Gun Control in the Third Reich (22 page)

The arrest form was signed by Deputy Police Chief Biense, who noted that Adler was jailed from 12:15 p.m. to 13:20 p.m. By order of Police Chief Gaster, the case was referred to the Gestapo. It is not known how long the Gestapo detained this Jew whose “crime” was possession of a hunting gun.

Other than this arrest report, no information could be found on Adler's identity or fate other than that he still resided at the same address in the 1939 census, which listed his descent as “JJJJ”—all four grandparents were Jewish.
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His name does not appear in the Holocaust victim's central database maintained by Yad Vashem.
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Not every arrest was referred to the Gestapo. A summary of a prosecution initiated on December 8, 1938, reveals that at least some would be subjected to judicial proceedings. These prosecutions may have been pursuant to the 1931 Weimar decree that not only required registration of firearms but also made it a crime not to surrender firearms when the police so declared. In a memorandum entitled “Maximum Sentence for Punishment of Jews,” chief judge Dr. Block of the Berlin District Court reported to the chief of the Supreme Court in Berlin about the prosecution of a Dr. Sohn. He explained: “The district court has not decided this case. It involves a proceeding arising out of forbidden weapons possession. In October 1938, the accused had surrendered an army revolver to the police, and in particular explained that he had no recollection of the existence of this firearm, which came from the time of his war service. He was surprised that the revolver was found in a search of the attic.”
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The 1931 law authorized jurisdictions to require registration not only of firearms, but also of various hand weapons.
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Flatow's arrest report records the confiscation of hand weapons that had apparently also been registered in 1932, including a “dagger [
Dolch
]” and “31 knuckledusters [
Schlagringe
],” also known as brass knuckles. Thirty-one of these devices would have been rather heavy to carry, especially by the sixty-nine-year old Flatow, and why he possessed them is mysterious. Perhaps they were leftover inventory of items for sale at his bicycle shop. Back in the last days of the Weimar Republic, one never knew when street fighting between extremists would break out, and a simple hand weapon could come in handy to defend oneself. Indeed, knuckledusters were issued to some Weimar police agencies, including to women police.
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It may have been
imprudent for an unpopular person to walk in public without a weapon for defense against Nazi thugs.

It seems implausible that the elderly Flatow possessed the registered weapons because he was the head of some anti-Nazi group planning to engage in a street brawl with Nazis or police armed with firearms. Perhaps the brass knuckles were used innocuously as hand weights for exercise by student gymnasts, similar to today's “heavy hands,” or as martial arts weapons for exercise.

One can imagine Berlin Jews standing in line to surrender weapons to the police. Perhaps it took ten minutes for Sergeant Weiser to process Flatow, collect his weapons, write the arrest report, then pass immediately on to Gold. The fact that the police arrested both men and turned them over to the Gestapo might mean that they had been discovered through the registration records or through house searches and had not obeyed an announcement that Jews must surrender arms. Or it may reflect the official attitude that any Jew with a weapon—even if both the weapon and the Jew were lawfully registered—was dangerous to the state and that the Jewish gun owner needed to be arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo.

As noted, Gold turned in only a Walther pistol with six rounds of ammunition, suggesting that it was his personal weapon that he perhaps discreetly kept or carried loaded with these six cartridges for self-defense. The police report did not state the model of the pistol. In World War I, German servicemen acquired numerous civilian pistols, and large numbers of Walthers were sold, in particular the 7.65-mm Model 4.
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Many German officers had carried the Model 1 pocket pistol. Gold, who was twenty-five years old when the war ended in 1918, could have acquired the pistol in service. In 1929, Walther introduced the Model PP pistol and shortly thereafter the more compact Model PPK.
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Maybe Gold turned in one of these popular Walther pistols.

Finally, Adler possessed only a “double-barreled hunting shotgun,” also described as a “rifle” with “an extra barrel.” Adler was Austrian, and Austrian gunmakers crafted very fine and expensive double guns of this type. German
gunmakers produced similar fine hunting guns. The Nazis obviously felt that any firearm, including hunting shotguns and rifles, was a danger to the state when possessed by a Jew.

