 CAPT. MARK KRUGER
IMAGE: Tom Martinez |
A banned YouTube video and a new complaint at City Hall have prompted a Portland police captain to speak publicly for the first time about long-standing accusations that he’s a Nazi sympathizer.
Central Precinct Capt. Mark Kruger vehemently denied those allegations in an Oct. 12 interview with WW. Kruger insists he’s simply a “history geek” whose public service should not be clouded by the fact that he’s worn swastikas, got married 13 years ago in a town where Hitler had his mountain retreat, and built a memorial to Nazi-era German soldiers on Rocky Butte while he was a Portland cop.
A 41-year-old Army veteran, Kruger insists he’s a victim of character assassination.
“This has been a tremendous torment for me [and] it’s been a tremendous torment for my family,” Kruger said, his eyes filling with tears. “There’s not a person on the face of this earth who can legitimately criticize my contribution and my service to my country and to my community.”
In his 16 years with the Police Bureau, Kruger has built a reputation as an unbending but highly capable manager. His rigid demeanor has earned him the nickname “Ice Man.”
Kruger’s curious hobby surfaced in 2003 and 2004, when the city was fighting several lawsuits for alleged excessive force by Kruger and other cops against antiwar protesters. The city eventually settled two of those lawsuits for $300,000. A third suit was thrown out of court.
Two of Kruger’s former friends came forward to tell the plaintiffs’ lawyers about Kruger’s alleged fascination with Nazis. They told WW that in his youth Kruger had displayed hatred in public toward gays, Jews and racial minorities—accusations Kruger calls “bunk and hokum.”
The latest chapter began Oct. 4, when one of those ex-friends, Robert Seaver, posted a video on YouTube featuring Kruger in Nazi garb. The four-minute video shows horrific images of the Holocaust and Hitler as well as contemporary photos of panicked protesters in Portland. Interspersed are photos of Kruger posing in German military gear, attending meetings in police uniform and grinning in his riot gear.
Seaver tells WW Kruger continued privately expressing hatred for minorities, the homeless and the disabled long after he became a cop. The video contains statements Seaver claims Kruger made to him, including “human life is overvalued” and cops are “nothing but garbage collectors.” Kruger denies saying any of it.
Seaver, a former legal aide with the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, claims he first came forward against Kruger six years ago to make amends for his own racist past. He says he posted the video out of anger at what he calls a lack of consequences for Portland cops. Seaver cites Chief Rosie Sizer’s decision last month that officers were justified in their use of force against James Chasse Jr., who died of blunt-force injuries sustained during his arrest in 2006.
“I can guarantee you that what happened to James Chasse will sadly happen all over again,” says Seaver, who now lives in Bandon. “Instead of taking responsibility and admitting their mistakes, the Portland Police Bureau is more interested in making excuses and rationalizations.”
A case in point, Seaver says, was Sizer’s decision to promote Kruger from lieutenant to captain last year.
Kruger was not among the cops who arrested Chasse, but Seaver says his continued promotions make him “a symbol of everything that is wrong at the Police Bureau.”
Sizer did not respond to email and phone messages seeking comment.
On Oct. 7, Seaver received notice from YouTube about a request to pull the video offline for violating YouTube’s privacy policy. YouTube pulled the video Oct. 10.
By then Seaver had already complained to the city’s Independent Police Review Division that Kruger violated his First Amendment rights by asking YouTube to delete the video.
Kruger says the request to pull the video came from his wife. He says it was justified because the photos were used without his permission, one image contains his police ID number, and the video accuses him of being something he’s not—a Nazi.
Kruger denies long-standing allegations made by Seaver and another of Kruger’ old friends, Robert Williams, that they drove around Portland together listening to Hitler speeches and shouting insults at minorities. But he agrees with several of Seaver’s other accounts about their past together.
ACHTUNG: Kruger on Rocky Butte in a vintage Nazi-era German fieldcap. PHOTO: Robert Seaver
In the late 1990s, Kruger confirms he attended World War II re-enactments on the Oregon Coast, where Kruger would wear Nazi-era German uniforms. He also owns historic British and American gear.
“I am not an adherent of Adolf Hitler,” Kruger says. “What I am is a person who has a profound and abiding interest in military history.”
Kruger married his now ex-wife in 1996 in Berchtesgaden, Germany—home of Hitler’s Berghof mountain retreat. Kruger says they chose the site for its natural beauty, not because Hitler spent most of World War II there.
