Holocaust Museum shooting suspect had history with hate groups
By: Leah Fabel
Examiner Staff Writer
June 10, 2009
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| James W. von Brunn |
A violent past and vehement anti-Semitism defined the life of the elderly man identified by police sources as the killer of a guard at the National Holocaust Museum.
James von Brunn, 88, was particularly focused on the June 8, 1967, attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, struck by Israeli fighter jets during the Six-Day War, which resulted in the deaths of 34 American crewmembers. The incident is recognized by the U.S. government as having been friendly-fire, but has been seized upon by conspiracy theorists.
He published his book, “Kill the Best Gentiles: A new, hard-hitting expose of the Jew conspiracy to destroy the white gene-pool,” on June 8, 1999, with a memorial to the ship.
Ten years later, on the anniversary of the last day of the Six-Day War, von Brunn allegedly entered the Holocaust Museum and shot a security guard, who was pronounced dead Wednesday afternoon.
The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington was “shocked and outraged” by the shooting, said Executive Director Ron Halber, adding that the community has experienced “nothing that has ever approached this sort of violence that we saw today.”
Remembering back to his grade school days, von Brunn wrote colorful tales on his Web site, “Holy Western Empire,” of a propensity for run-ins with Jewish people and their sympathizers.
He claimed to have been a sailor on a patrol torpedo boat in World War II, and wrote of holding a young German’s hand as he died of gunshot wounds. The boy had refused to take morphine from a “sallow-faced” Jewish doctor on board, von Brunn said, and accepted it from the cook, instead.
“ ‘My people are Germans, too,’ I told him,” von Brunn wrote. “He seemed to relax.”
After the war, von Brunn moved to New York City. By the 1980s, von Brunn had developed ties with anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based organization that tracks hate groups.
In 1981, he was convicted of kidnapping and armed burglary for entering the Federal Reserve Board building with a sawed-off shotgun and a knife in his backpack. His act against the Fed was “blamed on high interest rates,” according to an Associated Press article. He served six years in federal prison.
But von Brunn’s most hateful language was always reserved for Jews.
“Through manipulation, bribery, slander, assassination, and control of the mass media, JEWS contrived to pit nation against nation, race against race, financing all sides in the resultant wars,” Brunn wrote in the preface to one of many angry diatribes.
He closed one treatise quoting a call to violence.
“To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late, what better way to die than facing fearsome odds, for the ashes of our fathers and the temples of our gods.”
Examiner Staff Writer William C. Flook contributed to this story.
lfabel@washingtonexaminer.com
