Gun Control in the Third Reich (30 page)

But Klemperer had favorable experiences wearing the star, noting: “There is no doubt that the people feel the persecution of the Jews to be a sin.” A friend was greeted by a stranger at a shop, who stated, “We are a group ‘who greet the Jew's star.'” This was despite “an explicit warning on the radio, supported by a Goebbels article, against any association whatsoever with Jews.”
²⁸

The deportation of the Jews from the Greater German Reich that began in October 1941 involved the ever-present searches for weapons. A Gestapo directive to the police president in Rostock concerning the deportation of Jews to the East ordered: “Before the Jews leave, their apartments must be searched for weapons, ammunition, explosives, poison, money, jewelry, etc.”
²⁹
But that was not enough. As Alfred Hartmann recalled, Jews were sent to the Milbertshofen barracks camp near Munich, a staging area for deportation to more deadly camps: “After their arrival at the camp and assignment to individual barracks, Gestapo members collected the luggage of the Jews and searched it for weapons, jewelry, etc.”
³⁰

This was the final stage in the disarming of any Jews who may still have possessed firearms, making individual or collective resistance impossible. After Reichskristallnacht, the historical record does not reflect that German Jews unlawfully obtained or used arms as tools of resistance, at least not on a wide basis. In fact, the National Representative Organization of Jews in Germany (Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland), the German Jewish leadership,
insisted that Jewish activities be legal. Militant resistance was rejected as futile and provocative of reprisals.
³¹
This organization helped to register Jews selected for deportation and to ensure transportation arrangements for deportees.
³²

Firearms did play a role in resistance to deportations from Germany, although not on a wide scale as in the occupied countries. Anecdotal evidence exists of Jews with firearms who hid in Berlin. Fritz Corner fed his family on the black market by trading jewels but was identified by a “catcher”—a Jew working for the Gestapo who turned in other Jews to save himself. Corner refused the Gestapo's offer to betray ten Jews in exchange for not being sent to Auschwitz and escaped before being deported. He vowed that he would not be arrested again and walked the streets with his eyes on everyone coming his way and his right hand in his coat pocket holding a small pistol.
³³

Countess Maria von Maltzan (called “Marushka”) hid Jews in her Berlin apartment and helped many to safety. She befriended a major in the Wehrmacht, persuading him to give her a Mauser pistol because she felt unsafe living by herself. She worked with Erik Wesslen of the Swedish Church in smuggling Jews and political refugees out of Germany. He bought their release by bribing SS officers with coffee and cigarettes. On one occasion, when leading six elderly Jews released from Gestapo custody, she was followed and shot the pursuer in the leg. They escaped, but Wesslen scolded her for not having killed the pursuer because the same escape route could not be used again.
³⁴

Due to years of repression, armed resistance was not widespread. But as Holocaust survivor Arnold Paucker noted, “Was there an armed resistance of German Jews? There most certainly was!” However, one cannot “blame the Jews in Nazi Germany in hindsight for not having thrown themselves into any military adventures, on top of all the other threats they faced. It was only beyond Germany's borders that Jews could take up arms in the fight against their oppressors.” Although Paucker does not discuss armed self-defense and
survival by individuals within Germany, he criticizes the disparagement of the partisan struggle as inconsequential: “For us Jews who were so strongly committed to it, such denigration of the European partisan struggle is particularly painful. We were long accused of not having defended ourselves, and when we demonstrated the contrary, smart or supercilious military historians inform us that this self-defence was pointless and useless anyway.”
³⁵

Nazi policy in the occupied countries sought to preclude partisan resistance by decreeing that failure to surrender firearms was punishable by the death penalty. For example, an early 1941 Warsaw newspaper report noted the execution of three Poles—one for failure to surrender a pistol “despite the universally known order about surrendering arms,” another for buying it, and a third who never possessed it but “failed to fulfill his duty to report it to the proper authorities.”
³⁶
A formal Reich decree in late 1941 imposed the death penalty on any Pole or Jew “[i]f he is in unlawful possession of a firearm, hand-grenade, any weapon for stabbing or hitting, of explosives, ammunition or other implements of war, or if he has credible information that a Pole or a Jew is in unlawful possession of such objects, and fails to notify the authorities forthwith.”
³⁷