And Kruger concedes he placed memorial plaques to five World War II German soldiers in 2000 or 2001 on Rocky Butte in Northeast Portland. The plaques were nailed to a tree Kruger called the “Ehrenbaum,” or honor tree, overlooking the I-205 freeway. But Kruger says he later tore them down.
“I have great respect for soldiers who have demonstrated the most incredible gallantry on the field of battle,” Kruger says. “[I took] some of the most significant examples in history of that gallantry and put them together.”
It was, he adds, “probably the most geeky and humiliating thing that I’ve ever done in my entire life.”
The YouTube video that was pulled is available here (.mp4). Audio highlights from the interview are below:
[audio:http://media.wweek.com/attach/2009/10/13/KrugerClip1.mp3]
[audio:http://media.wweek.com/attach/2009/10/13/KrugerClip2.mp3]
FACT: In the late 1980s, Seaver fell in love with Diane Downs, who was serving a life sentence for shooting her three children in 1983, killing one. Seaver plotted to spring Downs from prison, then testified against her in 1990.
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And of course you told me that "We're nothing but garbage collectors," and you went on to complain about how PPB officers are overly scrunitized, actually have very little power, and that the deck is always stacked against them? Do you think I am making this all up??
I know people can change, because I have. What I once was, it makes me sick. If you have changed Mark, then I have made the greatest mistake in my life here. But how can anyone know that you have changed, when you do not admit to things and take responsibility? It is true that you have admitted to some events, but it seems like only those events that can be corroborated or that you were forced to admit to. Right??
And what about your actions at demonstrations? The Claw? How about Amber Hicks?
And getting married at Berchtesgaden merely for the mountain scenery? Come now. Of all the places on planet earth you could have gone for mountain scenery, you chose that place - so tied to Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Your words are not ringing true.
You told me that you wanted to be chief someday. If you are unwilling to be truthful, if you are still a racist like I was right along with you for all those years, then I am sorry - but you have absolutely NO business wearing that PPB uniform, no matter what the rank. The police are supposed to be there for ALL people. Not just some. And people, ALL people, are human beings and deserve to be treated as such. All life has value. And that is not the way you have acted. You told me that "human life is over valued" and complained about all the resources PPB puts into homicide investigations, that you felt was a waste. Remember that?
Remember what you told me, that on your last day on PPB, you wanted to do a traffic stop on MLK of a car occupied by blacks, and tell Radio that, "I'm out with a boat load of coal on the Avenue"? That was racist as hell, and you said that you were going to do that on your last day so PPB could not do anything to you. Because you'd be gone by the next day.
Or, how about the day you pepper sprayed Beth English of KPTV, and then laughed to me about that very night? You attacked her because she was a member of the despised news media. Where does it end, Mark? With somebody getting killed? THIS HAS GOT TO STOP.
After years and years of all this, what do you expect me - or anyone else - to think? It is scary, Mark. I won't even live in Portland anymore. Because I don't want to get killed by the Portland police.
Mark, the only person who has assassinated your character is yourself. Meanwhile, people like James Chasse are dying out there in the streets, and the officers are not being truly held accountable. I know you likely have nothing to do with Chasse, but it does call into the question of the types of people working for PPB, and the code of silence and cover-up that is so pervasive over there at times. Where oftentimes, personal loyalty is put above integrity. It is as plain as day.
This is not "bunk and hokum" and you know it. I wish you would just be honest.
I am sorry you are hurting, Mark. I really am. But people's lives are at stake here. Do you expect me to be silent? I cannot.
If you have changed, I mean really changed, then why not admit it? Why not admit to everything? For if you do not, then I can only conclude that you are still a racist and an unrepentant Nazi at heart, no matter what you say.
I used to laugh right along with you at blacks and others. I nodded my head when you said that Shriners was "such a waste" to devote to those sick children, and that they should all by murdered. So I am a moral failure. I almost never spoke up, until after all those years and I had finally had enough.
I can no longer be silent anymore.
Christ, why is Seaver so spiteful? Did he make a pass at the officer & get turned down?
Maybe his former good buddy Mark Kruger is repentant, but he hasn't let some of us know who care about that sort of thing. I lost my grandparents to the ovens of Auschwitz. I don't see ANY "honor" in what the Nazis. I think Mark Kruger should step down, or in the alternative, issue a sincere apology for his "past views" stemming from Nazi ideology to us Holocaust Jews.