Gun Control in the Third Reich

by Stephen P. Halbrook

  Der Strümer, the newspaper of Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, published a supposed letter from the boys and girls of the National Socialist Youth Hostel at Grossmoellen reflecting how the incident was exploited to picture all Jews as dangerous, armed enemies of Germany:

  Today we saw a play on how the devil persuades the Jew to shoot a conscientious National Socialist. In the course of the play the Jew did it too. We all heard the shot. We all would have liked to jump up and arrest the Jew. But then the policeman came and after a short struggle took the Jew along. You can imagine, dear “Stuermer,” that we heartily cheered the policeman. In the whole play not one name was mentioned. But we all knew that this play represented the murder by the Jew Frankfurter. We were very sick when we went to bed that night. None felt like talking to the others. This play made it clear to us how the Jew sets to work.16

  Although such propaganda undoubtedly influenced many, others only feigned assent under the duress of the police state. Klemperer quoted a youngster in the Hitler Youth (Hitler-Jugend): “We are all in the HJ; most of us would dearly like not to be in it…. They are 60, 80, 100 percent against the Nazis, only the three stupidest boys, whom no one respects, are entirely for it.”17

  Working alongside the propaganda to legitimize anti-Jewish polices was the continuing consolidation of Nazi authority over the private ownership and use of firearms throughout the country. Ordinary German citizens were not demonized, but clubs involved in the shooting sports were thoroughly controlled and by the same mechanism—the Gestapo—as “the armed Jew” was controlled.

  Nazism entailed the Gleichschaltung (forcing into line) of all societal institutions, including sports in general and shooting sports in particular. As noted in the previous chapter, the shooting clubs adapted to the Führer Principle only in a formal sense during 1933–34. This adaptation, however, became institutional during 1934–38, leading to the total breakup of the old regional, religious, and sport discipline–oriented associations and to the formation of a uniform Reich National Socialist umbrella organization for all shooting clubs.18 This shift undercut the democratic club traditions. The club head was still chosen by the regular general membership19 but now had to report to the Reich sport führer and could be recalled anytime.20

  Walter Plett summarizes the repression of the shooting clubs in this period of institutional forcing into line:

  The National Socialist decision makers instituted another series of measures with which they could harass the clubs: the prohibition of wearing the old shooting uniforms and decorations, the forced installing of swastikas on shooting banners, flying swastika flags at houses, and flying these flags with church and club flags; the requirement that the Hitler Youth may attend events of the clubs only in their uniform, first a prohibition of the participation of Jews at shooting matches and then their exclusion from the club entirely, a prohibition of parades, the holding of Party functions at shooting matches in order to disrupt or prohibit them entirely, etc.21

  On January 23, 1934, the Reich sports führer (Reichssportführer) proclaimed the German Reich Association for Physical Exercise (Deutschen Reichsbund für Leibesübungen), which absorbed the gymnast, soccer, and other sport associations. It was then announced that all of the shooting clubs in a region must be consolidated into a single club.22

  The Gestapo used a standard form to notify shooting associations that they were banned based on the 1933 Decree for the Protection of the People and State and on Weimar or National Socialist police decrees. It forbade all activities involving the shooting sports, including matches, wearing the traditional shooting uniforms, flying the shooting club banner, and using the club name.23

  Non-Nazi club officials were purged. In Grevenbroich, the Nazi Party pressured the “King of the Citizen Shooting Association” (König des Bürgerschützenvereins) for the year 1935—the club’s best shooter—to step down because of his political attitude. He was replaced with a party member.24

  In April 1936, the Reich sports führer announced a decree, effective in 1937, for the strict regulation of the newly founded German Shooting League (Deutscher Schützenverband, or DSV). Because the Great War had demonstrated that half the conscripts could not shoot, the formation of this league sought to harness the shooting clubs to serve the Third Reich’s future war goals by training marksmen.25

  Gestapo repression of the traditional shooting sport culture was exemplified in regard to such rural Catholic associations as the centuries-old Brotherhood of St. Sebastian (Erzbruderschaft vom hl. Sebastianus, or EB).26 Sebastian was a Roman archer who became the patron saint of shooters. Before the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the EB had warned against Hitler. It continued on a confrontation course with the regime until dissolved by the Prussian Gestapo on March 6, 1936.27 The Gestapo prohibited the EB and all of its member clubs, confiscating their property “on the basis of their confrontational behavior and in the interest of the standardization of German sports institutions.” Reaching further than the liquidation of the EB, the Gestapo used the occasion to threaten with swift prohibition all shooting clubs that had not yet joined the DSV.28

  Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin issued a new mandate on July 2, 1936, declaring that, by agreement with the Reich sport führer, clubs that had been banned since March for not joining the DSV could now be reinstated if they joined. Clubs not registered thereafter were prohibited. The requirement to be merged into the DSV extended to clubs, guilds, and associations of all kinds that shot with firearms, air rifles, indoor rifles, crossbows, bows, and anything similar. It included clubs that convened only once a year for a traditional Schützenfest.29 The Gestapo decree greatly supported expansion of the DSV, and some clubs chose dissolution rather than affiliation to such an organization.

  In somewhat of a regional minirevolt, the Westphalian Stapo authority protested against the Gestapo mandate. After consultation with the Reich Sport Office (Reichsbund für Leibesübungen), a new Gestapo mandate from Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police, was published on July 12, 1937. Clubs that had joined the Westphalian Homeland Association (Westfaelischer Heimatbund) by February 25, 1937, would not yet have to join the DSV. However, DSV affiliation was intended to be universal by 1938, and authorization for holding any Schützenfest by a local club would end.30

  In the structural conversion of the shooting clubs to the Nazi agenda, the main focus was on the realization of a common mentality among the people (Volksgemeinschaftsgedanken). This mentality was to be coerced through the systematic organization and unification of the clubs, anti-Catholic secularization, and “social equality.” These goals were promoted by an alliance of SA-dominated shooting officials and an ever-increasing number of the SS-backed Gestapo. Through consistent paramilitarization, the shooting clubs ultimately came to have much in common with the SA and the Hitler Youth.31

  Only after 1936, with the cooperation between sport associations and the Gestapo, were important organizational successes by the DSV achieved. Recalcitrant regional associations such as the Shooting Association for Free Cologne Sauerland (Schützenbund für das kurkölnische Sauerland) and the Westphalian Homeland Association were ultimately forced to capitulate. Considerable progress was achieved through 1939 in the institutional forcing of the shooting clubs into line.32

  Some clubs that were forced into line early on and had integrated the liturgy of National Socialism into their meetings—the Hitler salute, “Sieg-Heil” and the Horst Wessel song—nonetheless dissolved after 1936 by decision of the clubs themselves in order to avoid a compulsory dissolution.33 Clubs that had resisted the Nazi mandates were banned from activities or dissolved. The St. Lambertus-Schützen Kalterherberg was prohibited from participating in the May festival processions in 1936 and 1937 because its chairman was not in the party and refused, despite repeated admonitions, to begin the meetings with the Hitler greeting. He was forced to resign in mid-1938.34

  The liquidation of the pre-Nazi German Shooting Association took place throughout Mar
ch 1938 and was accomplished with the help of the Gestapo and the temporary imprisonment of some association leaders. The association register reflects the final closing of the clubs in April.35

  In sum, the Hitler dictatorship viewed private gun owners and gun clubs with suspicion, and the Gestapo used different tactics to bring them under total control or to disarm them altogether. Armed Jews were demonized in propaganda campaigns as dangerous to the state, and shooting clubs were essentially seized by central Nazi authorities. Protest was not an option, and no recourse existed. By the time the National Socialist police state had been in power for half a decade, it was approaching near-complete control of firearms possession and use by the populace. But on this and every other aspect of life, the worst was yet to come.

  *

  1. Betr.: Erteilung von Waffenscheinen an Juden, Preußische Geheime Staatspolizei, B.Nr. I G—352/35, Dec. 16, 1935, DCP 0072, Bundesarchiv (BA) Lichterfelde, R 58/276.

  2. Betrifft: Erteilung von Waffenscheinen an Juden, Jan. 7, 1936, Collection JM, File 10624, Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem, 111, cited in Michael E. Abrahams-Sprod, “Life under Siege: The Jews of Magdeburg under Nazi Rule,” PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2006, 133.

  3. Bayerische Politische Polizei, Waffenscheine an Juden, Feb. 5, 1936, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, München (BHStA), B.Nr.51722.

  4. Pr. Geh. Stapo to Reg. Präsidenten, Nov. 27, 1935, Verwertung eingezogener od. durch sonst. Massnahmen in poliz. Gewahrsam gelangter Waffen, BrLHA, Pr. Br. Rep. 2A, Reg. Potsdam I Pol/3477, Waffenangelegenheiten Bd. 3, 1928–37.

