Posted on 12/02/2013 7:00:02 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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.
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.
— Stephen Halbrook is a research fellow with the Independent Institute and the author of the new book, Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State.”
To put this into the right prospective....before the Nazis came to power...the German gov’t of 1931 got fearful of the Nazis using guns to bring about a change in gov’t. So it made sense to seize guns....to prevent the Nazi takeover.
However, whether or not this rumor of a Nazi coup of sorts was ever true or not...is questionable. They may have set up a fake story....to get the government to react in this way. Nothing is clear from this era on any decision of the government prior to the Nazis.
The Weimar government was about as Democratic as you can get....and still felt gun seizure was in the best interest of the public and the government. After the Nazis came to power....none of this gun rights business mattered anymore.
The lefties are actually trying to “debunk” Nazi-era gun control laws. The story line goes: Hitler really loosened Weimar gun control laws for “his people”, and only tightened them for the Jews, so he wasn’t a gun grabber.
With logic like that, the worldwide quota for lobotomies seems to have been fulfilled.
Coming conclusion: if President Obama only bans guns for clingers and tea partiers, then that’s okay.
Hitler used US progressives euthanasia plans.
Truth be told the left are the Nazi's.
We are on this road. Believe it.
Revolt is coming.
My only hesitation with this is the myth that Nazis were ever very well organized, rational, or efficient in carrying out their schemes. If you set aside their brutality and aggression against some for a while, what is striking is that they were a lousy government.
Much of what they did in domestic policy was along the lines of Obamacare. Take a somewhat flawed system and make it a complete cluster-foul-up. And it was this way throughout their system of government.
To start with, at the top, Hitler was very paranoid about one or more of his lieutenants amassing enough power to displace him. So he created a patchwork of overlapping authority, cross communications, and irrational leadership.
The “rank structure” he established for civilians was just nonsensical, so everybody was getting “promoted” all the time. Think “Private, 5th class”, having to get promoted time and again to become a “Private, 1st class”, their next promotion being “Basic Corporal, 5th class”.
And while they were expert at brutalizing individuals, they were utterly impotent when faced with mass protests. One notorious example was when hundreds of wives marched to a political prison, walked right past the guards and took their husbands home with them. And the Nazis just stood there, having no idea what to do.
Again, as will Obama’s people, while they were great at brutalizing individuals, they saw people only as groups. So if they could formulate an “us vs. them” psychology against a group, they could finally act, as they did when faced with hated minorities.
Even then, they were foul ups. It was noted by a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto uprising that, when they began, they had something like a few pistols and a little ammunition; yet by the time it was over, they had pistols, rifles, lots of other weapons and ammunition.
At least 17 German soldiers killed, and 93 wounded, over months of fighting. And though they killed about 13,000 and captured 57,000 unarmed civilians, it is downright stupid that their casualties were so high or that it took so long.
Interesting, but not very meaningful unless quantified.
How many guns were in private hands and therefore confiscated as a result of the registration? If a very small number, it is unreasonable to think they would have made any significant difference if there had been no registration. My understanding is that there had never been any particularly large number of firearms in private German hands, particularly handguns.
I haven’t seen those numbers, but I suspect it is a very-very different situation from the hundreds of millions of guns floating around USA.
I also ask people to consider what the likely result of Kristallnacht would have been had the attacked Jews been heavily armed and managed to kill some hundreds of their attackers. Would it have really brought down the Nazi government, or merely have accelerated the destruction of the Jewish people in Germany?
There were about .5M Jews in Germany in 1933 or about 0.75% of the population. Somewhat fewer in 1938 due to emigration. If every single Jew had been as heavily armed as an American prepper, it’s difficult to see how they could have won the battle.
I am not arguing against the need to fight against evil, using deadly force if necessary. Only against the delusion that doing so will always be effective. The Jews of Germany after 1933 could quite literally not win, regardless of whether they were armed or not. Therefore, the claim that their disarming somehow allowed or caused their destruction is illogical.
I don’t recall ever hearing that the Nazis were ‘well-organized, rational or efficient’, other than in their destruction of the Jewish population. Like Obama, Hitler was into fundamental transformation towards his utopian vision, which required the New Aryan Man, raised from Nazi schools.
Leftists are incapable of learning from history.
bttt
BTTT!
Bkmk
bookmark
I know it.
See how that worked out?
I only wish I could believe that. I do believe that the camps are coming and I doubt that there will be much resistance. Pre 2004, I would say revolt is coming because the people will not stand still for what the Government has planned. After 2008, I seriously much, if any resistance to anything the Government plans. The docile acceptance of obamacare and his other rapes of the Constitution convinced me that sometime between 2004 and 2013 America lost their will to fight.
When it happens here, I expect to be dead and gone by then. However, if worse comes to worse, I will die alone in my own yard shot to death by agents of the Government. I will not go alive to a Government camp.
Throughout history, outnumbered Jews have won impossible battles. One just doesn’t know what would have happened.
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