Pressed about the passage, Carson remarked, “The likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.”German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s, and by the mid 1940s, Hitler’s regime had mercilessly slaughtered six million Jews and numerous others whom they considered inferior. Through a combination of removing guns and disseminating deceitful propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.
First, the context: Why did Germany enact gun control laws in the years following World War I? And what was Hitler’s gun-control record?
“Following Germany's defeat in World War I, the Weimar Republic passed very strict gun control laws essentially banning all gun ownership, in an attempt both to stabilize the country and to comply with the Versailles Treaty of 1919,” according to Bernard E. Harcourt, of Columbia University, in the 2004 Fordham Law Review article, On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (a call to historians).
In 1928, the German parliament enacted the Law on Firearms and Ammunition, “which relaxed gun restrictions and put into effect a strict firearm licensing scheme,” Harcourt wrote. Some argue, he added, that the regulations were “enacted precisely in order to prevent armed insurrection, such as Hitler's attempted coup in Munich in 1923, as well as Hitler's later rise to power.”
Hitler came to power in 1933-34, and his regime demilitarized his political enemies with restrictive decrees, according to the Library of Congress article, Firearms-Control Legislation and Policy: Germany. But after doing so, a less restrictive weapons act in 1938 “exempted party hacks from licensing requirements and aimed at improving the combat skills of the population,” the article said.
Harcourt pointed out that the gun laws of 1938 specifically banned anyone who was Jewish from getting a license to manufacture firearms or ammunition. For others, the new gun laws were not so restrictive. “The Nazi gun laws of 1938 reflect a liberalization of the gun control measures that had been enacted by the Weimar Republic with respect to the acquisition, transfer, and carrying of firearms,” he wrote. "In this regard, Hitler appears to have been more pro-gun than the predecessor Weimar Republic."
Could righteous Germans have challenged Hitler’s army? If armed, could the Jewish people have mounted a successful resistance?
Consider that the German government (even before Hitler) had been preparing for another war -- and in a thorough way. The country evaded the Versailles Treaty by “dismantling and hiding large amounts of weapons -- including 350,000 rifles, 12,000 machine guns and 675 howitzers -- in secret arms caches throughout Germany,” writes Tim Ripley, military journalist, in the book, The Wehrmacht: The German Army in World War II. (Routledge; 2003).
The Versailles Treaty also limited the German army to 100,000 men. But by September 1939, Germany invaded Poland with 1.5 million troops, recounts the BBC article, 1939, Germany invades Poland.
As the war began in 1939, Great Britain, Poland and France together had superior industrial resources and population, recounts Encyclopedia Britannica online. But the German Army, the Wehrmacht, was known for training, discipline and armament. It was regarded as the “most efficient and effective fighting force for its size in the world.”
In contrast, by the end of 1939, approximately 202,000 Jewish people remained in Germany and 57,000 in annexed Austria, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. (This is not to say that there were 259,000 people of fighting age and ability -- but men, women and children of various ages.)
The museum’s website points out that during the war, there were attempts to resist. Notably, pockets of fighters managed to hold the Germans off for a month during Poland's Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1942. In the end, however, the Germans reportedly killed 7,000 Jews and deported another 7,000 to the Treblinka killing center. The German army lost approximately a dozen men. [Read the museum’s article here.]
Did most Germans keep their mouths shut while actually disapproving of Hitler, as Carson suggests?
Hitler’s political career began after World War I, according to the The Historical Encyclopedia of World War II” (MJF Books; 1989). In 1921, he became the leader of the Nazi Party, and his political views were popular, the book explains:"Anti-Semitic racism thus acquired a strong momentum, particularly among members of the lower middle class – clerks, shopkeepers, etc, -- who suffered badly in every economic crisis. Anti-Semitism offered them an explanation, in apparently valid terms, of a social and economic system that steadily reduced their status and standard of living. Even more, it flattered them by attributing to their mediocre lives a ‘higher moral value’ than that of the rich and ‘upstart’ Jews.
“Hitler and the fledgling Nazi Party appealed powerfully to this sentiment after 1918 by identifying the Jew as the cause of Germany’s defeat and the political and economic disasters that followed."
-- Found in the book, American Cassandra, The Life of Dorothy Thompson, by Peter Kurth (Little, Brown and Company, 1990).all that he could read filled him with dark anxiety and wild despair. He read how men, women and children, driven out of the Sudetenland by a conquering army -- conquering with the consent of Great Britain and France -- had been forced to cross the border into Czechoslovakia on their hands and knees. ... He read that the Jewish children had been stood on platforms in front of classes of German children and had had their features pointed to and described by the teachers as the mark of a criminal race. He read that men and women of his race ... had been forced to wash the streets while the mob laughed. ...
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