The Capture of Eichmann: How a Nazi-hunter tracked down his biggest prey

Simon Wiesenthal died this week, peacefully in his sleep, at the age of 96. Wiesenthal was one of that generation of European Jewry decimated by the "final solution" of Adolf Hitler in which 11 million people were exterminated, six million of them Jews. And if the horror of such genocide is blunted rather than sharpened by such huge numbers, consider this: Simon Wiesenthal lost 89 members of his family in the Holocaust. Among them were his mother, whom the young architect had watched being transported away for execution.

But he had survived. And after the death camp in which he was incarcerated was liberated, Wiesenthal - like so many victims of Nazism - dedicated himself to tracking down those responsible. Top of his list was Adolf Eichmann.

The experiences of Simon Wiesenthal and Adolf Eichmann are like mirror images of that terrible time. Eichmann was the "Transportation Administrator" responsible for the logistics of the extermination of millions of people. He had been at the notorious Wannsee Conference in 1942 when the cream of Germany's planners, administrators and logisticians sat around and calmly set up the mechanics of the mass murder of "undesirables" - Jews, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals, communists and the mentally and physically handicapped. Eichmann was the man in charge of the trains to the death camps in Poland.

For the next two years, Eichmann performed his duties with considerable zeal. He is known to have often bragged that he had personally sent more than five million Jews to their deaths on his trains. When in 1945, fearing the war was lost, his bosses ordered Jewish extermination be halted - and all the evidence destroyed - Eichmann blithely ignored his instructions from the SS chief Heinrich Himmler and proudly continued his work in Hungary against official orders.