Gun Control in the Third Reich (31 page)

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,”
London 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 F
ORDHAM
U
RBAN
L
AW
J
OURNAL
, 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).

29
. Geheime Staatspolizei, Evakuierung von Juden nach dem Osten, July 6, 1942, RG-14.006*01, B.Nr. II B 2-326/42 g, copy from Rostock city archives in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

30
. Quoted in Andreas Heusler and Tobias Wenger,
“Kristallnacht”: Gewalt gegen die Münchner Juden im November 1938
(Crystal Night: Violence Against Munich Jews in November 1938) (Munich: Buchendorfer, 1998), 184.

31
. Konrad Kwiet, “Resistance and Opposition: The Example of the German Jews,” in
Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich
, ed. David Clay Large (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1991), 65–66.

32
. Kwiet, “Resistance and Opposition,” 72–73.

33
. Leonard Gross,
The Last Jews in Berlin
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 171–77, 188–94, 210.

34
. Gross,
The Last Jews in Berlin
, 128–29, 154–56.

35
. Arnold Paucker,
German Jews in the Resistance 1933–1945: The Facts and the Problems
(Berlin: Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, 2003), 53.

36
. “Trzy wyroki śmierci za niedozwolone posiadanie broni,”
Nowy Kurjer Warszawski
, Jan. 22, 1941, 1.

37
.
Reichsgesetzblatt
1941, I, 759.

38
.
Hitler's Secret Conversations
, 403. See also
Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier 1941–942
(Hitler's Table Conversations at the Führer Headquarters 1941–1942) (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1963), 272.

39
. Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews
(New York: Homes and Meir, 1985), 341, 318, 297.

40
. Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, eds.,
The Einsatzgruppen Reports
(New York: Holocaust Library, 1989), ii, 117, 128, 233, 306, 257–58, 352–53, 368.

41
. Simha Rotem (Kazik),
Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter and the Past within Me
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 118–19, 25, 32–34.

42
.
The Goebbels Diaries: 1942–1943
, ed. and trans. Louis P. Lochner (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), 350–51.

43
. Thomas Keneally,
Schindler's List
(New York: Scribner, 1982), 346–47.

44
. Jacques Semelin,
Unarmed Against Hitler: Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939–1943
, trans. Suzan Husserl-Kapit (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993), 2.

45
. S. P. MacKenzie,
The Home Guard
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

46
. “2,000 Planes in West Rip Railways and Airfields,”
New York Times
, May 11, 1944, 1.

47
. Peter Hoffmann,
The History of the German Resistance, 1933–1945
, 3rd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), 90.

48
. Franz von Papen,
Memoirs
(London: Andre Deutsch, 1952), 498.

49
. The most thorough account of this assassination attempt is given in Hoffmann,
The History of the German Resistance
, 315–503.

50
. Hoffmann,
The History of the German Resistance
, 424.

51
. Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov,
The Berlin Diaries, 1940–1945
(London: Pimlico, 1999), 202, 208, 222–23.