In a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, the man inside the bulletproof glass booth looked like a bored accountant, not the organizer of the Holocaust. This episode traces the path of Adolf Eichmann from a poor student and failed traveling oil salesman to the chief logistician of genocide. Drawing on trial records and biographical sources, it examines how a directionless man in his late twenties found identity and status inside the Nazi security apparatus, branded himself an expert in Jewish affairs, and built an administrative assembly line for forced emigration in Vienna in 1938 that stripped nearly a hundred thousand people of their property.

The episode follows the shift from expulsion to annihilation after the war closed the borders, Eichmann's role at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, and the deportation of over 437,000 Hungarian Jews  ...