The Rude Pundit - Sorry, Gun Nuts: Hitler Actually Relaxed Most Gun Laws

[The Magistrate]

33. It is Not My Duty To Educate You, Sir

But here is an exceedingly brief synopsis of the situation.

In the last days of the Weimar Republic, all leading political parties fielded armed militias. Everyone knows of the Storm Troopers, though the Red Guard, the Steel Helmet (German Nationalists) and the Iron Guard (Socialist Workers, the largest party) have generally been forgotten. Election campaigns were marked by violent clashes among these bodies, with the explictly insurrectionist ones, the Nazis and the Communists, taking the leading role. While in some campaigns, these united against the Socialist Workers Party, their relations remained hostile and violent. While much stress is placed on elections having put the Nazis in power, the elections were conditioned by party violence, and the choosing of Hitler as Chancellor to form a government was in large a recognition of which party could wield the most effective violence in the streets.

Once Hitler had formed a government, and had police power to go with the power of the party militias (who were largely deputized as auxiliary policemen), the first thing done was the breaking of the Communist and Socialist parties, and their armed wings. This was accomplished in very short order. The Communists were crushed very quickly, and crushed despite the fact that they possessed weapons, and men practiced in their use organized into disciplined clandestine bodies. The Socialists were more or less allowed to surrender, which they mostly did. Both these parties had voting strength in the millions, and thousands of armed adherents: it availed them nothing.

The total of Jews in Germany at the time was about a half million, of all ages and conditions. Certainly less than half of that would have been healthy adults, and less than half of these would have been men of fighting age and trim. German Jews in the early years of Nazi rule were encouraged to leave, and by the great Krystalnacht pogrom more than half of them had done so ( as things developed, most had not fled far enough, but that is a separate matter ). This incident marked the first general violent action against Jews in Germany and Austria. It was carried out by the surviving Nazi party militia, the Storm Troopers, who were not only armed, but ready and willing to kill, and knew they would face no consequence but praise if they killed. The idea that a Jewish homeowner producing a pistol and shooting one or two of these men at his door would have ended the matter, sent them fleeing into the night like cowardly villains of a melodrama, and that if this had been multiplied a few thousand times the whole thing would have been stopped in its tracks, is ludicrous in a degree beyond the power of words to suggest. It would simply have gotten the house burnt down with the family inside, by hard men who had been in many fights before this one, acting with the assistance of the uniformed police and most of the people on the block, and had it been general, the toll of the night would have been in the thousands, rather than a hundred or so ( deaths among those taken under arrest over the next few months are a separate matter, but these, too, would certainly have been far, far, larger ).

And of course the great mass of Nazi killing of Jews involved conquered populations, places where the same armed force which saw to the executions had already broken and beaten powerful armies. To imagine that household weapons would have prevailed against what wrecked the first line of the Red Army is, to put it bluntly, delusional.