James von Brunn

Who was James von Brunn?

James Wenneker von Brunn was an American man who perpetrated the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting in Washington, D.C. on June 10, 2009. Security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns was killed in the shooting, and von Brunn was wounded by two security guards who returned fire. Von Brunn was named the prime suspect in the shooting, and was charged with first-degree murder and firearms violations. While awaiting trial, von Brunn died on January 6, 2010.

Von Brunn was a white supremacist and Holocaust denier who had written numerous antisemitic essays, created an antisemitic website called The Holy Western Empire, and is the author of a 1999 self-published book, Kill the Best Gentiles, which praises Adolf Hitler and denies the Holocaust. He was also an Obama citizenship conspiracy theorist. After the shooting, traces of his personal writings and works online were deleted from many websites, including AskArt.com, FreeRepublic and his personal user page on Wikipedia where he was indefinitely blocked, the latter said to constitute "a violation of policy of hate speech".