Holocaust denier had career at CU
Prof's far-right speech didn't bring sanctions
By Dave Anderson April 24, 2005
In a column in the Daily Camera on Jan. 30, Jon Caldara asked: "If CU had a tenured neo-Nazi on faculty, spouting off that Jews and blacks deserve to be killed en masse, how long would he last at CU? He wouldn't." Similar assertions have been made by others in letters to the editor.
But is that true? Some of us who have been around Boulder awhile remember the late Ben Kriegh, who was on the mathematics faculty at CU from 1952 to 1991. He certainly had a soft spot for Hitler.
He wrote numerous letters to the Camera about the Nazis. Longtime math professor Marty Walter laughs when he is asked about the letters. He says, "Kriegh claimed that far fewer than 6 million Jews were killed and that Nazi Germany wasn't all that bad." Walter thought this was outlandish but he wasn't particularly upset. "At a university, all sincerely held beliefs are part of the big picture."
I recently spoke with several current and retired math professors about Kriegh. He is remembered as an amiable man who was an avid mountain climber and excellent poker player. There wasn't any controversy about his teaching or his tenure. They didn't discuss politics with him.
Retired math professor Irving Weiss remembers Kriegh was accused of being an anti-Semite because he was a Holocaust denier. Weiss, who is Jewish, says Kriegh never made any anti-Semitic comments in his presence but he did name one of his sons after Nazi general Erwin Rommel. "Ben was a very pleasant, nice guy," Weiss says. In 1972, he needed to get a sabbatical and Kriegh helped him out by teaching his class.
In 1975, I covered a talk on campus by Kriegh when I was a Colorado Daily reporter. He claimed that "political Zionist" Jews have been behind the scenes of history for a long time. He focused on the Russian Revolution of 1917 which he said was "fomented" by powerful Jewish bankers. He stressed that "the Bolshevik movement was run by a small group of Jewish people."
Kriegh claimed Adolf Hitler was unjustly maligned by historians, England and France "provoked" World War II, and "world Jewry went on a holy war" against Nazi Germany. More atrocities were committed by the Allies than by the Germans, he charged, but conceded that "there was rough treatment no doubt" in Nazi concentration camps.
I was the editor of "Broadside," a section of political and social commentary in the Daily. In 1976, I asked Kriegh to write an essay on his view of World War II. His article cited historical works which challenged the notion that Germany was "building a war machine to conquer the world." Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were warmongers, not Adolf Hitler.
Kriegh also said that Nazi Germany wasn't "totalitarian" because "National Socialism involved no nationalization of factories or industry, and that all business organizations were privately owned."
"During the 1930s," Kriegh noted, "communism was said to be the antithesis of our way of life. Why, then, were we so anxious to destroy Germany, whose primary goal was to contain communism? "
Kriegh denounced America's national leadership: "The liberal establishment has been exposed as phony, subservient to alien interests. It can offer only bankrupt ideas and licentiousness. Traditional conservatism offers only stagnation. The majority political parties are enslaved to monied interests with socialism as their ultimate goal, for socialism-communism is the ultimate of monopoly capitalism."
He hoped for the emergence of "a new political movement" of the young. Kriegh's 1975 talk was sponsored by the CU chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student group. In 1974, chapter leader Mike Plapp told Daily reporter Kathy Kanda that racism was "a natural phenomenon" that whites should not feel guilty about. "It's bad for society to like people of other races," he added. He favored eugenics, an aristocratic elite (perhaps even a monarchy), increased press censorship and Christian values. Plapp later wrote an opinion piece for the Daily editorial page itled "Racism is part of human nature."
In 1982, Ben Kriegh unsuccessfully ran for state treasurer in the Republican primary. The Denver Post reported that his views on the Holocaust were hurting his campaign. He reiterated his doubts that Jews were gassed, saying, "Was an autopsy ever performed to determine if any of those people died from being gassed?" And he added, "I deplore this kind of thing being dragged into politics. I feel it belongs in academic arenas. It's a matter of intellectual integrity."
Recently, I did an Internet search of Kriegh's name and found his Daily essay on a Web site of articles published in neo-Nazi George Deitz's venomously racist Liberty Bell magazine.
Dave Anderson is a long-time Boulder resident and University of Colorado employee. He is the president of CU's AFSCME Local 3592.
-- Michael Pugliese