Gun Control in the Third Reich

by Stephen P. Halbrook

  Illustrative of violence against centrists, in Stuttgart Nazis shot and wounded several persons in an attack on a parade of the Palatinate Guard, which was affiliated with the Bavarian People’s Party (Bayrische Volkspartei). Police “arrested several Nazis for carrying concealed weapons, but there is scant indication that the arrests will be followed by the infliction of penalties.” Nazis also attacked Catholic meetings in several other cities.7

  On February 24, Göring authorized the arming and use of SA, SS, and Stahlhelm members as auxiliary police. He admonished Prussian provincial and district governors for inadequate censorship, finding that “periodicals, leaflets and posters defaming the Chancellor [Hitler] and members of the Cabinet are suffered to appear.”8

  Federalism was also under attack. Wilhelm Frick, Reich interior minister, attacked “certain state governments that have not yet quite grasped the meaning of this new era and that show resistance to the policy of the government of the Reich.” State councilor Fritz Schaeffer, head of the Bavarian People’s Party, responded: “Let the government of the Reich be assured that if it sends a Federal Commissioner to Bavaria, he will be arrested at the State line. We will have no Brown Party bailiff over us.” He denounced Nazism and posed the right of secession: “[I]f Berlin ceases to respect law and the Constitution that sets Bavaria free and we can choose what form of the State we will.”9

  On the night of February 27, the Reichstag was set ablaze. A Dutch Communist was caught in the building, but Nazi leaders may have organized the arson as a pretext against a parliament they detested. Working under Göring’s command from already prepared lists, the Gestapo began that same night to arrest every deputy and functionary of the Communist Party.10

  On February 28, Hitler and Göring persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree, based on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, suspending constitutional guarantees and authorizing the Reich to seize executive power in any state that failed to restore law and order. It was claimed that plans for Communist terrorism were found in a search of the Karl Liebknecht House, Berlin’s Communist headquarters; that Communists were responsible for the Reichstag fire; and that on the coming Sunday election day the Communists would attack Nazis and disarm the police.11 It never occurred to the non-Nazis in the cabinet, recalled Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, that the documents found were forged, adding: “We were all convinced that the Communists had planned an armed uprising and represented a menace to the security of the State.”12

  The Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State of February 28, 1933, authorized the government to suspend the constitutional guarantees of personal liberty, free expression of opinion, freedom of the press, and the rights to assemble and form associations. Secrecy of postal and telephonic communication was suspended, and the government was authorized to conduct search and seizure operations of homes.13 The decree provided that whoever engaged in “severe rioting” or “severe breach of public peace” by “using weapons or in conscious and intentional cooperation with an armed person” were subject to the death penalty or to imprisonment up to life.14 If the decree were applied to a protest march by political opponents, the mere keeping or bearing of a weapon might have become a capital offense.

  The decree essentially became the constitution of the Third Reich, even though the Weimar Constitution formally remained valid during the entire Nazi regime. It created a “prerogative state” (Massnahmenstaat) in which the regime ruled not by law, but by arbitrary measures (Massnahmen). Protective custody and other repressive measures instituted by the Weimar Republic were found to be highly useful to the new regime.15 So were the firearm restrictions and registration requirements.

  “The task of combating all movements dangerous to the state implies the power of using all necessary means, provided they are not in conflict with the law,” Werner Best, chief legal adviser for the Gestapo, would later explain. “Such conflicts with the law, however, are no longer possible since all restrictions have been removed following the Decree of February 28, 1933, and the triumph of National Socialist legal and political theory.”16

  In this bizarre New Order, legal formalities remained of great significance to the German people who expected state commands to be based on positive law, to the police who were trained to cite violations properly if “your papers are not in order,” to civil servants who carried out the letter of the law no matter who was in power, and even to judges who resisted the führer’s will as law. This worldview would persist, but Hitler would after all become the führer, even though it would take the next half-decade to consolidate his and the Gestapo’s total power.

  At this time, throughout Germany police searched offices and houses for subversive literature and illegal weapons under the guise of suppressing Communists. Meanwhile, in Prussia some 60,000 Nazi and Stahlhelm members had been armed with revolvers and truncheons. The outcome of the coming “election” could not be in doubt.17

  Reich interior minister Frick sent an urgent missive on March 1 to state officials regarding the KPD, the German Communist Party: “The Police Headquarters in Berlin has established that the KPD intends to conduct systematic attacks against members of the national units, especially the SA and the SS, and by doing so to recklessly neutralize any armed members of those units by force of arms. The plan is to conduct the action in such a way that their authors will, if possible, not be recognized as Communists. The plan is also to compel patrolling policemen by force of arms to give up their weapons.”18 Although Communists may have been capable of such attacks, this language is consistent with Nazi assaults on democrats and other opponents of the Nazis who might “not be recognized as Communists” and whose mere possession of firearms was evidence of the conspiracy.

