Gun Control in the Third Reich (28 page)

Victor Klemperer, too, had served honorably in Germany's armed forces during World War I, had retired as a university professor in 1935, and was a resident of Dresden. His acclaimed diary includes the following entry:

On the morning of the eleventh two policemen accompanied by a “resident of Dölzschen.” Did I have any weapons?—Certainly my saber, perhaps even my bayonet as a war memento, but I wouldn't know where.—We have to help you find it.—The house was searched for hours…. They rummaged through everything, chests and wooden constructions Eva had made were broken open with an ax. The saber was found in a suitcase in the attic, the bayonet was not found. Among the books they found a copy of the
Sozialistische Monatshefte
(Socialist Monthly Magazine—an SPD theoretical journal) […] this was also confiscated.

A courteous young policeman took Klemperer's statement and stated that they would have to go to the court building at Münchner Platz, adding: “There's nothing to fear, you will probably (!) be back by evening.” Klemperer asked if he was under arrest. “His reply was good-natured and noncommittal, it was only a war memento after all, I would probably be released right away.” At the court building, a policeman copied Klemperer's statement. After some waiting, a magistrate with a party badge made out a certificate of discharge, without which Klemperer would be arrested again. “At four o'clock I was on the street again with the curious feeling, free—but for how long?”
¹⁹

Numerous other Jewish veterans of World War I possessed firearms or edged weapons. More than 100,000 of the 550,000 Jews in Germany had served in the German army in the Great War, 12,000 had been killed in action, and more than 30,000 had won decorations. In the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, 300,000 Jews had served, 24 of them ranking as generals.
²⁰

Banning firearm possession by Jews conflicted with a law requiring a firearm for humane putting down of cattle for kosher slaughter. Seventeen-year-old Therese Gertrude Isenberg from Ober-Ramstadt, Hesse, recalled the sudden paradox: “My uncle had a butcher shop. In those days there was an ordinance that before you killed kosher, you had to have a gun to hit the animal and get the cow unconscious before you could slaughter it. So my cousin Manfred started hollering, ‘We have a gun in the house. If they find the gun, they're going to come and kill us.' [It was illegal for Jews to possess weapons.] My mother was lying there half paralyzed. It was a night you never forget.”
²¹

Dorothy Baer, who was fifteen at the time, recalled how the Nazis did not find her father's revolver at their residence in Frankfurt am Main because her mother had hidden it on her person and later managed to throw it away:

That day the terror started towards the evening. I remember four or five terrifying men crashing through our front door and starting to systematically destroy the apartment. My dad had a heart ailment and was lying in bed that day. My mother was taking care of him while I accompanied these terrible men from one room to the next…. I kept telling them that my father was on his death bed. We were lucky, they did not enter the bedroom. The apartment was destroyed, but my dad was still with us.

I have often been asked why we did not fight back. I believe that individuals were not able to fight back at all. Maybe only groups of people could have offered resistance.

I remember that my dad had a small revolver, which he kept in his nightstand, probably illegally. I am convinced that he did not have any bullets for it and doubt that he knew how to shoot. That evening, after the Germans had ransacked our apartment, mother said to me: “Put on your coat, we are going for a walk.” This was odd, but I went along. Mother had the small revolver with her and “lost” it as we entered a park. She wanted to avoid being caught with a weapon.—The next morning we learned that many [Jewish] men had been arrested and sent to concentration camps.
²²

In another instance in which a firearm was thrown away at Frankfurt am Main, Peter Bloch recalled that he, his mother, and Frau Fölsche, their “Aryan” tenant, were eating veal chops and peas when three members of the Staatspolizei rang the doorbell. Peter feared the worst but was politely defiant:

Now it was my turn. “Get your coat and come with us,” ordered one of the men with a dog face. Without showing my fear, I said, “I am under 18 and a student.”…I just reminded the Gestapo of what seemed to be their order, although I knew that in some places in Hesse 14-year-olds had been arrested.

The three men apparently had not yet met anybody who resisted arrest…. Then the man with the dog face ordered me to continue my meal….

