Gun Control in the Third Reich

by Stephen P. Halbrook

  This decree reflected fundamental Nazi policy. As Hitler stated in a rant in April 1942: “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.”38

  The role of the Special Deployment Forces (Einsatzgruppen), Nazi killing squads that exterminated two million Jews and others in the East, makes clear the significance of being or not being armed. Raul Hilberg is clear: “The killers were well armed…. The victims were unarmed.”39 Six Einsatzgruppen of a few hundred members each operated in Poland and Russia. Their tasks included arrest of the politically unreliable, confiscation of weapons, and extermination. For instance, Einsatzgruppe C reported in September 1941 that its operations included, “above all, the fight against all partisan activities, beginning with the well-organized bands and the individual snipers down to the systematic rumor mongers.” Typical executions were that of a Jewish woman “for being found without a Jewish badge and for refusing to move into the ghetto” and another woman “for sniping.” Extensive partisan activity by armed Jews was reported.40

  The heroic Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 demonstrated that even a few Jews with arms in their hands could effectively resist. Simha Rotem, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB), described the situation: “I and my comrades in the ZOB were determined to fight, but we had almost no weapons, except for a few scattered pistols…. In other places, where there were weapons, there was shooting, which amazed the Germans. A few of them were killed and their weapons were taken as loot, which apparently was decisive in the struggle. Three days later, the aktsia [deportations] ceased. The sudden change in their plans resulted from our unforeseen resistance.” ZOB members obtained more pistols and some grenades by the time of the April 19 aktsia. Rotem recalled that, despite the Germans’ heavy arms, after an SS unit was ambushed, “I saw and I didn’t believe: German soldiers screaming in panicky flight, leaving their wounded behind…. My comrades were also shooting and firing at them. We weren’t marksmen but we did hit some.”41

  Dozens of Germans were killed, but partisan losses were few. In the first three days of the resistance, not a single Jew was taken out of the buildings. Finally, the Germans resorted to cannon and aerial bombings to reduce the ghetto to rubble. On the tenth day, the ghetto was burned down. Many escaped through the sewers and into the forests. There they continued the struggle in cooperation with non-Jewish partisans. Joseph Goebbels’s May 1 diary entry reflects that “[t]he only noteworthy item is the exceedingly serious fights in Warsaw between the police and even a part of our Wehrmacht on the one hand and the rebellious Jews on the other. The Jews have actually succeeded in making a defensive position of the Ghetto. Heavy engagements are being fought there…. It shows what is to be expected of the Jews when they are in possession of arms.”42

  Although most are probably unknown, Germans who were aware of and opposed the Holocaust recognized that Jews must possess arms to defend themselves. Oskar Schindler, renowned for his list of Jews whom he protected in his factories in Poland and Czechoslovakia, provided for training in and issuance of firearms to his Jewish workers to resist the Nazis.43

  Countless acts of resistance, armed and unarmed, large and small, helped to defeat the Nazi dictatorship, more so in the occupied countries, but even in Germany itself. In the words of Jacques Semelin, “Most of those who resorted to unarmed resistance did so for lack of better options, that is, because they had no weapons which remained the principal and ultimate means of those who were trying to oppose the German order.”44

  No armed civilian resistence movement existed in Germany in part because Germans were unarmed, disorganized, and forced into line by years of dictatorship. Despite the growing threat of an Allied invasion, Nazi authorities did not trust the German people enough to distribute arms to civilians to act as a home guard. By contrast, beginning in 1940 Britain had organized a Home Guard force consisting of civilian volunteers bringing their own sporting arms or armed by the government with military weapons, which they kept at home.45 In May 1944, Nazi radio broadcast that 1,400,000 German civilians had been trained in the use of rifles and revolvers to defend the Reich. The New York Times quipped:

  Thus almost exactly four years after the formation of the British Home Guard in the face of the threat of a German invasion the enemy is belatedly instructing civilians to meet a similar onslaught from the base of Britain.

