Many Inquisitors joined the dark side due to torture or corruption. Under Vader's command, the Inquisitors searched the galaxy to destroy all Jedi. In a similiar vain to how Skywalker had fallen, the Inquisitors were all former Jedi that had fallen to the dark side and pledged themselves to Palpatine. Fearing the threat the surviving Jedi posed to his rule, Emperor Palpatine created the Inquisitors to track down and corrupt or eliminate the last remaining Jedi. As such, several Jedi had survived the initial purge and gone into hiding. The majority of the Jedi were killed by the clones but several managed to escape, especially after Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi sent out a distress signal from the Jedi Temple, warning the survivors off. Sidious also turned Skywalker to the dark side to be his apprentice, giving him the name "Darth Vader." Whereas Skywalker had the potential to be a Sith in his eyes, Sidious had selected those who would become Inquisitors specifically because he felt they had no chance of becoming powerful enough to challenge him. Nevertheless, as Sidious had predicted, some Jedi survived the mass–killing, so he planned for the Inquistors to hunt those who survived until the light of the Jedi was extinguished once and for all. Using Jedi Master Mace Windu's attempt to have him arrested as justification, the new Emperor activated Order 66, which had been hardwired into almost all of the Republic's clone troopers by the Sith prior to the war, and instructed them to kill the Jedi. When the war ended, Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine, who was secretly Darth Sidious, formed the Galactic Empire and declared the Jedi its enemy. He secretly offered these select few a chance at surviving Order 66, so long as they joined him and the dark side of the Force.
The Eighth Brother, Seventh Sister, and Fifth BrotherĪs the war carried on, Sidious also kept an eye on Jedi who had grievances with the Jedi High Council or the role the Jedi Order was playing in the conflict. Despite this setback, Sidious made more facilities and altered more nanny droids, ensuring the continuation of his plan to use Mustafar as a base to turn infants to his side. Nevertheless, this operation was prevented by Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker and Padawan Ahsoka Tano, who rescued the children and escaped the ruined facility with them. At his private facility, Sidious intended to put the children through a slave conditioning process, having foreseen he would have "an army" of Force-sensitive spies in his service. During the Clone Wars, Sidious hired bounty hunter Cad Bane to kidnap several Force-sensitive children who would become Jedi younglings in the near future. Knowing that there would be some Jedi who could survive his planned beginning of a Great Jedi Purge through Order 66, Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Sidious began to lay the seeds of the Inquisitorious program years before he became Galactic Emperor. And my enemies would be helpless against such vision." ―Darth Sidious " I foresee an army of Force-talented spies in my service, trained in the dark side to peer into every corner of the galaxy from afar. When the Empire believed the Jedi Order to be largely extinct by the time of the Galactic Civil War, the Inquisitorius were said to have vanished. Their pursuit of the Spectres also brought them into contact with another Jedi Purge survivor, the former Jedi Ahsoka Tano, as well as the former Sith Lord Maul, who sought revenge against the Sith for casting him out and killing his brother and mother. One of these groups were the Spectres, a rebel cell that included the Jedi Purge survivor Kanan Jarrus and his Padawan, Ezra Bridger.
In the years leading up to the Galactic Civil War, the Inquisitors came into conflict with several Jedi and groups affiliated with surviving or former Jedi as part of the purge. The Inquisitors were governed by the Sith Lord Darth Vader, who was the apprentice to the Galactic Emperor, Sheev Palpatine, and led by an individual known only by his title, the Grand Inquisitor. Members of the Inquisitorius were called Imperial Inquisitors, or simply Inquisitors, and were also nicknamed "Red Blades." They were tasked with hunting down the remaining Jedi who had survived Order 66 at the end of the Clone Wars as part of the Great Jedi Purge, as well as other political dissidents, and retrieving any children identified as Force-sensitive.
The Inquisitorius, also known as the Inquisitorius Program, the Order of Inquisitors, and the Imperial Inquisition, was an organization of mysterious, Force-sensitive dark side agents who served the Sith-ruled Galactic Empire. " Why, Jedi, of course." ―Darth Sidious and Darth Vader Slaves to the light side once, now awake.