Hitler’s Control-The lessons of Nazi history

This week's CBS miniseries Hitler: The Rise of Evil tries to explain the conditions that enabled a manifestly evil and abnormal individual to gain total power and to commit mass murder. The CBS series looks at some of the people whose flawed decisions paved the way for Hitler's psychopathic dictatorship: Hitler's mother who refused to recognize that her child was extremely disturbed and anti-social; the judge who gave Hitler a ludicrously short prison sentence after he committed high treason at the Beer Hall Putsch; President Hindenburg and the Reichstag delegates who (except for the Social Democrats) who acceded to Hitler's dictatorial Enabling Act rather than forcing a crisis (which, no matter how bad the outcome, would have been far better than Hitler being able to claim legitimate power and lead Germany toward world war).

Acquainting a new generation of television viewers with the monstrosity of Hitler is a commendable public service by CBS, for if we are serious about “;Never again,”; then we must be serious about remembering how and why Hitler was able to accomplish what he did. Political scientist R. J. Rummel, the world's foremost scholar of the mass murders of the 20th century, estimates that the Nazis killed about 21 million people, not including war casualties. With modern technology, a modern Hitler might be able to kill even more people even more rapidly.

Indeed, right now in Zimbabwe, the Robert Mugabe tyranny is perpetrating a genocide by starvation aimed at liquidating about six million people. Mugabe is great admirer of Adolf Hitler. Mugabe's number-two man (who died last year) was Chenjerai Hunzvi, the head of Mugabe's terrorist gangs, who nicknamed himself “;Hitler.”; One of the things that Robert Mugabe, “;Hitler”; Hunzvi, and Adolf Hitler all have in common is their strong and effective programs of gun control.

Simply put, if not for gun control, Hitler would not have been able to murder 21 million people. Nor would Mugabe be able to carry out his current terror program.

Writing in The Arizona Journal of International & Comparative Law Stephen Halbrook demonstrates that German Jews and other German opponents of Hitler were not destined to be helpless and passive victims. (A magazine article by Halbrook offers a shorter version of the story, along with numerous photographs. Halbrook's Arizona article is also available as a chapter in the book Death by Gun Control, published by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.) Halbrook details how, upon assuming power, the Nazis relentlessly and ruthlessly disarmed their German opponents. The Nazis feared the Jews — many of whom were front-line veterans of World War One — so much that Jews were even disarmed of knives and old sabers.

The Nazis did not create any new firearms laws until 1938. Before then, they were able to use the Weimar Republic's gun controls to ensure that there would be no internal resistance to the Hitler regime.

In 1919, facing political and economic chaos and possible Communist revolution after Germany's defeat in the First World War, the Weimar Republic enacted the Regulation of the Council of the People's Delegates on Weapons Possession. The new law banned the civilian possession of all firearms and ammunition, and demanded their surrender “;immediately.”;

Once the political and economic situation stabilized, the Weimar Republic created a less draconian gun-control law. The law was similar to, although somewhat milder than, the gun laws currently demanded by the American gun-control lobby.

The Weimar Law on Firearms and Ammunition required a license to engage in any type of firearm business. A special license from the police was needed to either purchase or carry a firearm. The German police were granted complete discretion to deny licenses to criminals or individuals the police deemed untrustworthy. Unlimited police discretion over citizen gun acquisition is the foundation of the “;Brady II”; proposal introduced by Handgun Control, Inc., (now called the Brady Campaign) in 1994.

Under the Weimar law, no license was needed to possess a firearm in the home unless the citizen owned more than five guns of a particular type or stored more than 100 cartridges. The law's requirements were more relaxed for firearms of a “;hunting”; or “;sporting”; type. Indeed, the Weimar statute was the world's first gun law to create a formal distinction between sporting and non-sporting firearms. On the issues of home gun possession and sporting guns, the Weimar law was not as stringent as the current Massachusetts gun law, or some of modern proposals supported by American gun-control lobbyists.

Significantly, the Weimar law required the registration of most lawfully owned firearms, as do the laws of some American states. In Germany, the Weimar registration program law provided the information which the Nazis needed to disarm the Jews and others considered untrustworthy.

The Nazi disarmament campaign that began as soon as Hitler assumed power in 1933. While some genocidal governments (such as the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia) dispensed with lawmaking, the Nazi government followed the German predilection for the creation of large volumes of written rules and regulations. Yet it was not until March 1938 (the same month that Hitler annexed Austria in the Anschluss) that the Nazis created their own Weapons Law. The new law formalized what had been the policy imposed by Hitler using the Weimar Law: Jews were prohibited from any involvement in any firearm business.

On November 9, 1938, the Nazis launched the Kristallnacht, pogrom, and unarmed Jews all over Germany were attacked by government-sponsored mobs. In conjunction with Kristallnacht, the government used the administrative authority of the 1938 Weapons Law to require immediate Jewish surrender of all firearms and edged weapons, and to mandate a sentence of death or 20 years in a concentration camp for any violation.

