Gun Control in Nazi Occupied-France

by Stephen P. Halbrook

  A Flame of Resistance

  Those organizing to resist the occupation contemplated using underground publications and acquiring arms. On October 22, Alphonse Juge, representing the Popular Democrats (Démocrates populaires), organized a meeting in Montpellier in the living room of Professor Jean-Rémy Palanque. He proposed a plan of action around the review Temps nouveau. He was harshly interrupted by one of participants, P-H. Teitgen, who shouted, “Your idea is very well, my dear Juge, but it is not sufficient for us! You must obtain arms to use against enemies and traitors!”53

  Similarly, in another context, Jewish resister David Knout insisted, “We have but one means of defending ourselves … taking up arms against the Germans.”54

  The first arms of the Resistance were typically an old hunting rifle and an obsolete revolver model 1873. This obsolete revolver, which fired an 11 mm black-powder centerfire cartridge, was last produced in 1886, and was no longer a “military” arm banned to civilians by French law. Rifles such as the bolt-action carbine model 1892/16 8 mm Lebel, being “military,” had been banned from civilian ownership, but would be highly desirable by the future Resistance members.55

  A member of the Resistance named Camaret was wanted by the Germans for hiding arms but had been tipped off and narrowly escaped. He crossed the border into the unoccupied zone on December 28, but would be in danger when he returned to Paris. Along with Guillain de Bénouville, he met with an attorney, Jacques Renouvin, who “told us that in addition to the military organizations which were hiding arms from the German commissions, other Resistance groups were already in existence…. They were unarmed, because the officers charged with hiding arms from the Germans would give them none.”56

  Most would have to content themselves with unarmed resistance, even if only symbolic. Simone de Beauvoir noted in her diary that she had seen a hawker “selling comic composite pictures of gorillas, pigs, and elephants, each with Hitler’s head instead of its own.” But shoving a German soldier could be deadly. On the Boulevard Saint-Michel, she saw the following warning in red print: “Jacques Bonsergent, engineer, of Paris, having been condemned to death by a German Military Tribunal for an act of violence against a member of the German Armed Forces, was executed by shooting this morning.”57

  At the end of 1940, France had experienced an occupation for six months that, while traumatic, was not the worst of all possible worlds. Regarding the focus of this study, French citizens who failed to surrender their firearms within twenty-four hours of Wehrmacht presence were threatened with the death penalty, but no instance of imposition thereof for mere firearm possession was reported. Probably thousands of violations were alleged, but incarceration, and not execution, was imposed.

  Enormous quantities of personally owned firearms were surrendered to the Germans to be kept in arms depots. This provided a complete supply of hunting guns to happy German soldiers just in time for the fall hunting season. Unknowable but also enormous quantities of firearms were not turned in, prompting the occupiers repeatedly to admonish and threaten the occupied to comply with their orders. The French police received the highest praise for their collaboration with and assistance to the Germans.

  To say that times would change for the worse would be an understatement.

  “Laval is Hitler’s man, and collaboration is merely a fine word for servitude,” wrote Jean Guéhenno in early 1941.58 Major General Neumann-Neurode verified that cooperation with the French police was good, although they were not enthusiastic in enforcing rules about traffic and darkening houses. But illegal weapons, mostly hunting guns and pistols, continued to be found, and owners were sentenced by military courts. He added that churches and the houses of ministers had been searched for weapons, and two ministers had been sentenced for weapons possession.59

  The above bears out the generalization by historian Henri Michel that “[i]n all occupied countries the Gestapo made use of the national police force, though placing little trust in it and had access to its files and saw its reports; they recruited from it volunteers who were completely at their service.”60 The records of firearm registrations were certainly within this cooperation. Although the Wehrmacht controlled the French police at this time, the tentacles of the Gestapo would increasingly assert themselves.

  In the two-month period ending on January 10, some 61 cases of spying, 139 cases of sabotage, and 358 cases of illegal weapons possession were reported. The numbers of confiscated arms, surrendered or otherwise seized, were phenomenal: roughly 8,000 rifles, 5,000 pistols, and 19,000 hunting guns.61

  In the same period, District A reported from Saint-Germain that numerous arms were surrendered mostly by wealthy people who were fearful of the penalties.62 District B at Angers noted sentences for anti-German demonstrations, weapons possession, theft, excessive prices, guerrilla activities, transfer of army goods, and resistance.63 An eighteen-year-old shoemaker was sentenced to death for finding a revolver and procuring ammunition.64 Hunting guns and revolvers were still in the hands of the population, and military courts intervened in fifteen cases. Roger Jeunet, an electrician working in the marine arsenal of Brest, was shot to death as he was aiming a pistol at two soldiers.65

  MBF Stülpnagel issued a situation report for February praising the French police, who were supervised closely by the Germans, for their reliability and good work. The police prefect for District Paris reported several cases in which French police officers misappropriated weapons or kept them illegally, turning them over to the German authorities for prosecution.66

  The MBF identified the main crimes committed as the cutting of communication cables, illegal crossing of the demarcation line, weapons possession, and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Of eighteen death sentences, one was for illegal weapons possession and negligent bodily injury, and another for anti-German propaganda, illegal weapons possession, and failure to surrender anti-German flyers. Others were sentenced to prison terms for similar acts. Instances of illegal weapons possession for January 13 to February 12 were reduced to 176 from the previous month of 358. Thousands of firearms and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition were confiscated.

