Steve Durham, vice president of the Colorado State Board of Education, believes he should determine how history is taught in Colorado. Citizens beware. His version of history for social studies standards is more than wrong-headed. It’s flat out wrong and dangerous.

It’s disturbing that Republicans on the State Board as well as two Democrats including board chair Angelika Schroeder voted in support of Durham’s revisions to social studies standards. With their votes, their competence to assign school and district accreditation is questionable.

Especially egregious are Durham’s assertions about the words “socialist” and “genocide” and how these words have historically been attached to specific governing ideologies. His revisionist history claiming that Nazis were “socialists” returns us to the post World War I era when Stalin’s communists who governed the Soviet empire vied with Hitler’s fascists from Germany and Italy. They both wanted to conquer Europe and, in aspiration, the world.

Communists and socialists in Germany after World War I were influential political forces. They were two separate parties. Communists connected to Russian leadership while socialists developed German leadership. Communists rumbled with Hitler’s fascist brownshirts to take over Germany’s Weimar Republic. Hitler’s party, originally named the German Workers’ Party, became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalisozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei),or “Nazis,” in 1920. Nazis used the word “socialist” cynically, as a ploy to trick workers and former soldiers unhappy with German capitalists to join their anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevik, anti-union enterprise.

To illustrate how Nazis manipulated words to deceive and mock, think of the phrases used in the gate entrances to Hitler’s genocidal concentration and extermination camps. “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “work makes you free,” greeted Auschwitz’s prisoners at the iron-gate entrance to its Camp 1 as well as at Oranienburg that became Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt, Gross-Rosen, Monowitz, and Flosenburg. “Jedem das Seine,” or “to each his due,” decorated the entrance to the Buchenwald concentration camp. A famous saying among Auschwitz prisoners went thus: “Work will make you free at crematorium number 3.”

Now that you can hardly breathe at the arrogance and evil of Nazi wordsmithing, let’s consider the Nazis’ inchoate genocidal ideology. Bolshevik was not what Nazis were. Hitler sold off German nationalized industries in the 1930s to underwrite his imperial war aims. “Successful” German owners thrived by buying into the Nazi corporate sell-off. They procured such industry giants as BMW, Daimler-Benz, IG Farben, Volkswagen, Krupp-Hoesch, Leica Camera, Siemens, Dynamit Nobel, Messerschmitt, Hugo Boss and Hella Dugussa that produced the killer Zyklon B gas. Hitler led a crony capitalist state. His government was the opposite of socialist.

His armies ravaged the Soviet empire in Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s attack on eastern Europe, to fulfill the Fuehrer’s Lebensraum dream of a colonial-powered Germany that would defeat Russian Bolshevism and democracies such as the United States and then-colonial Britain. In Hitler’s world, Bolshevism was code for Jewish and communist.

Operation Barbarossa led to the most brutal ground and air war in history with millions caught in the crossfire. Jews, “Don’t-Say-Gays,” Roma, and communist/socialist supporters were rounded up by National Socialist fascists for extermination. Russian soldiers and citizens across conquered nations were taken for slave labor into Germany. Poland was flattened. Eastern Europe was a wasteland.

German corporate owners, such as the Quandts of Porsche and Friedrich Flick in the steel industry and later principal shareholder in Daimler-Benz, built the tanks that moved the Barbarossa blitzkrieg forward; constructed the bombs that blew up London and many other cities in England; worked the laborers enslaved from France, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other conquered nations; and moved the huge guns east that crushed Warsaw in 1944. Deutsche Bank, another of Hitler’s privatized entities, bought Daimler-Benz in the 1980s turning Flick into a billionaire.

Hitler was no socialist using government to distribute income through social services. His Nazi party ran the Winterhilfe program that took money from German workers to distribute to the poor and to the party itself. His so-called political police, the Gestapo, reported to Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuehrer of the National Socialist party.

None of this history ignores Stalin’s own ruthless, murderous brutality in his domain. In the tyrant’s effort to industrialize Russia, he stole Ukraine’s grain to feed his workers while starving millions of Ukraine’s farmers and laborers. He collectivized farms in his misguided, ultimately homicidal belief that farmers united to serve the state would increase food production to support his industrial workers. We’re seeing a repeat of Stalin’s imperialism in tyrant Vladimir Putin’s violent and immoral invasion of Ukraine today.

Is it possible that Steve Durham and Angelika Schroeder, our august vice chair and chair of the State Board of Education, are unfamiliar with these facts? They grew up right after World War II, their parents were of the generation that lived and fought through the war, and some of their high school and college teachers probably battled against the Nazis to protect our democracy from the fascists and later the communists with whom we allied during World War II.

Students who don’t learn about the existential dangers of totalitarian governments in whatever form they arise can easily be seduced by their lies and false promises. Hitler’s use of the word “socialist” was particularly pernicious as a recruiting ruse for susceptible, angry, worn-out, abused World War I soldiers and impoverished German workers.

Today, we have our own totalitarian seducers with their own inchoate, sometimes genocidal ideologies. Students who learn how tyrants operate will be fortified against their seductions, their mockeries of humanity and ruination of good governance and democratic values.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.