Adolf Eichmann was born in 1906 in Solingen, in the Rhineland, to a lower-middle-class family that relocated to Austria in 1914 after the death of his mother. His father owned a small mining business. Young Adolf showed little academic aptitude and failed to graduate from vocational school. He began working as a laborer in his father’s company, later securing a position in the sales office of an electronics firm. Eventually, he was offered a job as a sales representative for the Austrian branch of the Vacuum Oil Company, where he worked from 1928 to 1933.

In 1932, he joined the Nazi Party. Until then, he had shown little political interest, aside from his student days when he belonged to a pro-German, anti-republican organization. His reasons for joining the Nazi Party were rooted in his belief that the Treaty of Versailles had been unjust and that unemployment needed to be addressed. Beyond that, he had not read Mein Kampf and did not harbor any particular hostility toward Jews. In fact, it was through the recommendation of Jewish relatives of his father's second wife that he had been hired at Vacuum Oil.

That same year, he was faced with a decision: whether to join the SS or become a member of the Schlaraffia. The Schlaraffia was a kind of Masonic lodge, formally known as Schlaraffenland, or “The Land of Cockaigne,” whose members included industrialists, doctors, actors, and civil servants. They met regularly, and each member was required to deliver a lecture filled with refined humor. Membership in the SS, however, was incompatible with belonging to the Schlaraffia, as the Nazis refused to accept Freemasons within their ranks.

Ultimately, the Schlaraffia shut its doors to him after he violated the lodge’s rules by trying to invite fellow members out for drinks. Thus, following the suggestion of future high-ranking Nazi Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann joined the SS. He later described his decision as follows: Kaltenbrunner had asked him, “Why don’t you join the SS?” and Eichmann replied, “Right, why not?”

So began his career within the Nazi Party, which would eventually lead him, during the war, to oversee the logistical organization of the extermination of Europe’s Jews, a crime for which he was sentenced to death by hanging in 1962 following the Jerusalem trial.