  House searches were reported to have revealed not only arms and illegal publications, but also catacombs used for hiding alleged Communists and their arms.19

  The Völkische Beobachter, the official Nazi newspaper, found much grist for the mill. Several articles in the March 4, 1933, issue alleged that house searches revealed detonators, subversive literature, and a machine gun. One headline sounded the alarm, “Firefight in Hamburg, Communist Snipers Armed with Carbines,” and the article averred that shots were fired at SA men marching in a Nazi torchlight procession and that police searches of houses and restaurants revealed numerous weapons. Scores were being settled for anti-Nazi activity that had taken place before Hitler’s ascension to power—a Berlin prosecutor charged Communists with severe breach of peace, attempted murder, and Firearms Law offenses during a December 1932 assault against Nazis.20

  Similar reports appeared in foreign presses. A Swiss newspaper reported searches in Düsseldorf, resulting in discovery of a clandestine publisher, Communist propaganda, and arms.21 The Nazis succeeded in creating a “Communist gun owner” bogeyman to justify extensive searches and seizures conducted by the police to confiscate firearms and arrest their owners. To carry out these measures, some 5,000 auxiliary police composed of SA, SS, and Stahlhelm members were enrolled in Berlin alone.22

  Despite the repression, the Nazis won only about 44 percent of the vote in the elections of March 5. But that portion sufficed for the Hitler regime to remain in power in the coalition government and to have executive power in all the German states.23

  Searches and seizures of firearms continued against persons of all types, not just so-called Communists. Wilhelm Willers of the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz complained to the Bavarian Interior Ministry about a police–SA search of his house under the pretext that his son had Communist affiliations. The police found no weapons hidden in a compost pile that was not even on his property. They returned early the next morning “to conduct a house search for weapons and documents…. From the attic to the basement, every corner, every closet, every drawer, even in my daughter’s bedroom and in my own, my records and even my bed were searched.” His son had belonged to socialist student organizations a decade earlier, but not since t
hen. Willers demanded the return of his pistol, which had been seized.24

  The monthly cocktail party of Bella Fromm, a high-society Berlin socialite and journalist who was Jewish, was raided by an SA gang. An SA officer alleged that informers saw “that arms and ammunition have been delivered to the house…. We know very well that this house belongs to non-Aryans.” Regular police later arrived, to whom she served coffee and cake. After the captain rejected her offer to “search the house for arms and ammunition,” she left in full evening dress to a dinner with Reich vice chancellor Franz von Papen.25

  Anti-Semitic actions began to be reported. One account noted, “The Produce Exchange in Breslau was entered today by Nazi storm troops, who searched the place for arms and ousted the occupants. Several Jewish-owned department stores there were forcibly closed, and the storm troopers ejected Jewish judges and lawyers from the courts.”26

  Raids against labor union buildings were explained as necessary to crush Communist subversion. A Reich radio broadcast from Munich on March 11 explained that an SA occupation of a union house in Munich was not aimed at the General German Federation of German Trade Unions (Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund), but at the SPD and the Reichsbanner, described as “a center of Marxist terror.” “During the search,” it was claimed, “two machine guns, hand grenades, pistols, ammunition and numerous cutting and stabbing weapons were found.”27

  In Dresden, the State of Saxony’s federal commissioner banned the republican Reichsbanner organization. The following report was typical of the time: “In Koenigsberg, Nazi storm troops occupied trade union headquarters after an exchange of shots during which four Reichsbanner men were wounded. The police reported that a quantity of arms was confiscated.” Socialist newspaper offices were seized, and numerous Communists and Socialists were arrested. “A prominent attorney at Kiel who represented Socialists at a number of political trials was slain when he admitted into his home several men who posed as police.”28

  On Sunday, March 12, six Nazi SA raided the apartment of the widow of Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democrat who had served as the first president of the Weimar Republic from 1919 until his death in 1925. They demanded the widow’s “mustard flag,” the republican black, red, and gold emblem, but her son protested that they had no flag. “They decided finally to look for hidden arms, but found only a revolver belonging to Herr Ebert, which he handed to them together with a permit that had expired.” President von Hindenburg ordered a police investigation of this “unchivalrous treatment.”29 However, Weimar-era Firearms Law made this seizure of the revolver lawful merely because the permit had not been renewed.

  An arrest record might state simply that the accused possessed a firearm. A sample arrest form later used in a Gestapo training manual identified the accused, a locksmith from Bavaria, and alleged: “Cause of Arrest: Was today at 14.10 [2:10 p.m.] found in House No. 17a with rifle Model 98.”30 The Mauser Model 98 was the military bolt-action service rifle.

