He participated in the January Wannsee Conference , at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. He was captured and detained by the Allies in , but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May , he was tracked down and apprehended by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, and put on trial before the Supreme Court of Israel.
The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem , following which he was executed by hanging in After doing poorly in school, Eichmann briefly worked for his father's mining company in Austria, where the family had moved in He worked as a travelling oil salesman beginning in , and joined both the Nazi Party and the SS in He returned to Germany in , where he joined the Sicherheitsdienst SD, "Security Service" ; there he was appointed head of the department responsible for Jewish affairs β especially emigration, which the Nazis encouraged through violence and economic pressure.
After the outbreak of the Second World War in September , Eichmann and his staff arranged for Jews to be concentrated in ghettos in major cities with the expectation that they would be transported either farther east or overseas. He also drew up plans for a Jewish reservation, first at Nisko in southeast Poland and later in Madagascar , but neither of these plans were ever carried out.
The Nazis began the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June , and their Jewish policy changed from internment or coerced emigration to extermination. To coordinate planning for the genocide, Eichmann's superior Reinhard Heydrich hosted the regime's administrative leaders at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January Eichmann collected information for him, attended the conference, and prepared the minutes. Eichmann and his staff became responsible for Jewish deportations to extermination camps, where the victims were gassed.
After Germany occupied Hungary in March , Eichmann oversaw the deportation of much of the Jewish population. Most of the victims were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp , where about 75 per cent were murdered upon arrival. By the time the transports were stopped in July , , of Hungary's , Jews had been killed. Dieter Wisliceny testified at Nuremberg that Eichmann told him he would "leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people [ b ] on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.