  It is significant that the guarded statement by the German radio does not admit that civilians have been armed, but merely that they have been instructed in marksmanship and the handling of small arms.46

  It remained for a conspiracy of Wehrmacht officers and police officials to attempt to kill Hitler and seize the government by force. Ironically, Berlin police president Helldorf—who orchestrated the disarming of the German Jews just before Reichskristallnacht in 1938—had already joined the anti-Hitler conspiracy at that time, when General Franz Halder headed a military group intent on seizing power to oppose Hitler’s war policy.47 Franz von Papen, German ambassador to Turkey, met with Helldorf and Count Gottfried Bismarck, government head of Potsdam, in Berlin in 1943. The latter two believed that “the Bolshevist methods introduced by Hitler” would destroy Germany, wrote Papen, adding: “Helldorf described the unbelievable conditions in the prisons, in which hundreds of people were being held under sentence of death for minor offences.” They discussed plans of a group led by the former chief of staff General Ludwig Beck to seize, imprison, and subject Hitler and other leading Nazis to trial. Papen’s role was to return to Turkey and use his diplomatic contacts to make contact with Franklin Roosevelt to discuss a peace without unconditional surrender. The Americans were not interested.48

  The conspiracy reached its zenith with the almost successful attack on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted the bomb under a table right by the führer at Wolf’s Lair. The plan was to mobilize the Reserve Army and stage a coup in Berlin against the Nazi regime.49 After planting the bomb and hearing it explode, Stauffenberg escaped by airplane to Berlin and announced Hitler’s death. He did not know, however, that the briefcase with the bomb had by chance been moved to the other side of an obstruction away from Hitler. Helldorf was ready to call out the Berlin police in support of the coup when news arrived that Hitler might not be dead after all.50 By nightfall, with confirmation that Hitler had survived the blast, Stauffenberg and other top conspirators at the military headquarters were captured and shot.

  Before all the conspirators were known, Missie Vassiltchikov noted in her diary that Helldorf was in danger of arrest: “His role in the attempted coup had been too conspicuous and he would be unable to produce an alibi.” He was quickly arrested, and as Gottfried Bismarck told Missie, Helldorf “is doomed. Hitler is particularly incensed at him as he was an old party veteran and a top leader of the S.A.” In the trial before People’s Court judge Roland Freisler, all the accused admitted they wanted to kill Hitler. “Helldorf was hanged last, so that he might watch the others die. It appears that they are not simply hanged, but are slowly strangulated with piano wire on butchers’ hooks and, to prolong their agony, are given heart booster injections. It is rummoured that the killings are being filmed and that Hitler regularly gloats over these films at his Headquarters.”51

  Helldorf “had turned from an early Nazi into an anti-Nazi” who would use the police to fight against Hitler, according to Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who earlier had planted a bomb on Hitler’s airplane that failed to explode and later plotted with officers to shoot Hitler with their pistols.52 He was one of the conspirators and would have been executed except that an Allied bomb landed right on the People’s Court and killed Judge Freisler.

  Tony Saurma, a wounded officer, was among those arrested but not tried. Missie wrote in her diary: “The charge: shooting at a picture of the Führer some t
ime ago and announcing after Stauffenberg’s attempt: ‘Well, never mind, better luck next time!’”53 Many were not so lucky.

  Three million Germans were imprisoned for political reasons in the years 1933 to 1945, and tens of thousands were executed. Clearly there was strong opposition to the Nazi regime, and just as clearly that opposition was smashed,54 although every act of resistance helped to end the regime. Six million largely unarmed Jews died in the Holocaust, and countless millions more unarmed people died in the countries occupied by the Nazis.

  Among other variables, a strong tradition of civilian firearm ownership with less government regulation as well as an ideological tradition of resistance to tyranny might have engendered different historical results. As has been rhetorically stated, the letter “W” might “stand for We, Awake, Weapons, Wolves, Widerstand [Resistance].”55 The Grundgesetz (Basic Law or federal Constitution) adopted by West Germany in 1968 provided that “[w]hen other avenues are not open, all Germans have the right to resist attempts to impose unconstitutional authority.”56 However, it failed to declare that the people have a right to keep and bear arms to enable them to do so.

