Fighting racism for 20 years - Neo-Nazi victim Alan Berg's ex-wife calls hate a 'disease'

By Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News
May 29, 2007

Twenty years ago tonight, Judith Berg came close to being gunned down with her ex-husband in one of Denver's most heinous murders.

But she prefers not to think about that.
Instead, she focuses on trying to stop the hate and racism that led neo-Nazis to assassinate Alan Berg — an abrasive-yet-popular talk show host on KOA-AM (850) radio.

On June 18, 1984, around 9:30 p.m., a hit squad was parked on Adams Street, staking out Alan Berg's town house. Judith had been there with him shortly before.

As Berg stepped out of his Volkswagen Beetle, he was cut down by a one-second burst of 13 bullets from a machine gun. He died instantly. Traces of the bullet holes can still be seen on the building's garage door.

It was the most notorious in a string of crimes committed by members of a gang that called itself Bruder Schweigen, or the Silent Brotherhood.

To the world, the group was known as The Order, patterned after the ruling clique in the racist novel The Turner Diaries.

Written by the late William Pierce, founder of a leading neo-Nazi organization called the National Alliance, the novel depicted a white revolution that included bombings and mass killings.

Eleven years later, the same novel would be embraced by Timothy McVeigh, whose bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building mimicked an event in the book.

It's that type of imitation that has Judith Berg concerned.

The 'disease of hate'

"Have things changed? Have we learned anything," she asked in an interview this week. "I just wish people noticed how it affected the future. It was a very shocking murder, which subsequently has been repeated in many ways."

Over the last two decades, Judith Berg has crisscrossed the country, speaking to diverse groups about what she calls the "disease and anatomy of hate," a sickness that can infect people so strongly that they commit horrible crimes.

Nearly all of the four dozen people associated with The Order had been ordinary folks with no criminal records until they began to conspire to establish a whites-only nation.

Members killed Berg and one other person, and committed numerous robberies, including a spectacular open-road heist of an armored truck near Ukiah, Calif., that netted $3.8 million.

They established a terrorist training camp in the remote Idaho panhandle woods and formulated a plan to break up into small cells to fan out and commit various acts of terrorism.

The FBI cracked the case before much more happened, killing The Order's leader, Robert Jay Mathews, during a 36-hour standoff on Whidbey Island, in Washington's Puget Sound, on Dec. 8, 1984.

Berg said the murder of her ex-husband was a watershed event that inspired more hate-movement violence.

"What happened to Alan in the grown-up world has reached into the youth culture," she said. "It opened the door to an acceptance of violence as a means of acting on hate."

The nation's attention is now focused on terror threats from abroad, but Berg thinks the nation should also look inward.

"While our backs are turned toward overseas, hate groups are having a heyday," she said.

"People are very unhappy; they're out of work and jobs are scarce. They're ripe for joining extremist groups. We need to understand what happened to make sure it doesn't happen again."...[Open in new window]

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The wackjobs have been on the inside these last 6 years. The hate is top down.

It's the kids you have to worry about. When Ronnie Raygun & Co. undermined education in the '80s that was the beginning of the invasion of the know-nothings. These 'kids' (up to about the age of 40) will believe anything because they don't know any better. Never learned anything in school. That's why FAUX NOISE & the snarling heads (Hannity, etc.) are popular. They seem authorative & that's good enough when you don't know any better.

Rightwing domestic nutjob terrorism is way scarier than neo-con fantasy terrorism.

Education is the best prevention but that's almost a lost cause. The ignorant make better consumers. Shit, they'll happily buy poison food & eat it while watching no-talent idiots compete for prizes on TV.

I wish stoopid was illegal.