Then the Gestapo searched the apartment for weapons and failed to find any. Our former driver had thrown my father's revolver into the Main River. It had never been used. When the man with the dog face saw my mother's fur coats in a closet, he said sarcastically, “these poor Jews!” But then the men left. I took one of Schiller's books and read the monologue of William Tell.
²³

William Tell, of course, after being forced to shoot the apple off his son's head, would later use his crossbow to shoot the tyrant Gessler through the heart, leading to a successful armed revolt. It is obvious why Hitler forbade Schiller's play from being performed or read in the schools.
²⁴

Although the Nazi tyrants would be met with no such armed resistance, incidents occurred in which brave individuals used firearms to impede the pogrom. Wichard von Bredow, Landrat (chief executive) administrator for the town of Schirwindt in East Prussia, was ordered by the Gauleiter (the Nazi provincial governor) to burn down the local synagogue. He decided instead to risk his life to protect it. When the Nazis arrived with incendiary materials, he loaded his revolver in front of them, making clear that they could proceed only
over his dead body. They fled, leaving it the only synagogue in the district not destroyed. Bredow would suffer no punishment for his defiance.
²⁵

Similarly, a coal merchant who was Christian pulled a firearm on Nazi arsonists to save a synagogue in Sontheim. He accompanied Jews away from the town to prevent their arrest.
²⁶

Historian Mitchell Bard has noted that “Jews rarely offered resistance to their attackers since they were unarmed and typically faced groups of men who had sticks, knives, iron bars, guns, and other weapons.” A Jewish family in Heilbronn pushed an SA man out of the window, and in Hilden a mother and son who resisted were murdered with an axe, and another person was stabbed to death.
²⁷

Some of the Jews whose homes were searched and ransacked were foreign nationals, leading to diplomatic protests. The following Gestapo report concerning the complaint of Mrs. Gertrude Dawson, a British citizen residing in Döbling, did not deny the systematic vandalism: “Given the sometimes high degree of agitation of the national comrades during the action against the Jews it is no longer possible to determine which persons participated in the riots. That also explains why there was little success in the clarification of the facts, even though the investigations were conducted with vigor. Several persons who were in Mrs. Dawson's apartment explained that they had orders to search for weapons. But it is impossible to determine the details about the damage to the furniture, etc.”
²⁸

An incident in Vienna became the subject of a report by none other than Dr. Werner Best, the Gestapo chief legal advisor. The report alleged the following about Henry Coren, a British citizen:

During the action of November 10, 1938, against Jews, the apartment of stateless retiree Hermann…was searched, and a loaded revolver belonging to his son-in-law Henry Coren, who was living with him, was found. The weapon was hidden in a suitcase belonging to Coren. Based
on these facts, three SA men belonging to the local group Fuchsröhren of the NSDAP took Mr. and Mrs. Coren, as well as Hermann, to a collection point at Rinnböckstrasse. There, their personal information, etc. was written down. When it was determined that Mr. and Mrs. Coren had British citizenship, they were released immediately….

After the SA men had taken Mr. and Mrs. Coren and Hermann to the collection point, the local group asked them to also fetch Mrs. Hermann, who had stayed back in the apartment. The men therefore returned to the Coren apartment and asked Mrs. Hermann to get dressed to go out and be interrogated. Mrs. Hermann then went to a room on the side for about 2 minutes and changed.
²⁹

Coren claimed that SA men stole 3,400 Reichsmark from the apartment, and the British consul-general filed a protest. The Gestapo found the suspicion of theft unfounded because the SA men “adamantly deny the allegation” and because “it was not possible to interrogate Coren about the matter because he fled the Reich on November 30, 1938. This fact also is an indication that Coren was not telling the truth.”
³⁰
For Coren, however, discretion must have been the better part of valor. Any Jew—especially any Jewish gun owner—who did not flee Nazi persecution well knew the possible consequences.

