As the "Jewish specialist" of the SS, Adolf Eichmann zealously and efficiently organized the arrests and transportation of millions of Jews to death and concentration camps. Convinced of the importance and "necessity" of his task, he asserted that he performed his job "with all the fanaticism that an old Nazi would expect of himself." He found his work "fascinating" and admitted that doing it well gave him "uncommon joy."

Eichmann joined the SS in 1932, and in 1934 he took a position in Reinhard Heydrich's Security Service (SD). Within the SD's Jewish Department, he became the leading expert on Jewish affairs. Disguised as a journalist, he traveled to Palestine in 1937 to study the possibility of deporting Jews to that region, but he concluded that the creation of a Jewish state "should be impeded." After the annexation of Austria in March 1938, he headed the Office of Jewish Emigration, acquiring expertise in "forced emigration" techniques: systematic physical violence, blackmail, and concentration-camp threats.

At the 1942 Wannsee Conference, Eichmann received the task of implementing the "Final Solution." With utmost bureaucratic efficiency, he organized the technical aspects of the extermination policy--from roundups and train convoys to devising gassing procedures and setting death quotas in extermination camps.