Holocaust Museum shooter has long record as white supremacist

washington  |  The 88-year-old man who allegedly shot and killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10 before being shot by other museum security guards is a longtime white supremacist and anti-Semite, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The shooter, identified as James Wenneker Von Brunn, was taken to George Washington Hospital in Washington, D.C. Authorities said his injuries were serious.

Stephen Tyrone Johns, who was on the security staff of the museum for six years, died after being taken to the same hospital

Museum guard Stephen Tyrone Johns, who was killed in the attack.

Von Brunn entered the museum sometime after 12:30 p.m. June 10 with a .22-caliber rifle and opened fire near the metal detectors at the museum’s entrance, according to police and museum officials.

Within minutes of the attack, federal agents were dispatched to Von Brunn’s home in Annapolis, Md., to check his computer. Joseph Persichini, assistant director in charge of the Washington FBI field office, said the shootings were being investigated as a possible hate crime or a case of domestic terrorism.

Von Brunn was identified by the ADL as a retired Naval reserve officer and World War II veteran who self-published an anti-Semitic book titled “Tob Shebbe Goyim Harog” (rough Hebrew for “Kill the Best Gentiles”), as well as many anti-Semitic essays.

Von Brunn has decried “the browning of America” and has claimed that he can expose a Jewish conspiracy “to destroy the White gene-pool.” He once wrote, “The ‘Holocaust’ Religion is destroying Western Civilization. The Aryan gene-pool dies, ‘unwept, unhonored and unsung.’ ”

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. photo/ushmm photo archives/max reid

In 1981, Von Brunn, then living in New Hampshire, was arrested at the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Board after he tried to use a sawed-off shotgun to take board members hostage. He was convicted of attempted armed kidnapping, second-degree burglary, assault with a dangerous weapon, carrying a pistol without a license and two counts of possession of a prohibited weapon. He was sentenced to four to 11 years in prison in 1983. He ended up serving more than six years.

Police say Von Brunn appeared to have acted alone in the Holocaust Museum shooting.

In a statement, Pres-ident Barack Obama said he was “shocked and saddened” by the attack, adding that it “reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all forms.” Obama made a speech repudiating Holocaust denial during a visit to Buchenwald on June 5.

In Israel, Information and Diaspora Minister Yuli Edelstein said the shooting was “further proof that anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial have not passed from the world.”

Witnesses to the shooting spoke of the chaos and fear when the gunfire erupted.

Moti Shair of Silver Spring, Md., who was at the museum with family in town from Israel, said he had stepped outside to take a phone call and was just steps away from the gunfire.

“I could hear some of the bullets,” he said. Shair said he ducked for cover until the shooting was over.

Lindsey Newman, 14, was standing outside the museum’s theater with her family waiting to hear a lecture by a Holocaust survivor when she heard four shots. She and her family were rushed into the theater, where they remained for about an hour.

“I thought we were going to die,” Newman said.

With an attack at a museum dedicated to memorializing history’s greatest genocide, New-man noted, “in a way it was history repeating itself, in a much smaller way.”

The museum was closed June 11 in memory of Johns, the security guard who was killed, and the museum’s flags were flown at half-staff.

The attack marks the fourth time in the 30 days that Jewish sites or people have been targeted for attack in the United States.

The man who killed a Jewish Wesleyan University student a month ago was found with a copy of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” police infiltrated a group of terrorists plotting to bomb a pair of Bronx synagogues, and the shooter at an Arkansas military recruiting center was found to have conducted research on Jewish sites.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.