Antronet local copy!

Skinhead scare real or overblown?
Cops on edge
Clinton denounces hate crimes

By David Olinger
Denver Post Staff Writer

Nov. 23 - For Ina Jaehnig, the sorrows grow.

On Monday she buried her youngest child, a son named Matthaus now known to the world as the 25-year-old skinhead who killed himself after gunning down Denver police officer Bruce Vander Jagt.

Two days later she was mortified to learn that someone - in an apparent expression of skinhead sympathy - had killed a pig, carved Vander Jagt's name on it and dumped the carcass at the police station where he had worked.

"This is just disgusting," she said. "This is so sick I can't even think about it." Now she fears that a community's anger toward her son is spreadng unjustly onto the Denver school and church to which she and her late husband devoted their lives.

In the week following Vander Jagt's murder, she silently endured a barrage of publicity and rumors about her family and the local institutions they created in Denver a quarter century ago.

A bounty hunter who once came looking for Matthaus described her house on television as a Satanic place. A University of Denver professor labeled her late husband's Christian Community Church a refuge of "Aryan Christianity." Others suggested that the Denver Waldorf School, which she and her husband founded, is a racist institution. One television station flashed an image of Adolf Hitler behind a photo of her dead son.

"My house is a witch house, my husband was a supremacist. If they want to slander the family in a desire for revenge, I can handle that," she said.

"But here we talk about two institutions that have nothing to do with this incident. That upset me more," she said, than anything else.

And that, more than anything else, prompted her to speak out.

Ina Jaehnig, who turned 54 yesterday, is a gray-haired woman with a soft German accent and a weariness that bears witness to the toll of a family tragedy. In an interview at her Denver home, she talked about her late husband Diethart, the ideals he and she held, the school they opened where she now teaches American history. She also talked, with obvious pain and reluctance, about a son she loved even as he began to nourish racial hatreds and a fascination with guns.

People want stories of good and evil, of heroes and villains, but "the world is not black and white. The world has lots of gray shadings," she said.

Her own world has been inseparable from the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian scientist and mystic who inspired the Waldorf educational system and a small religious sect.

She was educated at the original Waldorf school in Stuttgart, Germany, where Steiner helped create a new system of education for the children of workers at the Waldorf Astoria factory.

Her three children attended the Denver Waldorf School. Her two grandchildren are enrolled there now.

Waldorf schools emulate Steiner's effort to blend spirituality with science. They were banned by Hitler's Germany, which sent some teachers to concentration camps during World War II, and "reopened with the help of the Allies at the end of the war," she said. "What we try to teach is the free thinking of the human being. How can Aryanism enter that?"

In her high school history classes, she uses Ronald Takaki's "A Different Mirror," a book about the tribulations of immigrants coming to America, to teach tolerance. She said she wants her students to understand what it took for people of different races to become Americans "and how different the history of America looks through their eyes."

Her husband Diethart lost his family in World War II. As a 7-year-old boy, he was pulled from the rubble of a bombed German building. As a man  he founded a church based on Steiner's philosophy in Denver, where he also organized a series of disarmament conferences. A Denver Post story about him in 1987, four years before his death, was headlined, "Priest a tireless seeker of peace." "That was his whole purpose," his wife said.

Carl Raschke, a religious studies professor at the University of Denver who attended one of Diethart Jaehnig's services in the 1980s and interviewed him afterward, came away with a different impression.

"They worshipped what they call the genius in humanity," he said of Steiner's followers. "The teachings of the church were that the world should be run by superior human beings, and the superior human beings are few and far between. I imagine the young Jaehnig was brought up believing he was a superior human being." Ina Jaehnig said she has no idea how Raschke got the impression that her husband preached Aryan Christianity.

The church "has nothing to do with Aryanism," she said. It celebrates "the wisdom of the human being. "Human being' is every man." In Denver, Diethart and Ina Jaehnig lived in a six-bedroom mansion bought with money she inherited from her father, a house that has often "given shelter to homeless people," she said. They had three children: Jelena, Sam and Matthaus.

How did the youngest child of a couple who preached tolerance and free thinking come to associate with skinheads, tattoo a white power slogan - Blood and Honor - on his stomach, and murder a police officer with a 30-bullet semiautomatic rifle?

Ina Jaehnig discusses the violent end of her son's life with great reluctance.

Her youngest son was "an odd duck - very quiet," she said. He was a boy who learned with his hands more easily than with his mind, and whose goals often seemed to aborted in failure or bad luck.

He completed eight grades at the Denver Waldorf School, and because there was no Waldorf high school then, he went to South High. There he was placed in a class of slow learners. Many of his new classmates were black, and some tormented him, his mother said. More than once, "he came running over to the Waldorf school" to escape.

"He became racist when he went over to South High," she said.

The Anti-Defamation League in Denver traces Mattheus Jaehnig's association with other young skinheads to his high school days. The league also received information that he went to a Aryan Nations conference in Idaho, where white supremacists recruit young skinheads and offer them survivalist and weapons training. His mother denies that. "He never was in Idaho - ever," she said.

To the end she saw a softer, more generous side to the young man that arrest reports portray as a thug who sicced attack dogs on Denver police officers and once held a loaded gun to an ex-girlfriend's neck.

"He had a heart for the down-and-out," she said, and often brought them home. She regarded his friends as outcasts, not fellow skinheads.

She said she counseled him not to judge a race of people by the actions of a few, and she hated his fascination with guns. "I know when you have a gun you use it," she said. "That was the battle the two of us had."

Law enforcement sources have told Klanwatch, an Alabama organization that monitors hate groups, that a hundred skinheads came to Matthaus Jaehnig's burial ceremony on Monday.

His mother talked about another man who came.

Matthaus was grief-stricken by his father's death in 1991, she said, and kept searching for someone to replace him. Two years later he told her he had found a man whose advice reminded him of his dad. "Mom, I've adopted a father," he said.

His adopted father was a black man, she said, and he was among those who helped her bury Matthaus last week.