  5. Michael Stolleis, The Law under the Swastika (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 134; Edward Crankshaw, Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny (London: Greenhill Books, 1956), 89. For the Gestapo Law, see Gesetz über die Geheime Staatspolizei, Preussische Gesetzsammlung 1936, S. 21.

  6. Der Reichs-und Preußische Minister des Innern, Betrifft: Entwurf des Waffengesetzes, Jan. 7, 1936, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 2, Row 3.

  7. Stapo Halle, Waffenfund in einem Hausgarten, Dec. 15, 1935, BA Lichterfelde, R 58/2025.

  8. Preuß, Geheime Staatspolizei Düsseldorf, Gesamtübersicht über die politische Lage im Monat Februar 1936, Mar. 12, 1936, BA Lichterfelde, R 58/3044a.

  9. On this episode, see Stephen P. Halbrook, The Swiss and the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Havertown, PA: Casemate, 2006), 263–70; Peter Bollier, “4. Februar 1936: Das Attentat auf Wilhelm Gustloff” (The Assassination of Wilhelm Gustloff, February 4, 1936), in Politische Attentate des 20. Jahrhunderts (Political Assassinations of the 20th Century), ed. Roland Aegerter (Zürich: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1999), 42; Andreas Saurer, “Der Mord von Davos: David Frankfurter erschiesst Nazi-Gauleiter Gustloff” (The Murder in Davos: David Frankfurter Kills Nazi Gauleiter Gustloff), Bündner Zeitung, Feb. 3, 1996, 2; Martin Bundi, Bedrohung, Anpassung und Widerstand: Die Grenzregion Graubünden 1933–1946 (Threat, Adaptation and Resistance: The Grisons Border Region, 1933–1946), (Chur, Switzerland: Bündner Monatsblatt/Desertina AG, 1996), 32–33. An account in novel form can be found in Günter Grass, Crabwalk, trans. Krishna Winston (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2002).

  10. William E. Dodd, Ambassador Dodd’s Diary: 1933–1938, ed. William E. Dodd Jr. and Martha Dodd (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 311 (entry for Feb. 19, 1936).

  11. Preuss. Gestapo, Lagebericht Febr. 1936, Feb. 2, 1936, BA Licterfelde, R 58/3044b.

  12. Emil Ludwig, Der Mord in Davos (Amsterdam: Querido, 1936), translated as The Davos Murder (London: Methuen, 1937), 115, 118, 120, 126–27.

  13. Wolfgang Diewerge, Der Fall Gustloff. Vorgeschichte und Hintergründe der Bluttat von Davos (München: Franz Eher Nachf., 1936), 108–14.

  14. Wolfgang Diewerge, Ein Jude hat geschossen…Augenzeugenbericht vom Mordprozess David Frankfurter (München: Franz Eher Nachf., 1937).

  15. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1933–1941, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 153 (entry for Feb. 11, 1936). See also Arnd Krüger, “‘Once the Olympics Are Through, We’ll Beat Up the Jew’: German Jewish Sport 1898–1938 and the Anti-Semitic Discourse,” Journal of Sport History 26, no. 2 (1999), 353.

  16. “Letter from ‘Der Stuermer,’ no. 16, 4/1936,” in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947), 8:14.

  17. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 169 (entry for June 10, 1936).

  18. Michael Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im ‘Dritten Reich’: Etappen der Gleichschaltung traditioneller Vereinskultur” (Shooting Clubs in the “Third Reich”: Stages of the Forcing into Line of Traditional Club Culture), Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 79 (1997), 439, 442–50.

  19. Vereinsrecht §§ 21–79 Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, cited in Stefan Grus, “Allgemeines Verhältnis des Naziregimes zu den Schützenvereinen” (General Relationship of the Nazi Regime to the Shooting Clubs), unpublished manuscript, Wiesbaden, Oct. 2005, 2.

  20. Einheitssatzung in Deutsche Schützen Zeitung, no. 4 (1935), S. 41–43, cited in Grus, “Allgemeines Verhältnis,” 2.

  21. Walter M. Plett, Die Schützenvereine im Rheinland und in Westfalen, 1789–1939 (The Shooting Clubs in the Rhineland and in Westphalia, 1789–1939) (Cologne: RVDL, 1995), 466.

  22. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im ‘Dritten Reich,’” 251 n. 190, 447, 629.

