"If Hitler hadn't banned guns, the Jews could have prevented the Holocaust!"

Great Debates
1

Sometimes I hear or read this specific argument from anti-gun-control people: “The first thing HITLER did was prohibit Jews from owning guns! If he hadn’t done that, the Jews could have defended themselves from the Nazis!” etc etc…basically with an implication that gun control laws are fascist or something, I guess.

However, this is not about whether gun control is a good idea or not. For the record, I think it is not. I am 100% in favor of law-abiding people being allowed to legally own whatever sort of gun they want, from pistols to fully automatic rifles. (The government has nuclear bombs and M1 tanks - I should be able to have an automatic rifle.) That is a separate debate.

What I want to discuss here is whether or not the Jews actually would have tried to defend themselves against the Nazis if they had been able to own guns. In effect, whether there is any truth to that bit of propaganda I mentioned earlier, or if it is simply revisionist history and an outright fabrication or wishful thinking.

Simply put, the Jews - between Biblical times and the establishment of Israel - were not a fighting people. (The Jews in the Diaspora were not a fighting people, basically.) They could be effective soldiers in the context of another ethnic group’s army, but they never fought as a unified group, not really. There were some partisan and paramilitary Jewish groups around Europe once the Nazi oppression started to get really bad, but these were generally desperate people who had fled to the woods and acquired weapons through underground means. There was the Warsaw Ghetto but again this was a last-ditch suicide attack, again using smuggled weapons, and it wasn’t until the Jews had been totally walled off in the ghetto and were starving to death that they actually fought back.

As far as I know, no Jewish group actually tried actively resisting the Nazis before or during their rise to power. I am not aware of any Jews going out and buying rifles and pistols at German gun shops in preparation for the Nazi takeover. I also doubt that many Jews in Germany owned guns at all. They were city people, cosmopolitans who were so far removed from the martial traditions of German culture and European culture in general. I would guess that the only Jews in Germany who owned guns were upper-class Jewish bourgeois types who used them for occasional sport hunting.

In addition to that, I think there were a lot of Jews who thought “everything is going to be just fine” as the Nazis started taking over, and weren’t really hit by how bad it was until they were about to be killed. And furthermore, even if there were a few Jews who considered fighting back against the Nazis in the early days of their rise to power, I would imagine that they would have felt too outnumbered to put up any kind of fight.

So what do you think? Did Hitler’s prohibition of Jews from owning firearms really have any impact on his ability to oppress them? Would they really have been able or willing to fight back even if they had had free access to guns? My answer is no.

2

Relevant Mailbag article

3

If the Germans had had more guns they would have used them to kill more Jews.

4

I’m not sure I get what you’re trying to say here.

That article says:

I think the Germans already “had more guns,” at least that’s what I took away from that article. It seems like Jews were the only ones who were really strongly effected by the gun control laws. Also, it says that Nazi officials were exempt from all gun permits, and I get the impression that it was pretty easy for a German to become a Nazi Party official if he wanted to. I’d wager that any German in the Nazi Party could have gotten guns if he wanted to.

5

Well, the Jews had a serious problem. They lacked overall the financial resources to emigrate. Many of them were poor immigrants from Eastern Europe, ironically fleeing pograms into genocide. Often, those that could had a hard time getting accepted into other countries; some wound up in Shanghai as a result. And they had no effective means of defending themselves. Those Jews who were political usually favored the Social Democrat and Communist sides, but neither had any power in the Third Reich.

Simple put, they were outnumbered, and vastly outgunned. They couldn’t arm, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. Hitler would have blown up Berlin himself if he had to do it to get at the Jews.

6

I’d simply ask such people just what sort of success the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had. If they’re going to argue that ownership of weapons, and a willingness to use them effectively were all that was necessary to protect a minority within a society from abuse, why is the Warsaw Ghetto remembered as a “last stand?”

IOW, it is my opinion that within a few years of Hitler’s ascendancy to the Chancellorship, the opportunity for any kind of cohesive militia-style defense against to actually accomplish the preservation of the population involved would be nil.

I grant that Warsaw was not within Germany’s original borders, and so that may have had something to do with the availability of weapons for them, but I think it’s completely unrealistic to assume that it was solely the restriction against weapon ownership that left the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe so vulnerable.

