The Nazi Hunters

Chapter 1 begins with Adolf Eichmann at the height of his power, on his thirty-eighth birthday, on March 19, 1944. He is at the head of a convoy of SS soldiers and Gestapo, en route to conquered Hungary from Austria. Eichmann is the head of Jewish affairs in Nazi Germany, in charge of the IVB. The directive of this plan is to track down, isolate, displace, and ultimately murder the Jewish peoples of Europe. Although Eichmann holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, he is not a soldier in the common sense; his success is measured in how timely he completes his tasks. Despite this bureaucratic, administrative language, Eichmann is definitely a soldier, and the Jews are the enemy. What Eichmann has in store for the Jewish people of Hungary he has already enacted in other countries. This basic plan has three parts: isolation of the Jewish minorities in their respective societies, seizure of their property and businesses, and their forced transport to "ghettos,"undesirable neighborhoods, from which they are not allowed to leave. However, beyond even these stepswaits the horrors of the concentration camps. This was the fate that awaited twenty-year-old Zeev Sapir and his family.