This decree reflected fundamental Nazi policy. As Hitler stated in a rant in April 1942: “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.”
³⁸

The role of the Special Deployment Forces (Einsatzgruppen), Nazi killing squads that exterminated two million Jews and others in the East, makes clear the significance of being or not being armed. Raul Hilberg is clear: “The killers were well armed…. The victims were unarmed.”
³⁹
Six Einsatzgruppen of a few
hundred members each operated in Poland and Russia. Their tasks included arrest of the politically unreliable, confiscation of weapons, and extermination. For instance, Einsatzgruppe C reported in September 1941 that its operations included, “above all, the fight against all partisan activities, beginning with the well-organized bands and the individual snipers down to the systematic rumor mongers.” Typical executions were that of a Jewish woman “for being found without a Jewish badge and for refusing to move into the ghetto” and another woman “for sniping.” Extensive partisan activity by armed Jews was reported.
⁴⁰

The heroic Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 demonstrated that even a few Jews with arms in their hands could effectively resist. Simha Rotem, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB), described the situation: “I and my comrades in the ZOB were determined to fight, but we had almost no weapons, except for a few scattered pistols…. In other places, where there were weapons, there was shooting, which amazed the Germans. A few of them were killed and their weapons were taken as loot, which apparently was decisive in the struggle. Three days later, the
aktsia
[deportations] ceased. The sudden change in their plans resulted from our unforeseen resistance.” ZOB members obtained more pistols and some grenades by the time of the April 19
aktsia.
Rotem recalled that, despite the Germans' heavy arms, after an SS unit was ambushed, “I saw and I didn't believe: German soldiers screaming in panicky flight, leaving their wounded behind…. My comrades were also shooting and firing at them. We weren't marksmen but we did hit some.”
⁴¹

Dozens of Germans were killed, but partisan losses were few. In the first three days of the resistance, not a single Jew was taken out of the buildings. Finally, the Germans resorted to cannon and aerial bombings to reduce the ghetto to rubble. On the tenth day, the ghetto was burned down. Many escaped through the sewers and into the forests. There they continued the struggle in cooperation with non-Jewish partisans. Joseph Goebbels's May 1 diary entry reflects that “[t]he only noteworthy item is the exceedingly serious fights in Warsaw between the police and even a part of our Wehrmacht on the one hand and the rebellious Jews on the other. The Jews have actually succeeded
in making a defensive position of the Ghetto. Heavy engagements are being fought there…. It shows what is to be expected of the Jews when they are in possession of arms.”
⁴²

Although most are probably unknown, Germans who were aware of and opposed the Holocaust recognized that Jews must possess arms to defend themselves. Oskar Schindler, renowned for his list of Jews whom he protected in his factories in Poland and Czechoslovakia, provided for training in and issuance of firearms to his Jewish workers to resist the Nazis.
⁴³

Countless acts of resistance, armed and unarmed, large and small, helped to defeat the Nazi dictatorship, more so in the occupied countries, but even in Germany itself. In the words of Jacques Semelin, “Most of those who resorted to unarmed resistance did so for lack of better options, that is, because they had no weapons which remained the principal and ultimate means of those who were trying to oppose the German order.”
⁴⁴

No armed civilian resistence movement existed in Germany in part because Germans were unarmed, disorganized, and forced into line by years of dictatorship. Despite the growing threat of an Allied invasion, Nazi authorities did not trust the German people enough to distribute arms to civilians to act as a home guard. By contrast, beginning in 1940 Britain had organized a Home Guard force consisting of civilian volunteers bringing their own sporting arms or armed by the government with military weapons, which they kept at home.
⁴⁵
In May 1944, Nazi radio broadcast that 1,400,000 German civilians had been trained in the use of rifles and revolvers to defend the Reich. The
New York Times
quipped:

Thus almost exactly four years after the formation of the British Home Guard in the face of the threat of a German invasion the enemy is belatedly instructing civilians to meet a similar onslaught from the base of Britain.

