Gun Control in the Third Reich (21 page)

57
. See, for example, Werner Hoche, ed.,
Die Gesetzgebung Adolf Hitlers für Reich, Preußen und Österreich
(Adolf Hitler's Legislation for the Reich, Prussia, and Austria), vol. 27, Apr. 16–July 15, 1938 (Berlin: Franz Vahlen, 1938).

58
. Entwurf einer Verordnung zur Durchführung des Gesetzes über die Prüfung von Handfeuerwaffen und Munition (Beschußgesetz), 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 4, Row 1.

59
. Der Reichsminister des Innern, Betrifft: Gesetz über die Prüfung von Handfeuerwaffen und Munition (Beschußgesetz), Aug. 25, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 3, Row 7.

60
. Der Reichsminister der Justiz, Betrifft: Gesetz über die Prüfung von Handfeuerwaffen und Munition (Beschußgesetz), Sept. 16, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 4, Row 3.

61
. Verordnung über das Meldewesen, Reichsgesetzblatt 1938, I, 13. See Aly and Roth,
The Nazi Census
, 38–40.

62
. “Goering Starts Final Liquidation of Jewish Property in Germany,”
New York Times
, Apr. 28, 1938, 1.

63
. Edwin Black,
IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation
(New York: Random House, 2001), 248.

64
. Victor Klemperer,
I Will Bear Witness 1933–1941
, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 260 (entry for June 29, 1938), 11.

65
. Attentatpläne in jüdischen Kreisen, June 27, 1938, BA Lichterfelde, R 58/2246.

66
. Judenbewegung in Berlin, July 12, 1938, BA Lichterfelde, R 58/2246.

67
. Gisevius,
To the Bitter End
, 311.

68
. Zweite Verordnung zur Durchführung des Gesetzes über die Aenderung von Familiennamen und Vornmen,
Reichsgesetzblatt
1938, I, 1044.

69
. Fromm,
Blood & Banquets
, 57.

70
. Quoted in Richard L. Miller,
Nazi Justiz: Law of the Holocaust
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 24.

71
. Richard J. Evans,
The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 577–78.

72
. Fromm,
Blood & Banquets
, 280 .

73
. Fromm,
Blood & Banquets
, 281–83.

74
.
Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels
(The Diary of Joseph Geobbels), Teil I, Aufzeichnungen 1923–41, Band 6, Aug. 1938–June 1939, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998), 65. Among many other misspellings, Goebbels consistently misspelled the name “Helldorf” as “Helldorff.”

75
.
Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels
, Teil I, 142 (entry for Oct. 12, 1938). In this period, Goebbels began to have intimate discussions with Helldorf “about my personal situation”—a veiled reference to the scandal brewing about his affair with a Czech actress—leading also to meetings with Göring and Hitler.
Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels
, Teil I, 152–59, 170 (diary entries for Oct. 20–Nov. 3, 1938). Hitler was displeased with Goebbels's disloyalty to his wife, Magda, a firm National Socialist. Goebbels would soon find a way to regain the führer's approval by helping to instigate an unprecedented anti-Jewish pogrom.

76
. Quoted in Edward Crankshaw,
Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny
(London: Greenhill Books, 1956), 89.

ON OCTOBER
4, 1938
, just weeks before the Night of the Broken Glass (Reichskristallnacht), Berlin police arrested Alfred Flatow. His crime: being a Jew in
lawful
possession of firearms.
¹
The police knew he possessed firearms because he dutifully registered them in 1932 under the Weimar decree. In anticipation of the coming pogrom, the Nazi leadership launched a campaign to disarm Jews. Flatow was one of many who were arrested and turned over to the Gestapo. He would eventually be deported and die in a concentration camp.

