Eichmann traveled to Auschwitz to discuss the details for the construction of the largest and most important death camps in Poland. This expert on Jewish affairs had now become the man responsible for the Nazis new program of genocide. This program was put into effect at the Wannsee Conference held on January 20, 1942. It was decided that the following would happen: deportation to the East, forced labor, and mass executions. This task would be delegated to Adolf Eichmann, who was elated by the news. In this new post of authority, he set up a network of stations all over Europe. He issued orders to round up Jews, deliver them to transports, and then dispatch them to the East. Once in the camps, the Jews would be worked to death and the survivors executed. Eichmann once said, The people who were loaded on those trains meant nothing to me. It is really none of my business (Hausner 307). His business was to set up the destruction of the Jewish people. In the summer of 1944 Himmler ordered Eichmann to write a report detailing the total number of Jews who had either died or been given special treatment in extermination camps. Eichmann did not know for certain, he set the figure at approximately six million, four million who had died from natural causes and the rest shot by mobile units.Eichmanns career in the military ended with the fall of the Third Reich. He was arrested at the end of the war, but managed to escape from an internment camp in the American Zone of Occupation. He then disappeared for fourteen years, until an Israeli team of secret service men captured him in Argentina He was brought to Israel, where he stood trial for crimes against the Jewish people, humanity, and crimes during a time of war. His defense was that: he never acted from base motives, he had never had an inclination to kill anyone, he had never hated Jews, he had only done his duty, and his role in the Final Solution was an accident and almost an...