  As the Weimar–Nazi experience demonstrated, a well-meaning liberal republic enacted repressive firearm prohibitions that would be highly useful to a dictatorship. That dictatorship could consolidate its power by massive search-and-seizure operations against political opponents under the hysterical ruse that such persons were “Communist” firearm owners. It could enact its own new Firearms Law, disarming anyone the police deemed “dangerous” and exempting members of the party that controlled the state. It could exploit the tragic shooting of a minor foreign diplomat to launch a pogrom under the guise that Jewish firearm owners were dangerous and must be disarmed. This dictatorship could disarm the people of the nation it governed and then disarm those of every nation it conquered, thereby facilitating genocide.

  If the Nazi experience teaches anything, it teaches that totalitarian governments will attempt to disarm their subjects so as to extinguish any ability to resist crimes against humanity. It might be asked whether the course of history could have been altered had German opponents of Nazism, including both Jews and non-Jews, been less obedient to arms confiscations, more unified, and ideologically more inclined to resistance.

  Is there a larger lesson to learn from the experiences of the liberal Weimar Republic’s decreeing firearms registration and the Nazi regime’s using the records to disarm “enemies of the state” and the Jews? Although such actions do not foretell what will happen, they demonstrate what can happen. Contrary to the exceptionalist assumption that genocide can occur in some countries but can never occur in others, which is belied by the experience of highly cultured Germany, recognition and exercise of specific rights promote the objective of “Never Again!” How might the course of history been different had Germany (not to mention the countries Germany would occupy) been a country where large numbers of citizens owned firearms without intrusive legal restrictions and where the right to keep and bear arms was a constitutional guarantee?57

  Dictators certainly do not respect constitutions any more than they respect civil or human rights. But an armed populace with a political culture of hallowed constitutional and natural rights that they are motivated to fight for is less likely to fall under the sway of a tyranny, and if they do, they are more likely to offer armed resistance. A disarmed populace that is taught that it has no rights other than what the government decrees as positive law is obviously more susceptible to totalitarian rule and is less able to resist oppression.

  In the failed 1848 Revolution, the German republicans sought but were unable to achieve what the Americans of the previous century had won in this regard—a bill of rights and an armed populace ready to enforce it. The German people inherited no conception of a right to have arms at the founding of the Weimar Republic, which in the chaos following the Great War was only too ready to rule by emergency decrees, including the suspension of rights such as a free press and assembly (bearing arms was not even recognized). To be sure, the positive law, including legal decrees with the possibility of judicial review, continued to play a significant role in governing, even in the first stages of National Socialism. But the events of 1938 finalized the substitution of the Führer Principle for what remained of the rule of law.

  That brings us back to Alfred Flatow, the gymnast who won the gold for Germany in the 1896 Olympics.58 What if he—and an unknown number of other Germans, Jews and non-Jews alike—had not registered his firearms in 1932? Or if the Weimar Republic had not decreed firearm registration at all? What if when the Nazis took power in 1933 and disarmed Social Democrats and other political enemies, or when they decided to repress the entire Jewish population in 1938, they did not have well-kept police records of registered firearm owners? Can it be said with certainty that no one, either as individuals or in groups small or large, would not have resisted Nazi depredations or that doing so would have made no difference?

  One wonders what thoughts may have occurred to Alfred Flatow in 1942 when he was dying of starvation at the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp. Perhaps memories of the Olympics and of a better Germany flashed before his eyes. Did he have second thoughts, maybe repeated many times before, on whether he should have registered his revolver and two pocket pistols in 1932? Or whether he should have obediently surrendered his firearms at a Berlin police station in 1938 as ordered by Nazi decree, which only led to his being taken into Gestapo custody? We will never know, but it is difficult to imagine that he had no regrets.

  *

  1. Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 199–200.

  2. Preussisches Oberverwaltungsgericht, Nov. 10, 1938, Juristische Wochenschrift 1939, 382, cited in Fraenkel, The Dual State, 27–28, 217 n. 83.

  3. Hajo Bernett, Der Weg des Sports in die nationalsozialistische Diktatur (The Way of Sports in the National Socialist Dictatorship) (Schorndorf, Germany: Hofmann, 1983), 30, 45–46; Der Deutsche Schütze 1939, Nr. 2, S.18, 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.

