  After the pioneering work of the Heidelberg-Moscow (HDM) and International
Germanium Experiment (IGEX) groups, the second round of neutrinoless
double-$\beta$ decay searches currently underway has or will improve the
life-time limits of double-$\beta$ decay candidates by a factor of two to
three, reaching in the near future the $T_{1/2} = 3 \times 10^{25}$ yr level.
This talk will focus on the large-scale experiments GERDA, EXO-200, and
KamLAND-Zen, which have reported already lower half-life time limits in excess
of $10^{25}$ yr. Special emphasis is given to KamLAND-Zen, which is expected to
approach the inverted hierarchy regime before future 1-ton experiments probe
completely this life-time or effective neutrino-mass regime, which starts at
$\approx 2 \times 10^{26}$ yr or $\approx 50$ meV.
