 began studying Judaism.
When the Second World War began in September, 1939, Eichmann was promoted to the rank of Captain. He continued to work on plans to deport Jews from Germany, Austria and the occupied areas of Europe. During this work on the project he was quickly promoted to Major, then Lieutenant Colonel. Despite more than a year of work, his plans for mass deportations never moved pass the discussion stage.
In January, 1942, Eichmann was sent to the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, where he acted as recording secretary. The Conference brought together those civilian Nazis and SS officers whose job it would soon become to facilitate the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe. This genocide was presented as a top priority to those present. While death squads had been roaming Poland and the Ukraine with orders to round up Jews and kill them, nothing had been organized on a nationwide scale. The extermination of an entire race would take a tremendous allocation of resources, all while Germany strained to fight a two-front war. Such was the depth of the Nazi's hate.
Eichmann left the conference with orders to take charge of the trains necessary to carry Jews to the concentration camps. He was efficient at this work, so much so that when Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, he was sent to organize the round-up and deportation of that nation's Jewish population. In early 1945, Henrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS, ordered the genocide to cease and all evidence of the crime destroyed. Eichmann ignored the order and continued to do his ghastly work in Hungary. By the end of the war, 400,000 Hungarian Jews had died in the camps.
Eichmann was captured by the US Army in 1945, but he used a false name and convinced his captors that he was as person of little value. He escaped his captivity in 1946, hid in Germany for several years and then traveled to Italy in 1950. There, he obtained a humanitarian passport and a visa from Argentina. He soon left Europe forever. His past went with him.
After escaping from US custody in Germany, Adolf Eichmann made his way to Argentina. A decade went by, during which time he worked several different jobs in the Buenos Aires area using a series of assumed names. Meanwhile, Nazi hunters and the Israeli intelligence agency (the Mossad) searched the world over for Eichmann and other escaped war criminals. Simon Wiesenthal, the most famous Nazi hunter of them all, received a letter from a close friend who lived in Buenos Aires. The friend said that he had seen a local water company employee who was, he was certain, Adolf Eichmann. Whether this piece of information helped in his capture has been the source of some speculation. However, a chance relationship would ultimately reveal Eichmann's whereabouts beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Lothar Hermann, a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp, had moved to Argentina after the war with his family. His daughter Sylvia became involved with a young man named Klaus who, as fate would have it, was Eichmann's eldest son. Klaus was proud of his father's past and did little to hide his true identity. Sylvia told her father about Klaus's boasts, at which point he sent his daughter back to Klaus's house on a fact-finding mission. She eventually met the senior Eichmann, which told Lothar Hermann everything he needed to know. He contacted the Chief Prosecutor for the West German state of Hesse and Israeli officials. The Israelis wasted no time in formulating a plan to bring Eichmann to justice.
A team of Mossad agents captured the former Nazi on May 11, 1960. He was kept at a safe house for the next 11 days, after which time he was spirited out of the country and flown to Israel. The Israeli government initially denied that it had any involvement in the capture and stated that a group of civilians had acted on their own.
Eichmann's trial began in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961. He was charged with 15 crimes, including crimes against humanity. A three-judge panel presided over the trial with the Israeli Attorney General acting as the lead prosecutor