Even after 1938, the German gun laws were not prohibitory. They simply gave the government enough information and enough discretion to ensure that victims inside Germany would not be able to fight back.

Under the Hitler regime, the Germans had created a superbly trained and very large military — the most powerful military the world had ever seen until then. Man-for-man, the Nazis had greater combat effectiveness than every other army in World War II, and were finally defeated because of the overwhelming size of the Allied armies and the immensely larger economic resources of the Allies.

Despite having an extremely powerful army, the Nazis still feared the civilian possession of firearms by hostile civilians. Events in 1943 proved that the fear was not mere paranoia. As knowledge of the death camps leaked out, determined Jews rose up in arms in Tuchin, Warsaw, Bialystok, Vilna, and elsewhere. Jews also joined partisan armies in Eastern Europe in large numbers, and amazingly, even organized escapes and revolts in the killing centers of Treblinka and Auschwitz. There are many books which recount these heroic stories of resistance. Yuri Suhl's They Fought Back (1967) is a good summary showing that hundreds of thousands of Jews did fight. The book Escape from Sobibor and the eponymous movie (1987) tell the amazing story how Russian Jewish prisoners of war organized a revolt that permanently destroyed one of the main death camps.

It took the Nazis months to destroy the Jews who rose up in the Warsaw ghetto, who at first were armed with only a few firearms that had been purchased on the black market, stolen or obtained from the Polish underground.

Halbrook contends that the history of Germany might have been changed if more of its citizens had been armed, and if the right to bear arms had been enshrined it Germany's culture and constitution. Halbrook points out that while resistance took place in many parts of occupied Europe, there was almost no resistance in Germany itself, because the Nazis had enjoyed years in which they could enforce the gun laws to ensure that no potential opponent of the regime had the means to resist.

No one can foresee with certainty which countries will succumb to genocidal dictatorship. Germany under the Weimar Republic was a democracy in a nation with a very long history of much greater tolerance for Jews than existed in France, England, or Russia, or almost anywhere else. Zimbabwe's current gun laws were created when the nation was the British colony of Rhodesia, and the authors of those laws did not know that the laws would one day be enforced by an African Hitler bent on mass extermination.

One never knows if one will need a fire extinguisher. Many people go their whole lives without needing to use a fire extinguisher, and most people never need firearms to resist genocide. But if you don't prepare to have a life-saving tool on hand during an unexpected emergency, then you and your family may not survive.

In the book Children of the Flames, Auschwitz survivor Menashe Lorinczi recounts what happened when the Soviet army liberated the camp: the Russians disarmed the SS guards. Then, two emaciated Jewish inmates, now armed with guns taken from the SS, systematically exacted their revenge on a large formation of SS men. The disarmed SS passively accepted their fate. After Lorinczi moved to Israel, he was often asked by other Israelis why the Jews had not fought back against the Germans. He replied that many Jews did fight. He then recalled the sudden change in the behavior of the Jews and the Germans at Auschwitz, once the Russian army's new “;gun control”; policy changed who had the guns there: “;And today, when I am asked that question, I tell people it doesn't matter whether you're Hungarian, Polish, Jewish, or German: If you don't have a gun, you have nothing.”;

— Richard Griffiths is a doctor of psychology with research interest in gun issues. Dave Kopel is a NRO contributing editor.

Knights were expensive to support. They required a stable of horses, grooms, blacksmiths, squires, footmen and so forth. However, all of these were safer and had a better life in fealty to a prosperous and successful lord than if they were banished to a life of banditry (romantic tales of Robin Hood aside).

Which was probably another reason for having large castles: the knight needed to ensure the safety of his support personnel, without whom he would not be an effective fighter.

A knight can ride out and be moderately invulnerable, but he would not last long if he had to acquire and cook his own food, and if he did not have a safe place where he could take off his armor and sleep

Kevin, this is exactly the point many on this thread are making.

I just don't have a cassandra's view of the current state of affairs in this country. In EXTREME circustances armed resistence is certainly justified; that's what the Second Amendment is all about. We are nowhere near that extreme point presently. I doubt that we ever will be.

Granted.
-- Matthews was a delusional fanatic who hated our legal system and who contended that traffic laws he didn't like were "unconstitutional"

So what?

Roscoe, -- I'm calling your cowardly bluff.

How am I, along with either jeff or harpseal, -- "similar to the killer Matthews or in any way his "wannabes"?
-- Obviously you can't answer.
Which proves that your only motive was a personal attack in order to bait one of us into a flame fest.

news out of Russia about the terror famine in the Ukraine (millions deliberately straved to death) plus the liquidation of the old Russian middle-class, had the German middle-class terrified . . .

