Suspect spewed hatred, convicted in ‘80s plot

James W. von Brunn purported to serve aboard a Navy PT boat in a war that liberated Jews from the Nazi concentration camps. A half-century later, the victims of that war had unmistakably become the object of his unrelenting hatred.

The 88-year-old former Navy officer and Maryland resident was shot by security guards Wednesday afternoon when a gunman stormed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and opened fire, killing a security guard. He remained hospitalized late Wednesday.

For years, Mr. von Brunn openly expressed his hatred for Jews, minorities and the U.S. government on a Web site and had become a cause celebre in fringe white-supremacist circles after going to prison in a plot to try to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Board in the 1980s. He was well-known by experts who monitor hate groups.

In recent years, he had settled in Maryland’s Eastern Shore and Annapolis, where neighbors appeared to know little about his anti-Semitic views or a Web posting on another site in November purportedly by him that warned of enemies in “Congress, at ‘Holocaust’ memorials, [and] at synagogues.”

“It’s scary for me,” said Joshua Shyman, 16, a resident of Mr. von Brunn’s apartment complex. Two of his great-grandparents died in the Holocaust. “I never imagined something like that would happen here.”

Mr. von Brunn espoused anti-Semitic ideology on a Web site that features him at www.holywesternempire.org and had been praised by white supremacists. The site includes “von Brunn’s Federal Reserve Caper,” a detailed account describing the 1981 incident that led to his sentencing in 1983 by a D.C. Superior Court judge on charges that included attempted kidnapping. The Web site says he was sentenced to 11 years in prison, of which he served 6 1/2.

Police at the time said Mr. von Brunn was detained outside a room where board members were meeting on Constitution Avenue in Northwest. He was carrying a revolver, a knife and a sawed-off shotgun, according to news reports. Authorities said he told them he planned to take members hostage because of their role in high interest rates and economic problems in the country.

“The camera-case slung over my shoulder now contained a phony bomb, which, it appeared, could be activated by a phony detonator (range finder),” Mr. von Brunn wrote in a personal account of the Federal Reserve incident on the Web site. “As I didn’t want to kill anyone I carried no ammunition.”

The Web site features a synopsis and advertisement for his self-published book, “Kill the Best Gentiles!” The site touts the work as “a new, hard-hitting expose of the Jew conspiracy to destroy the White gene-pool.”

“This carefully documented treatise exposes the Jews and explains what you must do to protect your White family,” the site states. “Kill the Best Gentiles! is a must for every concerned parent and a manual for every student of World History.”

Customers had been able to download the book’s first six chapters free of charge and receive the rest for $10. The book’s foreword says Europe “is now over-run by hordes of non-Whites and mongrels” and that Adolf Hitler “was not all wrong.”

A later chapter is titled “The ‘Holocaust’ Hoax.”

“Since WWII the Zionist Occupied Government of the United States (ZOG) has welcomed huge numbers of fecund non-White immigrants predicated upon the ideology that diversity is better,” the book states, frequently using screaming all-capital letters. “Paradoxically, the liberal establishment is engaged in a counterculture campaign designed to eliminate diversity through racial miscegenation. These inconsistent concepts share a singular illuminati goal - destruction of the Aryan race.”

The Web site also says Mr. von Brunn received a journalism degree from a Midwestern university, was a member of the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon, played varsity football and served as a PT-boat captain during World War II, receiving a commendation and four battle stars for his service.

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