Famous Seattle Ceramicist Exposed as Holocaust Denier
He crafted a ceramic Hitler-bust teapot now in a San Francisco art museum, and put swastikas on other pieces of art, even on a ceramic wedding cake. He made a ceramic Uzi assault rifle, hand grenades and an “assassin’s kit” - a gun and dagger.
Now, the 65-year-old hippie-turned-artist is at the center of a growing controversy following a published report detailing evidence — including his own words — that suggests he is a white nationalist who believes the Holocaust is a myth.
Hundreds of comments about Krafft are being posted on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere, and the art and culture world — particularly in ceramic art circles — are abuzz over the revelations published in The Stranger, a Seattle alternative paper. The headline on that piece was hard to misunderstand: “Charles Krafft Is a White Nationalist Who Believes the Holocaust Is a Deliberately Exaggerated Myth.”
Beyond E-mail correspondence with Krafft, writer Jen Graves reported that she had found Krafft’s comments on a white nationalist website where he makes repeated anti-Semitic remarks. “I believe the Holocaust is a myth,” Krafft says on a podcast published last July. The article goes on to say that Krafft believes the Holocaust is “being used to promote multiculturalism and globalism.”
Krafft, sounding as if he, too, is surprised by the backlash, didn’t back away from any of that when contacted by Hatewatch.
“Since I’ve admitted to being a Holocaust skeptic and identifying as a WASP on a White Nationalist website, I really can’t claim I was smeared,” Krafft said. “However,” he continued, “I would like to point out that I never tried to dupe liberal art collectors and curators with satire and irony in my art while laughing at them. I came by my controversial opinions on race and WWII history relatively recently.”
In one white nationalist podcast, Krafft says Christianity is being replaced “by this new secular religion of the sacrifice of 6 million Jews. And the museums, memorials, monuments, study centers, Holocaust chairs at the universities — it’s all part of the promotion of a new kind of, like I said, civil religion maybe. … We’re the heretics in a new religion that’s being promoted and built up and being embraced by governments throughout the United States and Europe.”
