Gun control is a very hot topic and many are citing that Adolf Hitler disarmed Germany’s citizens, thus leading to the Holocaust. Here are the facts.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock and completely off the social media grid, you will have seen a meme similar to the one below:
This meme is a lightning rod for controversy, and understandably so. One day, I decided to go beyond the “scroll past” that I usually do to memes such as these and do my own research to see if this was true and let me tell you, it was a bit of a quest. While the internet is a fantastic place where you can find just about anything on everything, there are a lot of redundant sites in the Google index, which means that if I were to put up a new piece of information that would be popular among a certain niche of people and they cited/shared my creation, you’ll get repeat entries that say the same thing, which is what I encountered.
My first stop was the quote itself, “To conquer a nation, first disarm it’s citizens”.
While the results were plentiful, the sites I went to never had any legitimate sources. The quote sites across the net didn’t yield any results as well. Various fact-checking websites have results that range from “false” to “mixture”. The one quote that the meme could have paraphrased what Hitler said came from him between February and September of 1942. The quote is as follows:
“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjugated races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjugated races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or native police.”
In reading this, I could say to myself, “yes, Hitler did not let Jews have guns” and be done with it, but my curiosity was growing, so I decided to check the actual laws of the time, which began my mini-quest.
The first thing that came to mind was the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. in reading the laws, I quickly found them to be discussing the “purity” of the Jew, in essence, the Nazi form of eugenics through biology and systematic breeding. Gun laws would not be found here, but these laws would be used later to build a foundation for future laws that would be solely directed towards the Jews. You may check out this content to know the consequences of that law.
It was in visiting the Holocaust Encyclopedia that I began to get a better direction. I found an entry for the exclusion of Jewish merchants in the March 18, 1938 laws.
This is where I ran into quite a few problems.
Because of the gun control issue, digging into Nazi Germany’s past and Adolf Hitler, I was seeing a lot of skin-head sites and misinformation. Along with this, I was fearful that my activities would be monitored. While this may sound like bunker-in-the-basement, Alex Jones type of thinking, there are now many legitimate sources stating that our search pattern on Google, as well as other search engines, are being cataloged. Couple with this fact is when I share this on my social media platforms, I will be labeled an extremist by our ever-changing policies on the different platforms, but I pressed on.
Varying the wording in my search query, I came upon a German Wikipedia type of page called “Wikisource“. The page I found was in German, but thankfully, the technology exists to instantly translate the page via Google Chrome. Reading through the weapons law of 1938, I found this entry:
“to the incapacitated and mentally inferior”
When this section, combined with the overall tenor of the Nuremberg Laws, leads to the conclusion that the Jews were seen as “mentally inferior”. Other sections of the Nuremberg Laws would apply as well, but the combination of laws did keep the sale and ownership of guns by Jews during this horrific time in history illegal and their guns would have been taken away.
This took some time to dig up and over the years I’ve found that the fact checkers on these sites have made many mistakes. I have also found that anyone with a political agenda can twist and even hide/omit parts of history to suit an agenda, and I am speaking to both sides.
Where I stand on the whole issue of gun control is irrelevant. I would do the same research and publish the results, even if it went against my core beliefs as truth matters more than ego. I hope the same can be applied to the reader.
Sources:
Waffengesetz (1938) – Wikisource
Waffengesetz (1938) – Wikisource. (2018). De.wikisource.org. Retrieved 3 April 2018, from https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Waffengesetz_(1938)#Abschnitt_III_Handel_mit_Waffen_und_Munition
Examples of Antisemitic Legislation, 1933–1939
Examples of Antisemitic Legislation, 1933–1939. (2018). Ushmm.org. Retrieved 3 April 2018, from https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007459
Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor
Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. (2018). Jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Retrieved 3 April 2018, from http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/law-for-the-protection-of-german-blood-and-german-honor
2 thoughts on “Did Hitler Enact Gun Control Laws? Here are the Facts”
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.
Do you think the globalists used propaganda against Weimar Republic?… we wouldn’t know as they controlled the narrative from post war on. You could very well be sharing propaganda also