US: Indiana school board candidate says 'all Nazis weren't bad'

A candidate for a schoolboard seat in the American state of Indiana drew outrage by stating that "not all Nazis were bad."

Matt Keefer, a Republican running for a seat on the Community Schools Board of Trustees in the town of Zionsville, was earlier this week asked by a voter on Facebook regarding his stance on the school curriculum.

Referring to one of the worst racist massacres in US history, the voter asked "would teaching students that the Tulsa Massacre was a bad thing be considered the kind of ‘indoctrination’ that teachers shouldn’t be doing?" before further ramping up the rhetoric by asking "Can they also teach students that all Nazis are bad? Or is that ‘indoctrination’ as well?”

The loaded question was alluding to the consternation among conservative Republicans at the introduction of a critical approach to the history of institutionalized racism in America into school curricula, branded by its opponents as "indoctrination"; another likely reference is to a ban on an illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl by a Texan school board out to cleanse the curriculum of racy topics.  

Keefer replied that he had “no problem with your examples being taught in schools, but a few exceptions to these specific instances. All Nazis weren’t ‘bad’ as you specify. They did horrible things. They were in a group frenzy in both cases you site [sic].”

The post was quickly deleted from Facebook yet its screenshot sparked widespread outrage. 

Keefer then tried to explain his statement, telling the IndyStar outlet that he was "not a fan of Nazis," whose leaders were "definitely bad people, but that doesn't mean the common folk that were required to join the party were all evil."

"When they say all Nazis were evil, they're talking about anybody in Germany during that time, all of them were evil people," he said. "My statement was ... the entire population of Germany was not evil Nazis even though they joined the Nazi Party."