Fifty-six years after seven Holocaust survivors were killed in an arson attack on a Jewish nursing home in Munich, Der Spiegel reported Thursday that a neo-Nazi with an extensive criminal record was most likely responsible. According to the report, the attacker was Brand V., a far-right extremist who lived in Munich at the time. Brand V. died several years ago.
The deadly fire broke out on February 13, 1970. For decades, investigators focused on Germany’s far-left scene and on radical Islam, largely because three days earlier Palestinians had attacked Israeli passengers at Munich’s airport in a terrorist assault in which actress Hanna Maron was seriously wounded. It has now emerged that the likely perpetrator was a fervent antisemite from the extreme right.
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Brand V. and the arson attack at a Jewish nursing home in Germany in 1970
(Photo: Munich police; Yedioth Ahronoth archive)
The report says that early last year, a former member of Brand V.’s robbery gang told his family that Brand V., whose full name was not released, and another accomplice had attempted to break into a jewelry store at Gärtnerplatz, near the Jewish community center that housed the nursing home. The attempted robbery took place the night before the arson. When the burglary failed, Brand V. began cursing Jews and vowed to burn down the community building, according to the testimony. The account posed a major obstacle: Brand V. died in 2020, and the two other gang members are also deceased.
Nevertheless, Munich prosecutors said the new information was sufficient to reopen old files on Brand V., review investigation records from the 1970s, reassess evidence and interview witnesses who are still alive. The renewed investigation connected key elements. Among them was a previously overlooked eyewitness account describing a man resembling Brand V. near the scene on the night of the fire. Prosecutors also reexamined testimony from a former cellmate who said Brand V. confessed to carrying out the arson. Brand V. was imprisoned in 1971 for his role in a robbery, but investigators at the time did not act on the cellmate’s account. The cellmate has since died.
Brand V. was born into a wealthy family. His parents were dentists in southern Munich. He spent part of his youth in boarding schools, where he stood out for his intelligence and a pronounced attraction to violence. Influenced by an uncle who had served in the SS and who gave him a handgun and a dagger engraved with the initials of the Hitler Youth for his 12th birthday, he developed what childhood friends later described as an obsession with Adolf Hitler. He frequently visited Hitler’s mountain retreat and kept numerous copies of Hitler’s speeches in his room. As an adult, he turned to crime. He was arrested after blowing up two telephone booths and carrying out several burglaries in the 1960s, and was eventually sentenced to six and a half years in prison in the early 1970s.
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News headline: 'In Germany, there were hopes that Arabs, not Germans, had set fire to the nursing home'
(Photo: Yedioth Ahronoth archive)
Investigators believe that on the night of the attack, Brand V. entered the community building with ease. Security at Jewish institutions in Germany was tightened only after the fire. He allegedly climbed to the fourth floor carrying a can of gasoline, then made his way down, pouring fuel on the stairwell. At the exit, he set the building ablaze. Six Jewish residents burned to death. A seventh victim died after jumping from a window. According to witness accounts, one resident screamed in Polish, “Help, we are being burned alive.” One survivor, rushed to hospital with a gas mask over his face, told investigators he had survived seven or eight concentration camps and had lost an eye in one of them. “I thought that in Germany I would be able to grow old in peace,” he said. “I never experienced a night like that in my life.”