Gun Control in the Third Reich (10 page)

Although the Nazi focus continued to be the disarming of political enemies—for instance, a police raid of the local labor union in Hannover, where shots were exchanged and police searched the building for weapons
⁶¹
—the Jews' turn soon came. The government announced that an anti-Semitic boycott would not be resumed on the condition that the “atrocity campaign” abroad be ended, referring to the American and Polish consulates' repetition of accusations by eastern Jews against the Nazis. Apparently hoping to depict Jews as subversive by proving them to be in possession of firearms, search-and-seizure operations were executed on April 4, 1933.
The New York
Times reported: “A large force of police assisted by Nazi auxiliaries raided a Jewish quarter in Eastern Berlin, searching everywhere for weapons and papers. Streets were closed and pedestrians were halted. Worshipers leaving synagogues were searched and those not carrying double identification cards were arrested. Even flower boxes were overturned in the search through houses and some printed matter and a few weapons were seized.”
⁶²

The
Völkische Beobachter
, Hitler's newspaper, described the raid under the alarming headline “The Time of the Ghetto Has Come; Massive Raid in the Scheunenviertel; Numerous Discoveries of Weapons—Confiscation of Subversive Material; Numerous Arrests of ‘Immigrants' from East Galicia.” The article dramatically described how the police, supported by the SS and criminal detectives, approached Berlin's Scheunenviertel (Barn District)
⁶³
and searched the houses and basements of the Jewish inhabitants. It reported: “During the very extensive search, the search details found a whole range of weapons. Further, a large amount of subversive printed material was confiscated. Fourteen persons who did not have proper identification were detained. Most of them were Jews from Poland and Galicia who were staying in Berlin without being registered.”
⁶⁴

The article did not state how many or what types of arms were seized or whether they were even unlicenced—indeed, Weimar-era firearm registration records may have directed the police to exactly which Jews to search for arms. As will be seen, no prohibition on Jewish possession of firearms was decreed until 1938. The article does expand on the “subversive material” discovered. It includes two illustrations: first, the assemblage of SS and police on the street and, second, a pathetic picture of an elderly Jewish man in front of a microphone explaining to Nazi radio broadcasters on the scene that he did not know why he was being searched.
Beobachter
readers were apparently supposed to “get it,” but the picture and statement only evoke sympathy for the old man.

On April 12, Reich interior minister Frick promulgated the newly decreed law on racial and political restrictions in the civil service, dismissing from government service non-Aryans (except war veterans) and members of democratic and socialist groups. An Associated Press account under the headline “Seize Literature and Arms” gave the following description:

Systematic search by the police of passengers' baggage deposited at Prussian railway cloakrooms has yielded a rich harvest of treasonable material, it was said in an official report issued tonight.

Truckloads of trunks filled with Communist literature, arms and munitions were seized in Berlin and other cities, the report said.
⁶⁵

An April 21 report “Permission to Possess Arms Withdrawn from Breslau Jews” described what was happening in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), home to 10,000 Jews:

The Police President of the city has decreed that “all persons now or formerly of the Jewish faith who hold permits to carry arms or shooting licenses must surrender them forthwith to the police authorities.”

The order is justified officially on the grounds that Jewish citizens have allegedly used their weapons for unlawful attacks on members of the Nazi organization and the police.

Inasmuch as the Jewish population “cannot be regarded as trustworthy,” it is stated, permits to carry arms will not in the future be issued to any member thereof.
⁶⁶

The Breslau police would have known the identities of such persons because they themselves had issued the firearm licenses and registrations that had been required by the 1928 and 1931 Weimar laws. It was those same laws that authorized confiscation of firearms from persons not deemed “trustworthy.”
⁶⁷

As the Nazis consolidated power, traditional elements temporarily accorded recognition were then attacked. The Stahlhelm, the “steel helmet” veterans who had fought in World War I and who had been exempted from some of the arms seizures, came under scrutiny. An informer notified Munich's political police that a suspect “who belongs to the Stahlhelm is currently in the process of hiding weapons. Schnürpel [the suspect] has been said to have repeated several times that the Stahlhelm, fearing its dissolution, was hiding a part of its weapons.”
⁶⁸
The Stahlhelm would be subordinated under SA command in July and wholly absorbed by the SA early the next year.
⁶⁹