The police may not have realized that they had arrested a world-class gymnast who had won the gold for Germany at the 1896 Olympics: first place in the parallel bars events (individual and team) and second place in the horizontal bar event.
²

Flatow's arrest record is in the Landesarchiv Berlin in a file labeled “House Searches of Jews 1938–39.”
³
It is on a standard four-page police form entitled “Report Concerning Political Incident.” Two similar arrest reports were found in the same file. As will become evident, these arrests were part of an orchestrated police campaign to disarm all Berlin Jews, including those who possessed their firearms lawfully. Further evidence establishes that the disarming of Jews
took place all over Germany. Having rendered Jews defenseless, the regime set the stage for a major pogrom, requiring only the right incident to be launched.

The arrest report specifying Alfred Flatow as the perpetrator was filed at Police Station 106 Berlin, SW 68, on October 4, 1938.
⁴
Flatow was born on October 3, 1869, in Danzig. His address was Berlin SW 19, Alexandrinenstraße 50. That street intersects with the well-known Oranienstraße in the Kreuzberg District of Berlin, where Police Station 106 was located.
⁵

The name, birth date, and birthplace correspond to one and the same Alfred Flatow who competed in the 1896 Olympics. Before that, he had served in the Sixty-sixth Prussian Infantry Regiment during 1893–94. Flatow would be an active gymnast in the Berlin Turnerschaft, Germany's largest gymnastics society, for forty-six years. He had a small bicycle shop, officiated at sporting events, and wrote widely on the theory of gymnastics.
⁶

Having come to power in early 1933, the Nazis had by October that year forced Jews out of the Berlin Turnerschaft. Club chairman Rupert Naumann supported the Jewish athletes, but Flatow only wished to avoid confrontation and resigned.

All German Olympic champions were invited as honorary guests to the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Alfred Flatow's name, together with that of his cousin, Gustav Felix Flatow, another champion of the 1896 Games, were printed in the program. However, their names and photographs did not appear in news accounts of the event because they apparently refused to attend due to the Nazi regime's anti-Semitic policies.
⁷

For more than three decades, Alfred Flatow lived in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin in an old house on Alexandrinenstraße, the address shown on his 1938 arrest report. However, the 1939 census indicated that he then lived at 33 Landshuter Straße in Schöneberg, where he shared an apartment with Else
and Margarete Flatow.
⁸
Perhaps he moved in with these relatives after being released from Gestapo custody. The census listed his descent as “JJJJ”—that is, all four grandparents were Jewish.

As noted, Flatow's 1938 arrest was reported on the police form entitled “Report Concerning Political Incident.” Characterization of the matter as “political” brought it within the jurisdiction of the Gestapo, which could hold a detainee in “protective custody” indefinitely, and that person had no right to judicial review.
⁹

Flatow's arrest report states: “Political affiliation: Jew.” If “Jew” sounds odd as the designation for a “political affiliation,” perhaps the form was originally drafted for arrests of political opponents, such as leftists and various democrats, against whom the Nazi regime had focused its repression since 1933.

The “crime scene” (Tatort) was listed as Berlin SW 68, Curdtdamm 16, and the time was 1:50 p.m. Yet Curdtdamm 16 was the address for Police Station 106.
¹⁰
This was no crime scene—Flatow appears to have been standing in line with other Jews to surrender his legally registered arms because they were ordered to do so by Berlin police president Helldorf.

Under “Weapons Found,” the form specified: “Surrendered a) Slashing and thrusting weapons: 1 dagger, 31 knuckledusters. b) Firearms: 1 revolver, 2 pocket pistols, 22 rounds of ammunition.” Under the type of police intervention, the form indicated “special operation [Sonderaktion]” instead of routine patrol.