International media coverage was sympathetic although not necessarily well informed. The
Chicago Tribune
reported only eight arrests of Jews for possession of arms in violation of Himmler's decree threatening twenty years in a concentration camp.
³¹
However, the newpaper also reported personal stories. A Berlin Jewish scientist told its reporter how at 6:00 a.m. on November 12, a Nazi official in a brown uniform and four assistants in mufti took him from his home, only to order him to go back there. Many of his friends who were arrested were not so lucky. A friend's home was searched for weapons by six men, who broke the china and smashed furniture. The scientist related: “Only one thing they had missed—an old army revolver which was lying in a drawer of
a table in my friend's bedroom. That rusted weapon, probably fired for the last time in 1918, might have gotten him twenty years in a concentration camp.”
³²

These tragedies were also reflected in diplomatic reports. British acting counsel general A. E. Dowden reported from Frankfurt that Jews were arrested in that city in the period November 10–14. Thirty-six hours later the arrests began again. SS troopers and Gestapo agents prowled the streets looking for Jews. They entered houses with the excuse that they must search them for any Jewish males who were hiding. “Once inside, they made a thorough search for weapons of any kind, or money, and if either was found, the occupants of the house were arrested on the grounds that weapons were forbidden and that any large sum of money was being hoarded to enable the family to escape from Germany.”
³³

The American consulate in Stuttgart, headed by Samuel W. Honaker, reported to U.S. ambassador Hugh R. Wilson in Berlin on November 12 that “the Jews of Southwest Germany have suffered vicissitudes during the last three days which would seem unreal to one living in an enlightened country during the twentieth century.” He described the horrors of November 10, from torching of synagogues before daylight to the midnight arrests. He continued:

So great had become the panic of the Jewish people in the meantime that, when the Consulate opened after Armistice Day, Jews from all sections of Germany thronged into the office until it was overflowing with humanity, begging for an immediate visa or some kind of letter in regard to immigration which might influence the police not to arrest or molest them. Women over sixty years of age pleaded on behalf of husbands imprisoned in some unknown place…. Men in whose homes old, rusty revolvers had been found during the last few days cried aloud that they did not dare ever again to return to their places of residence or business. In fact, it was a mess of seething, panic-stricken humanity.

Honaker learned that “practically the entire male Jewish population of the City of Stuttgart, ranging from the age of eighteen to sixty-five years, has been arrested by authorities representing the police.” On November 11, some of the
prisoners were taken to Welzheim, a concentration camp in Württemberg. Many people believed that the action was planned and not spontaneous. “The vast majority of the non-Jewish German population, perhaps as much as 80 per cent, has given evidence of complete disagreement with these violent demonstrations against the Jews.”
³⁴

Reichskristallnacht ended, but not before countless other incidents like these had unfolded in the dark hours. At the end of that pogrom, Germany's Jews were largely disarmed. The Nazis saw that an apparent majority of the “Aryan” population was too cowed and intimidated by the dictatorship to protest. With what would become the largest, most persecuted group of victims now virtually weaponless, Hitler's plans could move forward. No foundation would exist for any effective resistance movement or individual acts of resistance. The way was paved for total repression.

1
.
Night of Pogroms: “Kristallnacht” November 9–10, 1938
(Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, 1988), 39–40.

2
. Lagebericht der Schutzpolizei am 10. November 1938, in Heinz Lauber,
Judenpogrom: “Reichskristallnacht” November 1938 in Grossdeutschland
(Pogrom against the Jews: “Night of the Broken Glass” November 1938 in Greater Germany) (Gerlingen, Germany: Bleicher, 1981), 104–5.

3
. Stadtarchiv Mannheim, ed,
Die Judenverfolgung in Mannheim 1933–1945: Dokumente
(Persecution of the Jews in Mannheim 1933–1945: Documentary Evidence) (Stuttgart: H. J. Fliedner, 1971), 13.

4
. “The ‘Reichskristallnacht' Pogrom of the 9th/10th November 1938,”
http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/rz3a035//pogrom.html
(visited Feb. 9, 2013).

5
.
Fragen—Erinnern—Spuren sichern: Zum Novemberpogrom 1938
(Asking Questions, Remembering, Securing Evidence: The November 1938 Pogrom) (Aachen, Germany: Annemarie Haase, 1992), 75, citing
Grenzecho
, Nov. 12, 1938, an anti-Nazi newspaper published in Eupen, eastern Belgium.