Anti-Semite is museum shooting suspect

WASHINGTON - A frustrated artist and an angry man, the suspect in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting once tried to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve board, a "caper" thwarted when a guard captured him outside a board meeting carrying a bag stuffed with weapons.

James von Brunn, 88, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, describes the 1981 assault with apparent pride on his Web site, the source of fulmination against Jews and races other than his own.

Von Brunn was sentenced in 1983 to more than four years in prison for attempted armed kidnapping and other charges in his Fed assault. He was released in 1989.

At the time, police said Von Brunn wanted to take the members hostage because of high interest rates and the nation's economic difficulties.

White-supremacist writings
Von Brunn's Web site is dedicated to denial of the Holocaust and white-supremacist writings. The author boasts of his exploits in the 1981 case, calling the Fed “treasonous,” and rails at length against Jews, the standard history of the Holocaust, African-Americans and “the browning of America.”

The site promotes a treatise, “Tob Shebbe Goyim Harog!” — which he says translates as “Kill the Best Gentiles!” The book blames Jews, Marxists and “Negroes,” among others, for “the millions of Aryan crosses covering the world’s battlefields.”

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, which monitors anti-Semitic causes, said the author, whom it identified as John Wennecke Brunn, was a “long time white supremacist and anti-Semite who often uses the name James von Brunn.”

It said von Brunn was World War II veteran who was retired from the Naval Reserve officer and formerly worked in advertising. The PT Boat Museum in Germantown, Tenn., told NBC News that James Von Brunn served as commanding officer of a PT boat during World War II.

His conviction in the Federal Reserve case was a difficult outcome for Van Brunn.

"The subject resides in my memory like old road-kill," he wrote. "What could have been a slam-bang victory turned into ignoble failure. Recalling all of this presents an onerous task. I am getting near the end of the diving board."

Despite the revolver, sawed-off shotgun and knife found in his bag that day, Von Brunn insisted he was trying to place the board under "legal, non-violent citizens-arrest."

Trying to piece together his life
Von Brunn also wrote, "The 'Holocaust' Religion is destroying Western Civilization. The Aryan gene-pool dies, 'unwept, unhonored and unsung.'"

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His lengthy, often rambling online biography aside, law enforcement officials are trying to piece together details of von Brunn's life.

Two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said investigators are trying to better understand time he spent in Idaho, and how he acquired the .22-caliber rifle used in Wednesday's attack. At the request of the U.S. Park Police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is tracing the weapon. Under federal law, convicted felons cannot purchase firearms.

In his account of his "Federal Reserve caper," the St. Louis native relates his "character shapers" — among them a schoolyard bully who beat him up, vacation days on the Mississippi River, his service on a PT boat in World War II, and what he said was his first trouble with the law — a year in jail for tussling with a sheriff on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1968, the year he moved to the area from New York City.

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