Flatow's “[c]riminal act (include pertinent statutory sections)” was described simply as “possession of weapons,” but the blank for the statutory section called for by the form was not completed because there was no statute to cite. The law
had not yet been revised to prohibit Jews from possessing a weapon, although Werner Best's 1935 secret Gestapo directive against issuing firearm licenses to Jews dictated as much: “As a rule, we have to assume that firearms in the hands of the Jews represent a considerable danger for the German people.”
¹¹
The written law was irrelevant anyway in a state in which every means for carrying out the führer's will was considered legal.
¹²
The arrest report continued:

The Jew Alfred Flatow was found to be in possession of 1 revolver with 22 rounds of ammunition, 2 pocket pistols, 1 dagger, and 31 knuckledusters. Arms in the hands of Jews are a danger to public safety.

[signed] Police First Sergeant Colisle

The arms were registered at Police Station 13 on January 26, 1932. Written confirmation is there.

As stated, First Sergeant Colisle was mentioned as the source of the information that Flatow's 1932 weapons registration remained at Police Station 13. Station 13 was a kilometer north of Station 106.
¹³
The officer filling out the report, who listed himself as a “witness to the crime,” was Police First Sergeant Edmund Weiser of Police Station 106. Perhaps a list of all firearms registered to Jews was circulated to all of the police stations. Officers in charge of the registrations could confer with arresting officers in writing or by telephone to verify that the Jewish gun owner in question possessed a registered firearm. Some Jews surrendering their weapons may have produced their registration forms.

The arrest form required a listing of objects confiscated from the arrested person, including items he supposedly could use to hurt himself or someone else. The policeman here listed a briefcase with journals and various documents, perhaps Flatow's copy of his weapon registration papers from 1932 because he was apparently there to surrender his weapons voluntarily and to show his compliance with the law. Also among the items confiscated were a wallet, a tiepin, a penknife, a cigarette case with six cigarettes, glasses, keys, and pencils.
Personal belongings seized but not confiscated included about 118 Reichsmark and a gold watch. Flatow signed to acknowledge the accuracy of the inventory of property.

Then came the ominous words, signed by the police seargeant and precinct head (Poliezi Obermeister und Revierführer): “The perpetrator…has been turned over to the Gestapo.” “Put into cell from 1:25 p.m. to ———.” The blank for the time the Gestapo picked up Flatow was not filled out, perhaps suggesting that he had an extended stay or the officer was not on duty when he was picked up. The report includes nothing about what occurred after Flatow was taken into Gestapo custody. Unlike an “arrest” that would lead to a trial, Gestapo “protective custody” entailed indefinite incarceration until the suspect was no longer considered a threat to the state.
¹⁴
Werner Best was architect of this procedure, also known as “preventive detention,” which wholly abrogated any judicial review.
¹⁵

Following Flatow's 1938 arrest, knowledge of his fate is sketchy. Hitler instigated World War II the following year. In early 1942, the Nazi leadership adopted the Wannsee Protocol, which outlined the “final solution of the Jewish question.”
¹⁶
Later that year, Flatow, then seventy-three years old, was ordered to be deported. His friend Karl Schumann, another Olympic champion in Athens, alerted the Olympic chief of staff Christian Busch, asking the Reich sport leader for intervention. Schumann's objection was abruptly rejected. Flatow was transported as prisoner number 8230 with 1,021 other deportees on Transport I/71-8230 from Berlin to Terezin in October 1942. Placed in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, he died of starvation in December 1942.
¹⁷

To commemorate his memory and that of his cousin Gustav Flatow, who also starved to death in Theresienstadt in 1945, Berlin renamed the Reichssportsfeldstraße (Reich Sport Field Street) as Flatowallee (Flatow Boulevard) in 1997. The location is in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Ortsteil Charlottenburg.
¹⁸

Flatow was not alone when arrested for weapons. A second police report also dated October 4, 1938, prepared at the same Police Station 106, and forwarded to the Gestapo, concerned Julius Ignatz Gold. Gold was born on May 4, 1893, in Polock, Poland, and resided at Berlin SW 19, Kommandantenstraße 49.
¹⁹
That street intersects with Alexandrinenstraße, where Flatow resided, in the Kreuzberg District of Berlin.
²⁰

As before, the “political affiliation” marked down was “Jew.” The address of the “crime scene” was identical with that indicated for Flatow—Curdtdamm 16, the address for Police Station 106—and the time was ten minutes later, 2:00 p.m. “Weapons Found” indicated “Firearms: 1 Walther pistol with 6 rounds.”

