In 1960, Adolf Eichmann took to the defendant's box in Jerusalem and insisted that he was no "manager of the Holocaust," as his accusers claimed, just a small-time bureaucrat following orders; perhaps surprisingly, many listeners were convinced. Collecting testimony from ace Luftwaffe pilots and SS henchmen, Bettina Stangneth refutes here Eichmann's claim and reconstructs in detail the secret life of one of the Holocaust's foremost perpetrators.