Ben (Bernhardt) Klassen
Born on February 20, 1918 in Rudnerwiede, Ukraine | Died August 6, 1993 in Otto, North Carolina, United States
Bernhard Klassen (February 20, 1918 — August 6, 1993), better known as Ben Klassen, was the founder, and Pontifex Maximus (High Priest) of the Church of the Creator, also known as the Creativity worldview. Klassen’s concepts contain a coherent natural philosophy, or a contemporary pagan worldview to the benefit of the Europeans. Klassen was Germanic in ancestry, born to a Mennonite family in the Ukraine before moving to the Americas as a child.
Klassen was a staunch critic of Christianity, urging Europeans to abandon it and blaming it’s original rise on a Jewish plot to internally demoralize the Roman Empire. Contrary to the new Germanic Heathens, however, he did not advocate a return of the old gods (or any sky “spook” as he describes it). Rather he advocated an essentially atheist materialist philosophy, informed by a racial socialism and eugenics; his ideals were the high cultures of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece.
Klassen’s family were originally Dutch Mennonites, who for a time lived in Prussia and then in 1804 moved out to the Ukraine. Klassen himself was born to Bernhard Kornelius Klassen and Susanna Penner in Rudnerweide, part of a historical German-speaking Mennonite colony, close to the Crimea, then part of the Ukrainian People’s Republic; the area would later become part of the Zaporizhia Oblast during the 1930s. Jakob Jakovlevitch Klassen, likely a close relative (possibly a cousin of his father), was the Executive Secretary of the Chortitza Mennonite Settlement and he was murdered in 1919 by anarcho-communist terrorists beholden to Nestor Makhno.
His family moved to Mexico when he was six years old and lived at a Mennonite colony, but soon relocated to Canada, in Herschel Saskatchewan. He attended the German-English Academy (now Rosthern Junior College). He held a college degree in Arts and Science and was Bachelor of Science in Engineering.
In his personal life he was married to Henrietta McWilliams and had a daughter (Anita Kim, born 1951). Klassen was a school teacher, inventor, electrical engineer, real estate agent, land developer, politician, author, religious leader, and racial activist. In 1949, he founded the community of Silver Springs Nevada. In 1957, he patented the first electrically operated can opener.
In 1962 Klassen and his family were living in Florida where he was a member of the John Birch Society. During this time he was briefly a state representative in the Florida legislature. In 1968 he worked for George Wallace’s presidential campaign and became Florida state chairman of the American Independent Party (AIP). In 1969 he resigned from both the John Birch Society and the AIP and formed the Nationalist White Party. In 1973 he founded the Church Of The Creator (COTC). Klassen coined the term Racial Holy War (RaHoWa) within the pro-White movement, and was the author of several books. His religious creed (Creativity) has spread worldwide, and continues to flourish in predominantly White countries.
