The Nuremberg Trials . . . and Homeschooling?!
By Michelle Miller,
TruthQuest History,
Children’s Preservation Library
Why,again,are wedoingthis homeschool thing?
I think if God could, He would grab
each of us by the shoulders, look deeply
into our eyes, and press into us His earnest answer to that question! Let Him do
that now. Still your weary mind, open
your yearning heart to His leading, and
listen to a story . . .
A boy was born in March 1906. His
mother died before his tenth birthday. His
father was a soldier and a miner. Young
Adolf (not the one you’re thinking of)
never did graduate from high school but
instead helped at the mine and worked
as a mechanic and traveling salesman. A
friend suggested he join a rising political
group with career opportunities. Adolf
Eichmann was eventually promoted
through the ranks, becoming a top SS official in Nazi Germany. He directed the
imprisonment, torture, and extermination
of millions of Jews, determinedly working toward his boss’s “Final Solution.”
80 Fall 2011 • HisStory
After the fall of Hitler, the victorious
Allied armies hunted this notorious war
criminal, but the soldiers who arrested
him under a false name did not realize he
was Eichmann and thus took no special
measures to hold him. The mass murderer was able to escape, hiding first in
Germany and then in Italy. Some priests
helped him get Red Cross paperwork for
Argentina, and he eventually blended
into Buenos Aires society.
But he wasn’t the only European who
moved to Argentina after the war. So
During that trial, many expected to
see on the witness stand a crazed killer,
a flailing megalomaniac. Eichmann was,
after all, a mass murderer! Millions died
unspeakable deaths, the ovens and gas
chambers were busy, at his hands! He
oversaw the herding of humans into
those awful trains . . . and was not moved
to guilt or compassion, not even when all
was recounted during the trial!
Eichmann . . . . was, in his mind, simply a good
citizen going with the national flow.
did a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor
who had suffered under Eichmann, and
whose daughter had unknowingly—due
to an alias—befriended Eichmann’s son.
When her father discerned the man’s true
identity, Israeli intelligence swooped in,
smuggled Eichmann out of Argentina,
and set him before the world in a dramatic Jerusalem trial (1961), eventually
hanging him.
recently been an Argentine factory foreman, daily riding the bus to and from
work and bringing flowers to his wife on
their recent twenty-fifth anniversary. In
other words, he was ordinary.
Did he deny the heinous crimes? No,
he only denied guilt, because he was
merely “following orders.” This was the
same alibi given by Nazi war criminals
at the earlier Nuremberg trials and now