  4. Bernett, Der Weg des Sports, 46; Anordnung des stellv. Verbandsführers, Amtschef in der Obersten SA-Führung Schmiere (Order of the Deputy Association Führer, Amtschef, in SA-Command Colonel Schmiere), in Der Deutsche Schütze 1940, Nr. 11, S.92, cited in Grus, “Allgemeines Verhältnis,” 2.

  5. Grus, “Allgemeines Verhältnis.”

  6. Hitler’s Secret Conversations: 1941–1944, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (New York: Signet Books, 1961), 114, 633.

  7. Anton Gill, An Honourable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 1994); Claudia Koonz, “Choice and Courage,” in Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich, ed. David Clay Large (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1991), 60; Hans Bernd Gisevius, To the Bitter End: An Insider’s Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler, 1933–1944, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 417–18.

  8. Gill, An Honourable Defeat, 122.

  9. Gill, An Honourable Defeat, 129–30. See also Peter Steinbach and Johannes Tuchel, “Ich habe den Krieg verhindern wollen”: Georg Elser und das Attentat vom 8. November 1939 (“I Wanted to Prevent the War”: Georg Elser and the November 8, 1939 Assassination Attempt) (Berlin: Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, 1997).

  10. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1933–1941, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 318.

  11. Gill, An Honourable Defeat, 149; Klaus Urner, Der Schweizer Hitler-Attentäter (The Swiss Would-Be Assassin of Hitler) (Frauenfeld, Switzerland: Huber, 1980).

  12. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 426–27.

  13. Der Bund (Bern), Sept. 29, 1939, 3.

  14. “Liberation from Nazism,” Lond
on Times, Feb. 10, 1940, 5E.

  15. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 335, 342.

  16. See, for example, Le Matin (Paris), June 27, 1940, 1 (proclamation); Le Matin, Sept. 22, 1941, 1 (execution of persons for “illegal possession of arms”). See also Stephen P. Halbrook, Why Can’t We Be Like France? How the Right to Bear Arms Got Left Out of the Declaration of Rights and How Gun Registration Was Decreed Just in Time for the Nazi Occupation, 39 FORDHAM URBAN LAW JOURNAL, 101 (2013).

  17. “Topics of the Times: Their Common Fate,” New York Times, July 2, 1940, 4.

  18. Geheime Staatspolizei, Staatspolizeileitstelle München, An die Landräte in Oberbayern et al., Betreff: Überwachung und Kontrolle der Waffen-und Munitionsverkäufe, Jan. 21, 1941, BHStA, B.Nr. 28115/41, II Schd./Roh.

  19. Der Landrat d.Kr. Calau to Reg. Präs. Frankfurt/O, Aug. 26, 1942, Beschwerde wegen Versagung eines Waffenscheines, Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv (BrLHA), Pr. Br. Rep. 3B, Reg. Frankfurt/O I Pol/1877, Waffenscheine 1933–42.

  20. Gestapo Frankfurt/O to Reg. Präs. Frankfurt/O, Sept. 15, 1942, BrLHA, Pr. Br. Rep. 3B, Reg. Frankfurt/O I Pol/1877, Waffenscheine 1933–42.

  21. Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 388.

  22. Annette E. Dumbach and Jud Newborn, Shattering the German Night: The Story of the White Rose (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), 184.

  23. Dumbach and Newborn, Shattering the German Night, 11, 146; Inge Scholl, The White Rose: Munich 1942–1943, trans. Arthur R. Schultz (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 66, 94–95.

  24. Dumbach and Newborn, Shattering the German Night, 170.

  25. Quoted in Dumbach and Newborn, Shattering the German Night, 8.

  26. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 391 (entry for June 22, 1941), 428 (entry for Sept. 2, 1941 entry), 429 (entry for Sept. 8, 1941).

  27. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 429 (entry for Sept. 15, 1941).

  28. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 438 (entry for Oct. 4, 1938), 445 (entry for Nov. 18, 1941).