  Notices of the sentences of transgressors, often including several on one poster, were posted to deter future offenses. The following example would not have had much dissuasive force compared to the possible death penalty: farmer Jean Nolle was sentenced on March 17 to three weeks in jail for grenade and munition possession.67

  Others got four years in prison for arms possession. In one case, the defendant possessed three rifles and over 100 rounds of ammunition that he stole from a captured property depot.68

  More Confiscations of Hunting Guns

  Meanwhile, hunting guns continued to be appropriated for use by the occupation forces. Brigadier General Adolph, head of District B at Angers, issued an order on March 19 reciting orders from 1940 about the surrender of arms and purchase thereof for use by the occupation authorities.69 The hunting guns were not captured property but were private property belonging to those who surrendered them. Compensation for guns taken for the German forces would be determined by the MBF. The Reich Hunting Office (Reichsjagdamt) was taking 25,000 hunting guns from the depots at District A, while the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe (Ob.d.L., or Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe) was taking 20,500 from District Bordeaux. The latter suggests that this was a power grab by Hermann Göring, Germany’s hunt master and Luftwaffe chief, to take over the above total of 45,500 hunting guns as loot. Göring was notorious for looting art, and looting firearms would have satisfied his artistic and hunting lusts as well as provided booty for Luftwaffe fighters.

  The German brass did enjoy the delicacies of French game, courtesy of special officers assigned to hunting. Reinhard Kops, an officer in the Abwehr (German military intelligence), was quartered in a beautiful room in the palatial building in the rue de Paris, where the other personnel of the Komandantur (commander’s headquarters) lived. In his memoirs, he recalled a hunt officer, a first lieutenant,
who acted as a forest ranger in the forest of Compiègne, located sixty kilometers north of Paris, who provided game for the Kommandantur.70

  Roast of wild boar was served at Kops’s first lunch at the headquarters. Kops wrote, “All arms had been taken from the French. In the Kommandantur, there was a huge room full of hunting arms, all carefully numbered and provided with the names and addresses of the owners.” The hunt officer and his minions had now replaced French hunters in controlling the stock of game.71 These must have been some of the finest confiscated hunting guns to be stored in such a place.

  The issue of compensation for confiscated arms was being pursued at the highest levels. On March 24, the French minister, state secretary of national economy and finances, sent a memorandum to the MVF on the confiscation of arms belonging to private citizens. It stated:

  Since the armistice came into effect, German authorities have confiscated, either directly or through the French police, all weapons and ammunition held by dealers for sale or by private citizens.

  This confiscation was apparently conducted pursuant to art. 53, paragraph 2, of the Hague Convention of October 18, 1907. That treaty provides that weapons and ammunition belonging to private citizens may be confiscated by the occupying forces, but that they may not be considered captured property. This means that when peace is reestablished, they must be returned and their owners reimbursed for any damage suffered. In reality it appears, however, that the German authorities did not limit their actions to the safeguarding of objects confiscated in this manner. Rather, they used them and often in a way that will make their return impossible.72

  The above-cited provision of the Hague Convention provided that “all kinds of munitions of war, may be seized, even if they belong to private individuals, but must be restored and compensation fixed when peace is made.”73 Hunting, competition, and other civilian firearms were not “munitions of war,” which meant military weapons. Needless to say, no firearms were ever restored or compensation made.

  The above French memorandum went on to say that weapons dealers should be indemnified immediately for the arms confiscated from then since their businesses were destroyed. Confiscations from private citizens such as hunters and marksmen need not be compensated until later. It suggested that the confiscation of weapons from dealers be treated the same way as all other confiscations and that the dealers be paid the same way. Incredibly, it ended that the Germans would be responsible for these payments, but they could be deducted from the amounts due from France to Germany under the armistice.

  A response concerning payment for confiscated firearms was issued by the MBF, apparently authored by Dr. Rudolf Thierfelder of the military administrative office (Kriegsverwaltungsrat, or KVR).74 Noting that in the beginning the plan was to secure about three million confiscated firearms, most could not be returned for the following reasons: (1) contrary to repeated orders of the MBF, ordnance staff treated many firearms as captured property and transferred them to collection centers without identification; (2) the Army High Command ordered 125,000 firearms to be transferred to Germany; (3) firearms loaned to German soldiers to hunt were no longer available; and (4) the safeguarding of firearms in collection centers was poor and many became useless.

  A plan existed to negotiate compensation with the French government, but the criteria was unclear because the French government had ordered the surrender of some firearms even before the German invasion; some of the weapons collections at mayors’ offices were then taken over by the Germans, while others were destroyed in battle. It was thus impossible to determine the number of firearms appropriated from French collection centers and their owners. Moreover, in many cases, the Germans did not issue receipts for firearms surrendered at their request. German compensation to the French for confiscated firearms, like compensation for untold other items, was a hypothetical exercise that would go nowhere.