7

Just providing data.

But it does indicate that Hitler’s quote is apocryphal.

Basically, I agree with your assessment. For the most part I think people just want to get along with their lives, and by the time the need for fighting back was made apparent it was too late.

8

Probably not even many of those. The kosher dietary laws say Jews can’t eat any mammals or birds that are not killed by kosher slaughter. Since game isn’t killed this way, it can’t be kosher, and most rabbis regard killing an animal that you don’t intend to use as being cruel. So there’s no real hunting tradition in Judaism. Any Jew who does have guns for hunting is going to be someone who is very assimilated.

According to the 1933 census, Jews made up 0.75 percent of the population of Germany. At least one historian claims that one of the unique features of the Holocaust is that basically nobody in Germany or eastern Europe with any power or influence opposed the killing of the Jews, so I doubt they could have expected much help from anyone else if they had tried to rebel. Realistically, in those circumstances, what kind of a revolt could they have made, even if they had had guns, money, and a fighting or hunting tradition?

9

I think most of the upper-class bourgeois Jews in Germany didn’t give much of a shit about the dietary laws or any other part of the Jewish religion. Many of them were totally assimilated and considered themselves to be 100 percent culturally German. These people definitely wouldn’t have had a problem with hunting. Don’t forget, a lot of Jews who converted to Christianity were still killed for having Jewish ancestry.

10

But if you think of yourself as German and not Jewish, how likely is it that you will start a revolt on behalf of German Jews, or join in if someone else does?

11

When Hitler came to power, the Jews in Germany were a very small minority. No way could they have mounted an effective revolt. (The Holocaust mostly involved the far more numerous Jews of the Jewish Pale, which came under German control during the war, when the Germans were quite prepared to face organized enemies with guns.)

12

I kind of reject the assertion that the Jews aren’t a “fighting people.” When they lived in segregated, small communities throughout Europe, no, they weren’t a fighting people. They weren’t allowed to be, and they were extremely small minorities in a country full of people who would never have let them engage in warfare.

However, the Jews fought several famous wars against the Romans, the Jewish revolts against Roman rule inflicted extremely heavy casualties on what was then the most powerful military force on the planet.

13

Well that’s why I specified the Jews in the Diaspora. In ancient times, the Judeans were extremely warlike.

14

For anyone remotely interested in the topic you might want to check out Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers by Brian Mark Rigg for some insight the internal conflicts of Germans with Jewish ancestry. We could discuss how assimilated certain segments of the Jewish population were but ultimately what really mattered is how Hitler defined a person as being a Jew.

Marc

15

In agreement, let’s not forget that much of Eastern Europe was in open-revolt against German rule, not that it helped them much. If that didn’t stop the Germans from taking over and carting the Jews off to the camps, not much would. And this was even after the Germans had pretty much decapitated the entire educated/religious/political classes of Eastern Europe.

16

Technical disagreement: sort of depends what you means by “biblical times.” The Jews certainly fought (successfully) until 70 AD, when they were defeated and slaughtered and dispersed by the Romans. Then, there was the Bar Kochba rebellion of 135 AD, put down mercilessly by the Romans.

However, ignoring the technical correction on dates, I’m not sure what you mean by “not a fighting people.” If you mean they didn’t have trained soldiers, or a standing army, I’ll go along with you. If you meant they were not strong to defend themselves, I disagree.

Under Christian rule for many centuries, fighting was impossible. First, the Jews were a minority scattered about, and there was no way to organize on more than a local level. Second, they were a very small minority, and there was no way to fight against an overwhelming majority. They didn’t take up armed resistence often, but they survived as best they could.

A comparison might be to the enslaved and segregated blacks in the U.S., up until the 1950s when they learned to “fight” via civil disobedience. If they had tried civil disobedience in the 1880s, they would have been slaughtered. Civil disobedience worked because of television and the ability to project their plight to the rest of the country, so that it was no longer simply a local issue.

That doesn’t mean they were not a strong people.

