One of the most brutal of the Nazi officers who controlled Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, Karl Adolf Eichmann nearly escaped prosecution. It took 15 years after the end of World War II to find him, but Israeli secret service agents finally located him in Argentina and arrested him. As chief of the Gestapo's "Office for Jewish Emigration" from its inception, Eichmann was responsible for moving Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe to the concentration camps where an estimated six million died.

Born in the German town of Solingen in 1906, Eichmann moved with his family to Linz, Austria (coincidentally, Hitler's home town) during World War I. He became interested in the then-secret National Socialist (Nazi) Party and actually joined early in 1932. Within six months he had joined the elite group known as the Schutzstaffel, or the SS, and a year later he was attached briefly to the Austrian...