  The MBF issued a situation report for March noting that, of eighteen French citizens sentenced to death, one was for guerrilla activity—shooting at a German airman who made an emergency landing—and two others were for illegal weapons possession and assault on a German soldier. There were 193 weapons offenses for the previous four weeks, the highest number being 76 cases from District A. District A also had the largest number of hunting guns confiscated, numbering 2,760. Not many firearms were surrendered in the other districts for this period.75 Not surprisingly, District A would brag about the good cooperation between German authorities and French police and gendarmes in a later report.76

  Collaboration Against Resistance

  As an example of the ongoing collaboration, what was described as an assassination attempt against Wehrmacht soldiers in Paris resulted in the apprehension of the terrorists with French cooperation. Fernand de Brinon, secretary of state and third-in-command for the Vichy government,77 declared to the press:

  Two French construction site workers in a Paris suburb ran after a terrorist immediately after he had shot a German army soldier, and contributed to handing him over to the French authorities.

  You know what Marshal Pétain thinks of these cowardly and vain attacks; he stigmatized them himself, by saying that they were committed against men who do their duty. Therefore, I have decided to congratulate, tonight, on behalf of the Marshal, the two workers who reacted with such determination and with courage, for their instinct worthy of good French citizens.78

  This expressed Vichy’s collaborationist policy that sought to ingratiate itself to the Germans. As de Brinon told AP correspondent Roy Porter in an interview, “France has only one way to look and that is toward Berlin.”79

  In this period, there was no organized armed French resistance. The Resistance instead was publishing underground newspapers and organizing for armed actions against the occupation when the appropriate time came. The Réseau du Musée de l’Homme (Network of the Museum of Man), a student group that used the museum’s duplicating machine, began publishing the newspaper Résistance the previous fall.80

  The group did not have any weapons, related Noël Créau, a member of the group who responded to my questionnaire in 2002.81 Born in 1922, he was a college student living in a Paris suburb when the war came. He was supposed to go to the air force flight training school in June 1940, but the German occupation obviously changed that.

  In prewar France, Créau explained, “[a]side from hunting guns, the law made it difficult to keep other types of arms.” When the Germans came, “I think most French people were reticent to hand over their hunting guns to the gendarmerie, and delayed doing so. But my father, as well as my father-in-law, veterans of 1914–18, buried their weapons in their gardens. They had to replace the shoulder stocks once they retrieved them.” They risked death: “It was common practice for the German police to execute firearm owners.”

  That last comment requires qualification. Execution for mere gun possession would have been less common in 1940–41 but more ordinary after the SS assumed police duties in 1942 and also as armed resistance grew, particularly in 1944. Moreover, there were only about 3,000 German police in France. Most of the killing would be done by the French police and particularly by the Milice, Vichy’s paramilitary organization formed with German aid to fight the Resistance.

  As Henri Frenay detailed in his memoirs, Resistance leaders changed their appearances and addresses often, and carried guns to defend themselves.82 Yet Communist operative Charles Tillon opined about his organization, “The Paris region did not contain fifty combatants capable of using any weapons at all in the spring of 1941.”83

  Hunting-Gun Depots

  The MBF issued a directive on May 20 regarding the management of hunting-gun depots. Noting insufficient adherence to previous orders, it mandated that each district must immediately establish a central depot large enough to store all confiscated hunting guns on shelves where they would be dry and secure from unauthorized access. Existing arms depots at district headquarters, mayors’ offices, offices of the ordnance staffs, or in other locations w
ere required to be transferred forthwith to the central hunting-gun depot.84

  Smokeless powder hunting guns that needed little or no repair were required to be separated from those that needed repair or were old or unusable. They were to be categorized by those whose owners were known and those whose owners were unknown. Usable guns would be sorted by type, that is, shotgun, rifle, three-barrel or similar combination, and small bore rifle. Each district would stock up to 1,000 hunting guns to be issued to soldiers.

  All of the usable hunting guns would be immediately confiscated from private French ownership and placed in the depots for use by the occupying forces. The unusable and old hunting guns would be safeguarded and administered as confiscated private French property. Weapons that could be traced back to their owners would be listed with the name and address of the owner and the weapon number.

  The hunting-gun depots would be set up by the war administrative inspector (Kriegsverwaltungsinspektor) assigned to forest services at each district. The staff person for forests and woods would supervise all hunting-gun depots of a district, and hunting officers would be in charge of the local administration of the depots. French assistance for care of weapons was subject to restrictions.

  Finally, depots for hunting ammunition would be secured separately from hunting-gun depots. All hunting and small caliber ammunition from existing depots or other stocks were required to be stored in those depots. All other ammunition, including pistol ammunition, had to be surrendered.

  Soldiers were not getting the guns free. Purchasers of hunting guns were given a receipt with the buyer’s rank and name, a recitation that the gun was purchased from captured property pursuant to AHM 1941, item 462, the price, the type of gun, manufacturer (if known), serial number, place and date, and disbursing officer. Payment for hunting guns was due by June 5.85