by Katelyn Muir

Created on: November 17, 2008

It is unlikely that a young child looks up at their parent and says when they want to grow up they want to massacre and torture millions of people.

Somehow along life's path some people make choice that lead to dire consequences and the rest of the world are left wondering how they got to that place. One of these men is Karl Adolf Eichmann. He was born March 19, 1906 near Cologne, Germany.

His family was Protestant and of the middle class. Although native to Germany, Eichmann and his family moved to Austria, to Hitler's hometown of Linz, where he would grow up. As a child, Eichmann's dark complexion earned him the nickname the little Jew' from his peers.

As a young man Eichmann desired to become an engineer but failed to pass the exams and to finish his studies. He ended up in a series of jobs, one as a labourer in his father's small mining company. He also worked for an electrical company, in the sales department and as a traveling salesman for an American oil company.

At 26 years old, in 1932, he chose to join the Austria Nazi Party. He had some encouragement from Ernst Kaltenbrunner to do so. Quickly Eichmann became a member of the SS and served as an SS corporal at Dachau concentration camp in 1934.

The monotony of his job at Dachau did not suit Eichmann, but that problem was fixed when he got a job in Heydrich's SD, the very powerful SS security service, just months later. He was quickly moving up the ranks. In his new position, he worked as a filing clerk, cataloguing information on Freemasons. Soon he was moved to the Jewish section, where he gained lots of information on prominent Jews. This sparked the immense interest he took in the Jews that would catapult his career. The special interest he took in the Jewish people and culture would be to their detriment. He began attending Jewish meetings and visiting Jewish sections of cities. He took volumes of notes on what he learned and thought of these people. He learned Hebrew and also managed to learn to speak some Yiddish. If he was not intending to use all his knowledge for evil, he could have been deemed an honorary Jew. He became widely known as a Jewish specialist'.

He attracted the attention he desired and was promoted to head a SD Scientific Museum of Jewish Affairs, which was a new creation. Eichmann was assigned to find a solution to the Jewish question'. He decided to discuss a mass migration of the Jews to the Middle East with Arab leaders and went to Pakistan in 1937. He was quickly ordered out of

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