Adolf Eichmann, an unremarkable former traveling salesman, became a chief logistical architect of the Holocaust, scheduling the trains that carried millions to extermination camps. He built a career as a self-styled bureaucratic specialist, reducing human beings to cargo capacities and rail timetables from behind a Berlin desk.

His detached bureaucrat defense collapsed under scrutiny: in Hungary in 1944 he personally drove the deportation of over 437,000 people and defied a halt order to keep trains running. He fled to Argentina after the war, was captured by Mossad in 1960, and tried in Jerusalem, where his crimes were placed on the historical record.

• He was deployed to Vienna in 1938 to run a state-sanctioned forced-emigration extortion racket.
• At the 1942 Wannsee Conference he served as the logistics liaison, not a decision maker.
• A teenager’s careless boast to his girlfriend ultimately exposed the family’s hiding place.
• Mossad agents disguised him as a sedated airline crew member to smuggle him out of Argentina.
• Hannah Arendt coined the banality of evil, an interpretation many modern historians now dispute.