Exactly. While the New York Times denied it, anyone who wanted to know, knew. Many ethnic Germans who lived in Russia had immigrated to the midwest. German language papers were common in the Dakotas up to the 1930s and they published letters from Russian Germans describing what was happening to them (300,000 murdered). North Dakota State University has an archive of the German papers. Ron Vossler translated a selection of the letters and describes his surprise at finding them here:

Pilgrims In The Valley Of Tears

The full text of New York Times reporter Walter Duranty's notorious 1933 dispatch denying a genocide in the USSR is here:

RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING

Duranty's article was a snide hit piece on the Welsh investigative journalist Gareth Jones who had reported on the genocide. An archive of articles by Jones and Muggeridge is here:

http://colley.co.uk/garethjones/site_map.htm

Chilling stuff.

The only way I could envision foreign troops on US soil would be UN blue helmets "invited" in by a Quisling governor in a post nuclear type environment of near societal collapse. But that scenario is pretty far out there.

In the US, the target of conquest is the productive middle class. To conquer them, you need a force that has no affinity for the American middle-class (and thus would enjoy their work and feel no connection with the people they were stomping), is naturally comfortable with brutality and violence, and recognises that their standard of living is dependent on their success with keeping the middle-class in line.

You don't need to go overseas to recruit such people. You can find all you want in our own inner-cities. All a future Clintonite would need to do to recruit an army of BATF thugs to try to disarm the middle class, is give the gang-bangers new "colors". And Clinton organized a "gang summit" in 1993 to get the street gangs stop fighting each other so much

jpfo is correct. i've heard aaron speak several times. interesting, hollywood only gets it when there's a riot. i laughed when i saw hollywood women take to the streets with newly-purchased guns in their purses! after the l.a. riots.

too bad no one ever examines the aristocratic women of the 1920's that greased hitler's rise to power. they adored their adolf, as much as hollywood sets standards today, made hitler into a palatable social event.

I could also see foreign troops on US soil after a disputed presidential election where the loser after the court battles does not concede and an incumbent administration backs the loser.

No need of foreign troops in certain circumstances. Like if the supporters of the loser and incumbants include the street gangs. Just ensure that a handful of "trusted" people hand over the keys to the National Guard armories to the "right" people, who then surround the capital and promise civil war if "their" person is not allowed to assume office

Whatta creepy coward you are roscoe.

"He shot the officer in the back"

So? --

Poor little roscoe, -- your 'cop hater' baiting tactics are being ignored everywhere on FR today, aren't they?
-- I was wondering what brought on your attack here on this thread.. Go soak your head somewhere & cool down.

Just because a lot of freepers question the constitutionality of laws and the behavior of those who enforce them, the sky is not falling, roscoe.

Its just part of living in a free republic.

This is an interesting thread - at least to a guy who collects large bore, pinned and recessed S&W wheelguns.

1. As a German interpreter who lived in Berlin, I gotta tell you that Nazi history is scary. Primarily because I do not see America as immune to the Gleichschaltung, solution-at-any-price mentality which propelled Hitler to power. Kevin C. is correct. Before we see a 21st Century replay of the death of Weimar, things are going to have to reach the level of 'some deep systemic problem.'

2. I think the source article for this thread is wide of the mark. Nazi gun control was not the necessary and sufficient condition for the 12 years of Adolph's tyranny. He had a lot of help. That is the problem.

3. What I am concerned about is the utter ignorance of the malleable middle of our electorate, which in times of great duress (not now), would welcome the dictator. The promises and propaganda would flow freely, the masses would drink deeply thereof, and those of us knowledgeable of the wisdom of our Founding Fathers...would be out in the cold. It seems utterly inconceivable now, but a latter day Bubba Rex (he was just a shoddy precursor) could turn Homeland Security (Heimatsicherheit) into a club to crush our republic.
4. The premise of some on this thread, with whom I am most sympathetic (and alongside whom I would fight), is that a few well-armed freedom-minded individuals could effect a change in the face of a political Hitlerian tsunami. I'm not sure. We should be more focused on the media than our Dillon reloaders. The Goebbels of our age (Schumer, Pelosi, Hillary Regina, Petah Jennings, et al.) are much more of a threat than an absence of firepower.

I agree..

We should be more focused on the media. The Goebbels of our age are much more of a threat than an absence of firepower, and I see them rising from the 'beerhalls' of today..
Forums on the web..

-- Tis amazing how many severly disturbed people there are out there, who actively hate the principles of our constitutional free republic.
Five years on FR have been quite an education.

There are always jackboot licking licking cowards on these threads.
Their kind sold their sisters to Nazi soldiers for five francs a roll, guided the Gestapo to hidden Jews, and wept when the Germans were defeated.
It was always thus.
-TMc-

I had no idea when I first started posting here how many there were, or how blatant they could be about their disregard for constitutional principles.
In the normal course of life, you rarely ever get down to brass poitical tacks with your peers.
Perhaps it is best not to..
I've seen quite a bit of negative reinforcement going on, even here where most profess to be constitutionalists..

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