  23. Plett, Die Schützenvereine im Rheinland und in Westfalen, 482–83. The Gestapo cited section 1 of the Decree for the Protection of the People and State (Verordnung zum Schutz von Volk und Staat) of February 28, 1933. It also cited either section 14 of the Police Administration Law (Polizeiverwaltungsgesetzes) of June 1, 1931, or the Prussian Decree (Preuß. Verordnung) of August 2, 1933.

  24. Plett, Die Schützenvereine im Rheinland und in Westfalen, 452.

  25. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im ‘Dritten Reich,’” 461.

  26. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im ‘Dritten Reich,’” 462.

  27. Plett, Die Schützenvereine im Rheinland und in Westfalen, 441–42, 443–44.

  28. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im ‘Dritten Reich,’” 461–62.

  29. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im ‘Dritten Reich,’” 467.

  30. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im ‘Dritten Reich,’” 470–72.

  31. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im ‘Dritten Reich,’” 482–83.

  32. Schwartz, “Schützenvereine im ‘Dritten Reich,’” 483.

  33. Plett, Die Schützenvereine im Rheinland und in Westfalen, 447.

  34. Plett, Die Schützenvereine im Rheinland und in Westfalen, 452.

  35. StA Nürnberg, Vereinsregisterakte DSB 1938, p. 156/26, cited in Grus, “Allgemeines Verhältnis,” 2.

  9

  Hitler’s Gun Control Act

  WHAT MIGHT BE called the incredibly shrinking rule of law in Nazi Germany was characterized by ever-increasing Gestapo action outside any law. With the Reichstag no longer bothering to legislate, the Hitler cabinet continued to decree formal laws, including—after five years of leisurely consideration—the Weapons Law of 1938, a revision of the 1928 Weimar Firearms Law, under which the courts continued to adjudicate cases.

  National Socialism embodied a schizophrenic perversion of law as a set of predictable rules that could be overridden by the führer, acting through institutions such as the Gestapo. But formal laws remained significant because in the usual course of events they were enforced by ordinary police and adjudicated by the courts. They could be ignored in extraordinary cases only if the Gestapo so decided.

  Illustrative of the continued usefulness of the Weimar law to the Nazi regime was a case decided by Reich Regional Court (Landgericht) in Allenstein, East Prussia, in January 1937.1 Rejecting the argument that the defendant who possessed an unregistered double-barrel gun was unaware of the legal requirements, the court held that he “acted with intent when he purchased and carried the firearm as well as when he failed to register it.” Allenstein decreed the registration of firearms in 1932, and despite the decree’s being
annulled in 1936, the defendant could still be convicted.

  The Reich Court reversed the lower court’s decision that all of the offenses—including acquisition of, failure to register, and poaching with the gun—constituted but one criminal offense. “But the failure to register the gun is not part of the other offenses because those offenses were not committed through failure to register.” In short, the lower court sought to ameliorate the piling up of charges for the same act, but the appeals court demanded multiple convictions.

  In response to continued discussion about a revised Firearms Law, Wilhelm Frick’s Interior Ministry invited Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police Heinrich Himmler and officials of the High Office of Security Police (Hauptamt Sicherheitspolizei) to a meeting on February 2, 1937, to resolve differences.2 On May 5, Frick circulated a new draft,3 explaining its most important element as follows: “The self-understood principle that enemies of the people and the state and other elements that pose a danger to public security may not possess any weapons shall be enforced by giving the police the authority to prohibit such persons from acquiring, possessing and carrying weapons and ammunition and to confiscate without compensation weapons and ammunition found in the possession of such persons.”4

  The draft rejected the suggestion that the acquisition of firearms should not require a permit, “given public security concerns.” “Rather, the police must be able to maintain control so that firearms that are easy to handle or can be carried concealed get into the hands of reliable persons only who proved a need.” Although “expensive long rifles, in particular hunting rifles,” did not require a permit under the 1932 regulations, “a special permit must be necessary for those long rifles that fall under the definition of war materials”—that is, military rifles. Further, “small firearms (pistols and revolvers)” must also require an acquisition permit.5

  The explanation of the new draft provided a little more detail on the prohibition of Jews’ playing any role in the firearms industry: “There will be no room for Jews in the German weapons industry and trade. § 3, paragraph 5, therefore provides that no permit may be issued if the requestor or the person designated to be the technical head of a facility is Jewish. This provision is not limited to the technical head of the business, but also applies to the commercial manager. It applies to both manufacturing and trade (§ 7, paragraph 2).”