Dr. Sohn had an army revolver left over from his service in the Great War and had forgotten about it in an attic.

Under the type of police intervention, the arrest forms for the three men indicated “special operation” (Sonderaktion) instead of “routine patrol.” Do the arrests indicate an orchestrated police campaign to disarm all Jews in Berlin? October 1938 was a time of great crisis in which the Nazi regime was attempting to confiscate Jewish assets and to expel Jews from Germany. Disarming all Jews would prevent any armed resistence, whether by groups or by individuals.

The literature on Reichskristallnacht suggests that the Nazis were making ready for a major new action against the Jews, evidenced by the vast expansion of concentration camps in the previous months and their ability to absorb some 20,000 Jews during that pogrom.
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Equally significant evidence of an invigorated anti-Jewish campaign was the special operation that sought to confiscate firearms from Jews in order to render them defenseless from attack.
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The Nazis found just the incident and excuse they needed to unleash an unprecedented pogrom against the German Jews when, on November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year old Polish Jew, shot and mortally wounded Ernst vom Rath, the third secretary in the German embassy in Paris. Grynszpan was despondent because his parents were among thousands of Polish Jews deported from Germany who became stranded at the border with Poland, which refused to accept them because they were no longer regarded as Polish citizens.
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The “special operation” involving Flatow and other Berlin Jews was not initially reported in the highly censored German press. But with the shooting at the embassy in Paris, German newspaper headlines on the morning of November 9 reported variously “Police Raid on Jewish Weapons,” “Armed Jews,” “Berlin's Jews Were Disarmed,” “Disarming the Berlin Jews,” and “Surrender of Weapons by Jews in Berlin, a Measure by the Police President.”
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All these articles contained substantially the same text:

In view of the Jewish assassination attempt in the German Embassy in Paris, Berlin's Police President made known publicly the provisional results so far achieved, of a general disarming of Berlin's Jews by the police, which has been carried out in recent weeks.

The Police President, in order to maintain public security and order in the national capital, and prompted by a few individual incidents, felt compelled to disarm Berlin's Jewish population. This measure was recently made known to Jews by police stations, whereupon—apart from a few exceptions, in which the explicit nature of the ban on possession of weapons had to be articulated—weapons until now found by the police to be in the possession of Jews who have no weapons permit were voluntarily surrendered.

The provisional results clearly show what a large amount of weapons have been found with Berlin's Jews and are still to be found with them. To date, the campaign led to the taking into custody of 2,569 stabbing and cutting weapons, 1,702 firearms, and about 20,000 rounds of ammunition.

Upon completion of the weapons campaign, if a Jew in Berlin is found still to possess a weapon without having a valid weapons permit, the Police President will, in every single case, proceed with the greatest severity.
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The Berlin police president, Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, had apparently announced the results of the sweep the day before the newspaper reports. As noted, the “general disarming of Berlin's Jews by the police” carried out in the previous weeks—the net in which Flatow and other Jewish firearm owners had been caught—was now made public because of the wholly unrelated shooting of a German diplomat by a Polish Jewish teenager at the Paris embassy. The implication was that because of the act of a single foreign Jew in a foreign country, no German Jew could be trusted with a firearm.

Although none of the “few individual incidents” were specified, disarming the entire Jewish population was necessary to maintain “public security and order” (“öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung”). Helldorf was thus invoking the very power granted by the 1931 Weimar firearm registration decree, which authorized confiscation of registered weapons and ammunition “if the maintenance of public security and order so requires.”
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The police knew that Jews such as Flatow and Gold possessed firearms because of the Weimar registration requirement, and the Weimar confiscation power made the seizures legal, even if the arms were registered. Police president Helldorf had merely to find that the seizures were necessary for “public security and order.” In short, the Nazi government relied precisely on the legal authorizations decreed by the Weimar Republic.

