How the Nazis Used Gun Control
The Weimar Republic’s well-intentioned gun
registry became a tool for evil.
The
perennial gun-control debate in America did not begin here. The same
arguments for and against were made in the 1920s in the chaos of
Germany’s Weimar Republic, which opted for gun registration.
Law-abiding persons complied with the law, but the Communists and
Nazis committing acts of political violence did not.
In
1931, Weimar authorities discovered plans for a Nazi takeover in
which Jews would be denied food and persons refusing to surrender
their guns within 24 hours would be executed. They were written by
Werner Best, a future Gestapo official. In reaction to such threats,
the government authorized the registration of all firearms and the
confiscation thereof, if required for “public safety.” The
interior minister warned that the records must not fall into the
hands of any extremist group.#ad#
In 1933, the ultimate extremist group, led by Adolf Hitler, seized
power and used the records to identify, disarm, and attack political
opponents and Jews.
Constitutional rights were suspended, and mass
searches for and seizures of guns and dissident publications ensued.
Police revoked gun licenses of Social Democrats and others who were
not “politically reliable.”
During the five years of repression that followed, society was
“cleansed” by the National Socialist regime. Undesirables were
placed in camps where labor made them “free,” and normal rights
of citizenship were taken from Jews. The Gestapo banned independent
gun clubs and arrested their leaders. Gestapo counsel Werner Best
issued a directive to the police forbidding issuance of firearm
permits to Jews.
In 1938, Hitler signed a new Gun Control Act. Now that many “enemies
of the state” had been removed from society, some restrictions
could be slightly liberalized, especially for Nazi Party members. But
Jews were prohibited from working in the firearms industry, and .22
caliber hollow-point ammunition was banned.
The time had come to launch a decisive blow to the Jewish community,
to render it defenseless so that its “ill-gotten” property could
be redistributed as an entitlement to the German “Volk.” The
German Jews were ordered to surrender all their weapons, and the
police had the records on all who had registered them. Even those who
gave up their weapons voluntarily were turned over to the Gestapo.
This took place in the weeks before what became known as the Night of
the Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, occurred in November 1938. That
the Jews were disarmed before it, minimizing any risk of resistance,
is the strongest evidence that the pogrom was planned in advance. An
incident was needed to justify unleashing the attack.
That incident would be the shooting of a German diplomat in Paris by
a teenage Polish Jew. Hitler directed propaganda minister Josef
Goebbels to orchestrate the Night of the Broken Glass. This massive
operation, allegedly conducted as a search for weapons, entailed the
ransacking of homes and businesses, and the arson of synagogues.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler decreed that 20 years be served in a
concentration camp by any Jew possessing a firearm. Rusty revolvers
and bayonets from the Great War were confiscated from Jewish veterans
who had served with distinction. Twenty thousand Jewish men were
thrown into concentration camps, and had to pay ransoms to get
released.
The
U.S. media covered the above events. And when France fell to Nazi
invasion in 1940, the New
York Times reported
that the French were deprived of rights such as free speech and
firearm possession just as the Germans had been. Frenchmen who failed
to surrender their firearms within 24 hours were subject to the death
penalty.
No wonder that in 1941, just days before the Pearl Harbor attack,
Congress reaffirmed Second Amendment rights and prohibited gun
registration. In 1968, bills to register guns were debated, with
opponents recalling the Nazi experience and supporters denying that
the Nazis ever used registration records to confiscate guns. The
bills were defeated, as every such proposal has been ever since,
including recent “universal background check” bills.
As in Weimar Germany, some well-meaning people today advocate severe
restrictions, including bans and registration, on gun ownership by
law-abiding persons.
Such proponents are in no sense “Nazis,” any
more than were the Weimar officials who promoted similar
restrictions. And it would be a travesty to compare today’s
situation to the horrors of Nazi Germany.
Still, as history teaches, the road to hell is paved with good
intentions.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/12/how-nazis-used-gun-control-stephen-p-halbrook/
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