17

I don’t think any of it mattered in the end. Guns, warrior traditions, none of it. There just weren’t enough Jews or people who sympathized with the Jews in Germany or eastern Europe to mount a revolt that would have stopped the Holocaust.

Point is, if 99% of the population either hates or doesn’t care what happens to the other 1%, that 1% is screwed. They can have all kinds of guns and a long tradition of being hunters or soldiers. But if the country has a reasonably large police force and army, is determined to destroy them, and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks about that goal or the methods they use to achieve it, it’s not going to help. Depressing, but true.

The Jews who moved from Europe to Israel after WWII certainly managed to figure out how to fight pretty quickly, so a lack of military tradition didn’t handicap them too much.

18

A lot of those Jews had been trained in the Soviet military. Even before the Communists, there were a lot of Jews in the Russian military, though none of them were allowed to become officers unless they converted to Christianity. According to this article some Jews also joined Cossack regiments in the Ukraine and in Poland. Most of the Jews in the Tsarist army of Russia were forcibly conscripted, and for a while there was a 25-year minimum service requirement (!) so the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe definitely did have a military tradition, whether they wanted to or not.

The Jews of Germany, though, had no such thing as far as I know. Most of these Jews were city dwellers and members of the middle class.

19

This seems to be an uniquely American preposition (as part of the US gun control debate) - it’s below the German public’s radar (if it were not it’d be widely ridiculed).

First of all, the major aspects of gun regulation were already implemented in 1928, by a democratic legislature, to try and cut back on political violence (To the extent that Nazi party members were armed this was due to selective enforcement by officials and judges more concerened with left-wing than right-wing violence - common in the Weimar Republic where a lot of senior officials and senior judges were anti-democratic holdovers from the Wilhelmine empire). The Nazi government did not introduce gun control (but tinkered with the legislation like it did with almost all areas of legislation).

Second, the Social Democrats and Communists (who were more numerous than the Jewish population, and had their own paramilitary organizations), faced with persecution and imminent banning of their organizations, decided against an armed uprising because it was not winnable against police + army.

Third, for the German Jews armed resistance against persecution simply was not a viable option.

Consider a German Jew who endured the following in 1933-cal 1943:

  1. Have family-owned shop forcibly boycotted, with SA posts at the door
  2. Be expelled by organizations
  3. Lose any state business. For state employees, lose job.
  4. Have anti-miscegenation law imposed to you. Non-Jewish spouse encouraged to divorce you.
  5. Not allowed to employ German house staff.
  6. Forbidden to own a farm
  7. For doctors and lawyers, be forbidden to have non-Jewish clients/patients.
  8. If willing to emigrate, have confiscatory special tax on assets imposed.
  9. Forbidden to drive a car.
  10. Obligated to carry yellow star
  11. Obligated to move from previous apartment to room in cramped housing set aside to concentrate Jewish population
  12. Expelled from housing, told to pack bag and be escorted to a transport for unspecified resettlement in the East. Rest of belongings confiscated
  13. Transported
  14. Arrival at death camp. Killed sooner or later.

Now what I am getting at: At any point in that progression, up to #14, armed resistance would not only be dealt with swiftly and lethally, but would be perceived by everyone as a criminal act, not justified as resistance against the particular act of discrimination even if that act was clearly unjust.

Do you point a gun at a scout leader when his troop expelled his kid?
Do you threaten the head of HR at the state agencies when he fires you?
Do you force your German housemaid to remain at gunpoint?
Do you, as a doctor, threaten public medical insurance when it ceases to reimburse you?
Do you, as a lawyer, point a gun at a judge when he refuses you to represent someone before his court?
When your bank cancels your account, do you take a gun when you visit them to appeal?
Do you draw a gun, when, at the ‘elections’, you are refused a ballot paper?
Do you shoot the cop who arrests you for driving with a revoked license?
Do you threaten violence when told to move from your present address to accomodation reserved for Jews?

In all those cases, if you drew a gun, everyone else, even people hostile to the Nazi government, would see you as a dangerous nut who regrettably needed to be taken down.

20

They were successful except for the times they weren’t. Nebuchadnezzar, remember? And that’s not counting all the major battles lost to the Philistines, Hittites, Egyptians, and others I can’t be bothered to remember right now.