The order to surrender weapons was “made known to Jews by police stations,” and the process of identifying whom to arrest could have been carried out in a variety of ways. As the Flatow and Gold arrest records suggest, the police located and notified some Jewish weapon owners based on the firearm registration records, which may have identified such persons as Jewish or which could have been compared with other records that identified Jews. As the Adler arrest record exemplifies, police discovered other Jewish firearm owners through interrogations and house searches, which could well have been assisted by informants.
Police may have posted notices in locations such as the Jewish Quarter, the Scheunenviertel (Barn District) in the east of the Spandauer Vorstadt.
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The result of the sweep was that, as the November 9 editions of the newspapers quoted above pointed out, “weapons until now found by the police to be in the possession of Jews who have no weapons permit were voluntarily surrendered.” This seems to be belied by the broad statement in the previous sentence that the police president “felt compelled to disarm Berlin's Jewish population,” not just Jews with no weapons permit. Flatow and Gold, for instance, had duly registered their weapons. Of course, additional or renewal permits may have been required to continue possession of registered weapons. After all, Werner Best's 1935 Gestapo directive declared that “there will be very few occasions where concerns will not be raised regarding the issuance of weapons permits to Jews.”
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Notably, the articles indicated, there were “a few exceptions, in which the explicit nature of the ban on possession of weapons had to be articulated”—perhaps a euphemism for police brutality against Jews who were reluctant to surrender their property and means of protection. The police may have revoked Flatow's and Gold's registrations, causing them no longer to have valid permits, thus in Kafkaesque fashion justifying their arrest. The weapon ban definitely “had to be articulated” to Jews such as Adler, who sought to secret his weapon with an apparent “Aryan” friend.

The November 9 press announcement declared “that a large amount of weapons have been found with Berlin's Jews,” noting the confiscation of “2,569 stabbing and cutting weapons, 1,702 firearms, and about 20,000 rounds of ammunition.” The edged weapons could have been anything from kitchen knives to bayonets left over from the Great War. Assuming that the statistics are reliable, the number of weapons do not indicate the number of weapon owners. Gold had a pistol, and Adler had a long gun, but Flatow had a pistol and two revolvers, not to mention a dagger and thirty-one knuckledusters (which were blunt weapons, not cutting and stabbing weapons).

As to the “20,000 rounds of ammunition,” one can imagine petty Nazi functionaries counting each cartridge. That amounts to approximately ten rounds per firearm—a low number suggesting that many firearms may have been inherited or war souvenirs not kept functional with many cartridges for ready use. Firearms possessed for hunting or sporting use would have needed far more cartridges for practice and use.

To illustrate, Flatow had “1 revolver with 22 rounds of ammunition, [and] 2 pocket pistols” with no ammunition mentioned. “Gold was in possession of one Walther pistol with 6 rounds.” No ammunition was recorded in relation to Adler, who to be sure had sought to secret his weapon and could have been more successful in secreting his ammunition.

The announcement concluded that “if a Jew in Berlin is found still to possess a weapon without having a valid weapons permit, the Police President will, in every single case, proceed with the greatest severity.” Because Flatow, Gold, and Adler had been arrested and turned over to the Gestapo, they presumably had been treated with such severity. And the entire Jewish community of Germany would be attacked the day following the publication of the November 9 articles on Helldorf's disarming of the Berlin Jews—on Reichskristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass.

Orders to disarm the Jews were not limited to Berlin but included all of Germany, as confirmed in a memoir by Hans Reichmann, a lawyer who worked during 1924–39 for the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, or CV), one of the most important organizations defending Jewish interests. It was renamed the Jewish Central Association (Jüdischer Central Verein) in 1936, the year Reichmann was named its new syndic.
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In spite of Nazi policy, the CV sought to protect Jews' legal rights, at times actually finding officials who were responsive.
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Reichmann has been called “the leading Centralverein functionary for Jewish self-defence.”
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