“It was a giant fleecing operation. Jews entered at one end with money and possessions and came out the other with nothing but their lives. The Nazis would later refer to the process as the ‘Vienna model,’ and it was regarded as one of Eichmann’s finest accomplishments. In truth, Voss deserved much of the credit, if you can call it that. He was never far from Eichmann’s side. They used to prowl the corridors of the palace in their black SS uniforms like a pair of young gods. But there was one difference. Eichmann was transparently cruel to his victims, but those who encountered Voss were often struck by his impeccable manners. He always carried himself as though he found the entire process distasteful. In reality, it was just a disguise. Voss was a shrewd businessman. He would search out the well-to-do and pull them into his office for a private chat. Invariably, their money would end up in his pocket. By the time he left Vienna, Kurt Voss was a wealthy man. And he was just getting started.”

By the autumn of 1941, with the Continent engulfed in war, Hitler and his senior henchmen decided that the Jews were to be exterminated. Europe was to be scoured from west to east, with Eichmann and his “deportation experts” operating the levers of death. The able-bodied would be used as slave labor. The rest—the young, the old, the sick, the disabled—would immediately be subjected to “special treatment.” For the nine and a half million Jews living under direct or indirect German rule, it was a catastrophe, a crime without a name.

“But not for Voss,” said Lavon. “For Kurt Voss, it was the business opportunity of a lifetime.”

As the lethal summer of 1942 commenced, Voss and the rest of Eichmann’s team were headquartered in Berlin at 116 Kurfürstenstrasse, an imposing building which, much to Eichmann’s delight, had once housed a Jewish mutual aid society. Known as Department IVB4, these were the men who kept the Continent-wide enterprise of mass murder humming along smoothly.

“Voss had an office just down the hall from Eichmann,” Lavon said. “But he was rarely there. Voss had a roving commission. He approved the deportation lists, supervised the roundups, and secured the necessary trains. And, of course, he expanded his thriving side business, robbing his victims blind before dispatching them to their deaths.”

But Voss’s most lucrative transaction would occur late in the war and in the last country to be ravaged by the fires of the Holocaust: Hungary. When Eichmann arrived in Budapest, he had one goal—finding each and every one of Hungary’s 825,000 Jews and sending them to their deaths at Auschwitz. His trusted aide, Kurt Voss, wanted something else.