  Police reported the seizure by German customs officers in Igel of three boxes from Antwerp, Belgium, addressed to an arms dealer in Hesse-Nassau. The boxes contained ninety-nine Model 08 service pistols with Erfurt factory markings. “The public prosecutor of Trier has ordered an investigation to determine whether this arms dealer really exists or whether these weapons were perhaps meant for a Communist organization.” He would also investigate how they disappeared from the Erfurt factory and were thereafter sent to Belgium and then back to Germany.31 There followed the searches of houses of alleged Communists and the seizure of weapons and subversive materials, together with numerous arrests and the shooting of two Communists who were allegedly fleeing.32

  On March 17, Christian Daniel Nussbaum, a Jewish SPD deputy in the Baden state parliament who had received death threats, fatally shot with a 7.65-mm pistol two intruders who were breaking into his dwelling in Freiburg. He feared that they were there to kill him, although they turned out to be policemen who were allegedly there to search his house. He was indicted for murder.33

  This “Marxist crime” served the Nazis as the occasion for a campaign of terror, including the arrests of SPD elected officials and trade unionists.34 Press accounts made the most of the facts that “the SPD Murderer Nussbaum” was Jewish and “had received a firearm license from the police headquarters.”35 “The political consequences of the bloodbath” included the dissolution of the Reichsbanner, various leftist organizations, and the “Marxist shooting clubs” (marxistische Schuetzenvereine), whose property would be confiscated.36

  Nussbaum explained to his attorney that he knew about numerous cases “where people sharing my political convictions were murdered.” He stated, “When I consulted with the director of police, where I asked for a weapons permit, I showed him two letters with threats against me, where even the police director alerted me to the suspicious handwriting.” Had he thought that the persons were police, he “would have never made use of the weapon.”37

  Perhaps because the Nazis wanted no trial in which such evidence would be presented, Nussbaum was held in the prison’s psychiatric ward, where he died of mysterious causes in 1938. Nussbaum’s fate remained of interest decades later, and in 1978 a hospital official reported that “the psychiatrists only said he was mentally ill so that they could save him.”38

  Repression continued unabated. In Saxony, police launched a vast action against alleged Communists, supposedly seizing numerous rifles, a thousand cartridges, and a bomb.39 Throughout Germany, the leftist presses were shut down, and centrist and neutral presses were subject to immediate suppression. Germans were forbidden to reveal information to foreigners; telephones were tapped; informants lingered in cafes; and Jews fled persecution.40

  “Nazis Hunt Arms in Einstein Home,” ran a March 21 New York Times headline, but the subtitle smirked, “Only a Bread Knife Rewards Brown Shirts’ Search for Alleged Huge Cache.” Reporting from Berlin on March 20, the article stated:

  Charging that Professor Albert Einstein had a huge quantity of arms and ammunition stored in his secluded home in Caputh, the National Socialists sent Brown Shirt men and policemen to search it today, but the nearest thing to arms they found was a bread knife.

  Professor Einstein’s home, which for the present is empty, the professor being on his way back to Europe from the United States, was surrounded on all sides and one of the most perfect raids of recent German history was carried out. The outcome was a disappointment to those who have always regarded Professor Einstein’s pacifist utterances as a mere pose.41

  A campaign of assaults against Jews under the guise that they might possess firearms was described in Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns, a true-to-life historical novel by a German Jewish emigre published the year the assaults began.42 In the novel, which Hitler ordered to be burned, anti-Nazi lawyer Dr. Bilfinger and Jewish author Gustav Oppermann find sanctuary and meet in Switzerland. The novel tells of a fictitiously named but real village in southern Germany:

  On March 25, while in Künzingen, Dr. Bilfinger observed the occupation of the city by Nationalist [Nazi] troops. He saw the troops surround a synagogue, which was full as it was a Saturday. The women were locked inside and the men dragged to the town hall where they were searched for weapons. Dr. Bilfinger pointed out the ridiculousness of the weapons search because there was no reason the men would have taken weapons with them to the synagogue. The Jewish men were energetically beaten with steel rods and rubber truncheons before they left the town hall.

  The novel describes other places where “a number of the population were searched for weapons” and mistreated. In one incident, an elderly Jewish woman dies in her bed when Nazis “searched the house ‘for weapons.’”43

  Historian William Allen describes the Nazi disarming campaign as experienced in the town of Northeim in Lower Saxony. The town had several traditional shooting societies that held competitions and festivals. A club member commented: “The ‘Gun Club of 1910’ was for the broad masses; the ‘Hunters’ were most
ly middle class; the “Free-hand Shooters’ were the upper 10 percent.” The town’s Jews, being assimilated, participated in the shooting clubs until the Nazis took power.44

  No real Communist threat existed in the sleepy village to justify the repression, but “Northeim’s Nazis provided this by finding various arms and weapons in and around Northeim and by publishing these findings in the local newspapers.” Northeim’s citizens found “that it was extremely unhealthy to have any sort of weapon around the house.”45

  To be sure, Reichsbanner members “took the threat of a Nazi Putsch seriously enough to gather guns and ammunition for the counterstrike.” But no organized resistance would be ordered. Professor Allen opines that the Social Democrats were “the only defenders of democracy in Germany, the men who should have been gathering guns and calling the general strike,” but instead their homes were being raided for midnight arms searches, and they were being hauled off to concentration camps.46

  The Enabling Law—the popular name for the euphemistically-worded Law to Remove the Distress of the People and the State—of March 24, 1933, was the last nail in the Weimar Republic’s coffin driven in by the Nazi coup d’état. Passed by the Reichstag, which then dissolved itself, the act provided that the cabinet could decree laws without consulting the Reichstag or the president. The chancellor—Hitler—was empowered to draft the laws, which could deviate from the Constitution.47