was to be efficient; he was to figure out the logistics of mass murder and to make it work.
Eichmann did not deny anything. He did not rant or rave or act in any way like a monster. He did not commit any crime, he would say. His defense, like so many other Nazis, was that he was merely following orders, that the murder of millions of men, women and children was just another day at the office, just another part of the daily routine. Eichmann showed the world that people who had been Nazis weren't necessarily raving lunatics or psychopaths; that ordinary people could be capable of the most evil acts imaginable.
Eichmann's trial would make some people in our government uncomfortable. We had been recruiting former Nazis into the CIA as spies, and wasn't that Werner Von Braun guy working over at NASA the man responsible for the rockets that bombed London? The CIA knew where Eichmann was, but they kept quiet about it because they didn't want attention drawn to themselves; they didn't want the world to know that our country was using former Nazis to help us fight the Communists.
It seemed that evil could be overlooked if you could make yourself useful.
So the world would watch the man in the glass booth and listen to all the witnesses recount the horrors of concentration camps and how Eichmann was an important cog in the Nazi machine.
He would shock the world by how common he was; how indifferent he was.
He showed the world that there could be monsters lurking in us all.