Reichskristallnacht was 74 years ago. Stephen Halbrook’s 2009 article in the St. Thomas Law Review details the close connection between the disarmament of the German Jews and what came next. From the conclusion:
Over a period of
several weeks in October and November 1938, the Nazi government disarmed the
German Jewish population. The process was carried out both by following a
combination of legal forms enacted by the Weimar Republic and by sheer lawless
violence. The Nazi hierarchy could now more comfortably deal with the Jewish
question without fear of armed resistance by the victims.
It may be tempting
to argue that the possession of firearms by the German Jews would have made no
difference, either in the 1938 pogrom or later in the Holocaust, when the
majority were deported and then eradicated in death camps. Yet this fatalistic
view ignores that the Nazis themselves viewed armed Jews as sufficiently
dangerous to their policies to place great emphasis on the need to disarm all
Jews. In 1938, it was by no means certain that Jewish armed resistance
movements could not develop, and even less certain that individual Jews would
not use arms to resist arrest, deportation, or attacks by the Nazis.
...
Consistent adherents
of a “Never Again!” policy – which assumes that what has happened in history,
could again happen – would seek policies to help ensure that it does not indeed
occur again.
That brings us back
to Alfred Flatow. [The article provides a case study of Flatow, a Jewish
veteran of the German army, who competed for Germany in the 1896 Olympics.]
What if he – and an unknown number of other Germans, Jews and non-Jews alike –
had not registered his firearms in 1932? Or if the Weimar Republic had not
decreed firearm registration at all? What if the Nazis, when they took power in
1933 and disarmed social democrats and other political enemies, or when they
decided to repress the entire Jewish population in 1938, did not have police
records of registered firearm owners? Can it be said with certainty that no
one, either individually or in groups small or large, would have resisted Nazi
depredations?
One wonders what
thoughts may have occurred to Alfred Flatow in 1942 when he was dying of
starvation at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Perhaps memories of the
1896 Olympics and of a better Germany flashed before his eyes. Did he have
second thoughts, maybe repeated many times before, on whether he should have
registered his revolver and two pocket pistols in 1932* as decreed by the Weimar
Republic? Or whether he should have obediently surrendered them at a Berlin
police station in 1938 as ordered by Nazi decree, only to be taken into Gestapo
custody? We will never know, but it is difficult to imagine that he had no
regrets.
* If Mr Flatow did registered his guns in 1932, it was not under a new decree. The Law on Firearms and Ammunition of 1928 was passed and required that all gun owners, but the few exempted citizens, were required to register their weapons and be permitted before acquiring a gun and then permitted again before said firearm could be carried.
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