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Holocaust Museum Shooter Dies

Von Brunn, 89, succumbs in prison hospital

by
Marc Tracy
January 06, 2010
Flowers marking the death of the Holocaust museum security guard, last June.(Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Flowers marking the death of the Holocaust museum security guard, last June.(Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The man who last June allegedly shot and killed a security guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., died today in a prison hospital in Butner, North Carolina. (An anonymous government official has confirmed the death.) James Von Brunn was facing a potentially capital charge of first-degree murder, as well as several smaller charges, including one for committing a hate crime. In the 1980s, he served over six years in federal prison for threatening people in the Federal Reserve Board headquarters with a sawed-off shotgun.

If you want a refresher on Von Brunn’s bizarre racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, TPM published the go-to rundown when the shooting occurred:

Von Brunn, apparently a World War II vet, has a long history of white supremacist writing. His book, Kill The Best Gentiles, embraces Adolf Hitler’s view that Jews concocted World War I as part of a scheme to stab Germany in the back—a myth the Nazis used to justify the Holocaust.



He also wrote an Internet posting complaining that Obama’s birth certificate and other documents have not been made public.



In 2003, he claimed to have conducted an investigation into the ethnic and religious background of Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander at the time, after some U.S. troops were placed under British command in Iraq.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.