A police raid in Frankfurt resulted in the arrest of 200 alleged Communists and the seizure of fifty weapons and a duplicating machine.
⁷⁰
A massive raid in Berlin netted “extensive written inflammatory material” along with “hitting and stabbing weapons.”
⁷¹
Victor Klemperer, a Jewish war veteran, noted in his diary: “The garden of a Communist in Heidenau is dug up, there is supposed to be a machine-gun in it. He denies it, nothing is found; to squeeze a confession out of him, he is beaten to death. The corpse is brought to the hospital. Boot marks on the stomach, fist-sized holes in the back, cotton wool stuffed into them. Official post mortem result: Cause of death dysentery, which frequently causes premature ‘death spots.'”
⁷²

In the month of May, the newspapers, buildings, and other assets of political enemies were forfeited to the state,
⁷³
and the infamous book burning consumed in flames “subversive,” Jewish, and “degenerate” works.
⁷⁴
The SPD was banned in June, and the so-called bourgeois parties were prohibited by the Law Against the Formation of New Parties of July 14, 1933.
⁷⁵

The burgeoning police state needed detailed information on every person. For the previous fifty years, the state registry offices had maintained files on every person's status and religion, making Jews readily identifiable.
⁷⁶
Beginning in June, a new census began that would provide to authorities detailed information on every household. For the census, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (Dehomag), the subsidiary of the U.S. firm International Business Machines (IBM), provided its new punch card and card-sorting system, which allowed an enormous amount of data to be stored in 600 punch hole possibilities per card.
Besides name, address, sex, birthdate, native language, family, and employment, the cards included at column 22: hole 1 for Protestant, hole 2 for Catholic, and hole 3 for Jew.
⁷⁷
It is unclear whether firearm ownership was included, but census records could easily have been correlated with police records to identify Jews, political opponents, and others who had obtained permits to acquire or carry firearms or who had registered firearms pursuant to the 1931 decree.

Indeed, the Gestapo on July 19 directed the Berlin police president and other police agencies in Prussia to keep monthly statistics of confiscated firearms and explosives, noting: “Recently, especially with search and seizure operations of wider scope, arms and explosives in great numbers have been confiscated.” The requirement extended to “military arms and other firearms.”
⁷⁸

This information gathering was hardly limited to the census and police firearm records. In an August diary entry, Victor Klemperer denigrated the ostensible support for Hitler with the comment: “But everyone, literally everyone cringes with fear. No letter, no telephone conversation, no word on the street is safe anymore. Everyone fears the next person may be an informer.”
⁷⁹

Opponents of the New Order were by now invariably labeled “Communists,” but these enemies of the state were frequently Social Democrats, political moderates of various stripes, and Jews. The Weimar firearms laws and decrees were ready made to justify the escalating police raids for unregistered or otherwise unauthorized firearms. The ostensible dimunation of the rule of law was itself paradoxically based on a perverted concept of the rule of law, arising from the legislative branch's surrender of law-making power to the executive—now embodied in the person of the führer Adolf Hitler. The repression would only become more systematic and pointed as the Nazis consolidated power and flexed their growing police-state muscle and firepower.

1
. See, for example, reports in
Völkischer Beobachter
, Jan. 29, 1933, 2;
New York Times
, Feb. 3, 1933, 1;
Der Bund
(Bern), Feb. 11, 1933 (Saturday edition), 1.

2
. “Razzia in Charlottenburg” (Police Raid in Charlottenburg),
Der Bund
(Bern), Feb. 2, 1933 (evening edition), 2.

3
.
New York Times
, Feb. 13, 1933, 4.