It is significant that the guarded statement by the German radio does not admit that civilians have been armed, but merely that they have been instructed in marksmanship and the handling of small arms.
⁴⁶

It remained for a conspiracy of Wehrmacht officers and police officials to attempt to kill Hitler and seize the government by force. Ironically, Berlin police president Helldorf—who orchestrated the disarming of the German Jews just before Reichskristallnacht in 1938—had already joined the anti-Hitler conspiracy at that time, when General Franz Halder headed a military group intent on seizing power to oppose Hitler's war policy.
⁴⁷
Franz von Papen, German ambassador to Turkey, met with Helldorf and Count Gottfried Bismarck, government head of Potsdam, in Berlin in 1943. The latter two believed that “the Bolshevist methods introduced by Hitler” would destroy Germany, wrote Papen, adding: “Helldorf described the unbelievable conditions in the prisons, in which hundreds of people were being held under sentence of death for minor offences.” They discussed plans of a group led by the former chief of staff General Ludwig Beck to seize, imprison, and subject Hitler and other leading Nazis to trial. Papen's role was to return to Turkey and use his diplomatic contacts to make contact with Franklin Roosevelt to discuss a peace without unconditional surrender. The Americans were not interested.
⁴⁸

The conspiracy reached its zenith with the almost successful attack on Hitler's life on July 20, 1944, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted the bomb under a table right by the führer at Wolf's Lair. The plan was to mobilize the Reserve Army and stage a coup in Berlin against the Nazi regime.
⁴⁹
After planting the bomb and hearing it explode, Stauffenberg escaped by airplane to Berlin and announced Hitler's death. He did not know, however, that the briefcase with the bomb had by chance been moved to the other side of an obstruction away from Hitler. Helldorf was ready to call out the Berlin police in support of the coup when news arrived that Hitler might not be dead after all.
⁵⁰
By nightfall, with confirmation that Hitler had survived the blast, Stauffenberg and other top conspirators at the military headquarters were captured and shot.

Before all the conspirators were known, Missie Vassiltchikov noted in her diary that Helldorf was in danger of arrest: “His role in the attempted coup had been too conspicuous and he would be unable to produce an alibi.” He was quickly arrested, and as Gottfried Bismarck told Missie, Helldorf “is doomed. Hitler is particularly incensed at him as he was an old party veteran and a top leader of the S.A.” In the trial before People's Court judge Roland Freisler, all the accused admitted they wanted to kill Hitler. “Helldorf was hanged last, so that he might watch the others die. It appears that they are not simply hanged, but are slowly strangulated with piano wire on butchers' hooks and, to prolong their agony, are given heart booster injections. It is rummoured that the killings are being filmed and that Hitler regularly gloats over these films at his Headquarters.”
⁵¹

Helldorf “had turned from an early Nazi into an anti-Nazi” who would use the police to fight against Hitler, according to Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who earlier had planted a bomb on Hitler's airplane that failed to explode and later plotted with officers to shoot Hitler with their pistols.
⁵²
He was one of the conspirators and would have been executed except that an Allied bomb landed right on the People's Court and killed Judge Freisler.

Tony Saurma, a wounded officer, was among those arrested but not tried. Missie wrote in her diary: “The charge: shooting at a picture of the Führer some time ago and announcing after Stauffenberg's attempt: ‘Well, never mind, better luck next time!'”
⁵³
Many were not so lucky.

Three million Germans were imprisoned for political reasons in the years 1933 to 1945, and tens of thousands were executed. Clearly there was strong opposition to the Nazi regime, and just as clearly that opposition was smashed,
⁵⁴
although every act of resistance helped to end the regime. Six million largely
unarmed Jews died in the Holocaust, and countless millions more unarmed people died in the countries occupied by the Nazis.