Once again, this was the same “[s]pecial operation,” the crime was “possession of weapons,” and the statement of facts—again filled out by the same Police First Sergeant Weiser, whose source for the pistol's registration was the same Police First Sergeant Colisle—read:

The Jew Julius Ignatz Gold was in possession of one Walther pistol with 6 rounds. In the hands of Jews, this weapon is a danger for public security. Gold had registered this weapon on February 13, 1932, at Police Station 105 (now Police Station 112).

Police First Sergeant Colisle

Other than this arrest report, no information on the identity of Julius Ignatz Gold could be found. His name does not appear in the Holocaust victim's central database maintained by Yad Vashem, the World Center for Holocaust Research, Documentation, Education, and Commemoration.
²¹
All that can be surmised is that he was most likely standing in line behind Flatow at the police station to surrender his registered firearm. One can only wonder who were the other Jewish gun owners standing in the same line that day and in the days before and after.

The arrests of Flatow and Gold were not isolated incidents. An orchestrated campaign against Jewish firearm owners was afoot. Another arrest report and referral to the Gestapo like those for Flatow and Gold were issued from Police Station 113 in Berlin, SW 68, on October 3, 1938.
²²
Station 113 was a kilometer west of Station 106, where the arrests of Flatow and Gold were made, and was also in the Kreuzberg District.
²³

Alois Adler was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1884, and lived at SW 11, Saarlandstraße 52, in Berlin's Kreuzberg District. Although his “[p]olitical affiliation” is listed as “[a]llegedly none,” this form is stamped at the top with an oversized “J”—meaning “Jew.”
²⁴
The “crime scene” was at his home address, and “[w]eapons found” included only a “double-barreled hunting shotgun.”

Under “Criminal act (include pertinent statutory sections),” the arresting police officer wrote only, “Subversive attitude of a Jew,” without citing any statute. The statement of facts reads:

Adler, a former Austrian Jew, always was obstreperous. His behavior showed that he has the attitude of a public enemy. At the slightest provocation, he immediately turned to the Consulate. In order to avoid being found in possession of weapons during a house search, he left his hunting
rifle with an agent, Albrecht Kriener, at the address of Blücher Street 1 in Berlin SW 61. When Adler was taken to the police station and asked about weapons, he confessed to this. The rifle, including an extra barrel, has been secured at the police station for the time being.

Adler has been arrested because of his attitude as a public enemy.

The police already were familiar with Adler, as noted, because of his repeated complaints to the Austrian consulate. Perhaps he was an Austrian businessman who objected to Nazi harassment. The police may have known that he possessed a firearm by consulting the registration records, by conducting a house search, or perhaps by getting this information from an informer. Alerted that the police knew he was a Jew with a firearm, he refused to comply with the Nazi confiscation order. He secreted his hunting gun with a friend so that it would not be found in an anticipated house search.

Police may have been searching the houses of Jews who had registered firearms or were for other reasons suspected of possessing firearms, but who had not surrendered them at a police station. The report also makes clear that Jewish gun owners had friends—“Aryans,” possibly gun owners themselves—who were not Nazis and were willing to risk hiding firearms for their Jewish friends. Such Aryans doubtlessly received unwelcome visits from the Gestapo.

The arresting officer who filled out this report called the firearm both a shotgun and a rifle, although the double-barreled gun may have included a shotgun barrel and a rifle barrel. Unlike in the Flatow and Gold arrest reports, in this report the officer did not explicitly allege that a weapon in the hands of a Jew is a danger for public security. Adler had only 5 Reichsmark on his person.