4
. Quoted in Konrad Heiden,
Geburt des Nationalsozialismus
(The Birth of National Socialism) (Zürich, 1934), cited in Gerd H. Padel,
Dämme Gegen die Braune Flut: Die Schweizerpresse und der Aufstieg des Dritten Reiches 1933–1939
(Dam Against the Brown Flood: The Swiss Press and the Ascent of the Third Reich 1933-1939) (Zürich: Thesis, 1998), 16.

5
. Hans Mommsen,
The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 535–37, 542.

6
. Leon Dominian to Secretary of State, Feb. 21, 1933, in U.S. Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers 1933
, vol. 2:
The British Commonwealth, Europe, Near East, and Africa
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 195–96.

7
. “Hitlerites Wreck Catholic Meetings,”
New York Times
, Feb. 22, 1933, 1.

8
. Quoted in Frederick T. Birchall, “Hitler Arms Nazis as Prussian Police,”
New York Times
, Feb. 25, 1933, 1, 5. See also Mommsen,
The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy
, 534–35, 542.

9
. Quoted in Birchall, “Hitler Arms Nazis as Prussian Police,”
New York Times
, Feb. 25, 1933, 1, 5.

10
. Hans Bernd Gisevius,
To the Bitter End: An Insider's Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler, 1933–1944
, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 13, 33–36.

11
. “Red Terror Plans Alleged by Reich,”
New York Times
, Mar. 1, 1933, 11. See also William L. Shirer,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(New York: Simon & Shuster, 1990), 194, citing Nürnberg Document 1390-PS,
Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), III, 968–70.

12
. Franz von Papen,
Memoirs
(London: Andre Deutsch, 1952), 269.

13
. Reichsverordnung zum Schutz von Volk und Staat,
Reichsgesetzblatt
1933, I, 83, § 1.

14
.
Id.
§ 5.

15
. Ernst Fraenkel,
The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 3; Mommsen,
The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy
, 542–43.

16
.
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
, July 1, 1937, quoted in Fraenkel,
The Dual State
, 25, 216 n. 71.

17
. “Red Terror Plans Alleged by Reich,”
New York Times
, Mar. 1, 1933, 11.

18
. Der Reichsminister des Innern (RMI) to Landesregierungen, Mar. 1, 1933, I A 2130/1.3, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, München (BHStA), (MA) 106312.

19
.
Der Bund
(Bern), Mar. 3, 1933, 3.

20
. See “2000 Sprengkapseln in der Wohnung eines Kommunisten gefunden” (2000 Detonators Found in a Communist's Apartment); “Maschinengewehr bei Kommunisten beschlagnahmt” (Machinegun Confiscated from Communists); “Feuergefecht in Hamburg, Kommunistische Dachschützen mit Karabinern bewaffnet” (Shootout in Hamburg, Communist Snipers Armed with Carbines); See also “Anklage gegen 9 Kommunisten” (Charges Against 9 Communists),
Völkischer Beobachter, Tägliches Beiblatt (Supplement)
, Mar. 4, 1933, 2.

21
.
Journal de Genève
(Switzerland), Mar. 6, 1933, 6.

22
. Hsi-Huey Liang,
The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 171.

23
. Ingo Müller,
Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich
, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 33; Frederick T. Birchall, “Hindenburg Drops Flag of Republic,”
New York Times
, Mar. 13, 1933, 6.

24
. To the Bayerische Staatsministerium des Innern., Bad Tölz, den 9.III.1933, BHStA, MA 105475.

25
. Bella Fromm,
Blood & Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary
(New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990), 84, 87.

26
. “Nazis Seek Sweep of Local Offices,”
New York Times
, Mar. 12, 1933, 19.

27
. Bayhsta Reichsstatt-Halter Epp, Nr. 37, München Abt. II, Der Beauftragte der Reichsregierung, München 11: III.33, BHStA.

28
. “Hindenburg Drops Flag of Republic,”
New York Times
, Mar. 13, 1933, 6.

29
. “Nazis Raid Home of President Ebert's Widow: Hindenburg Orders Inquiry of Flag Search,”
New York Times
, Mar. 15, 1933, 11.