So, this has been brought up on various websites throughout the net, and I thought it would be cool to discuss it here: the Hitler gun control debate.
You guys may know that conservatives in the U.S. (I’m one myself) have pointed to Hitler as a prime example of the dangers of gun control. They say that Hitler took firearms away from citizens before beginning his mass murders via camps and gas chambers. Anyway, I’m aware that many liberal people say that this claim is false; that Hitler did not ban guns in Germany, but actually loosened firearm restrictions. Of course, conservatives and liberals have argued about this and it is basically, in a nutshell, a debate about whether Hitler was a right-winger or left-winger, depending on his (real life) gun policies.
The reason I brought this up here is because the liberal argument that Hitler loosened gun laws is challenged by a survivor of the Third Reich: Austrian woman Kitty Werthmann. Look her up on youtube to see a video of her talking about the experiences she had under the Nazi regime. She says in one video that Hitler did**, in fact, ban guns in Austria. And if he banned guns in Austria, then surely he banned them in the rest of the Third Reich, right? IDK. It seems like a sensible suggestion. At any rate, most people agree that he banned guns from the hands of the Jewish people, if no one else. What are your thoughts? How would you respond to the claims made by Kitty Werthmann?
Is it really necessary to try to classify Hitler on a left-right political spectrum? The lesson he (and Stalin, and Mao, and any other totalitarian dictator) offers is about abandoning rule of law and replacing it with rule of whim.
My response is, it doesn’t matter. Hitler was an evil man, who did evil things, but regardless of what his stance was, it means nothing. For instance, Hitler loved dogs; does this mean that dogs are bad pets?
That said, there may be something interesting in saying that Hitler did something and that helped him do something else. But even if he banned guns, how much can we say it did or didn’t help him do what he did. So, we’re still just looking at a single data point. And really, considering guns are about as available in the US as they are anywhere in the civilized world, and they’re effectively banned in a number of European countries, and I don’t think there’s any realistic concern of something akin to the acts of Hitler happening in either place, I’m not sure that, even if we could show a correlation, that it’s relevant anymore.
And let’s even say that we could demonstrate that he did it and it helped him enact his policies and it wasn’t an isolated incident since a number of other dictators did something similar… so what? Do you really think anyone is going to be convinced to change their minds by being compared to Hitler? It just makes them dig in their heels harder and fight back.
I’m actually favorable to gun rights, and I’ve seen this discussion come up before, and I wish it would just go away. There’s plenty of other more relevant points to discuss for both sides, whether it’s constitutional interpretation, effectiveness or not in crime deterence, accidents and safety, sports, mass shootings and terrorism, etc. that we just don’t need to bring Hitler into the discussion.
Whether or not Hitler disarmed his own side is a red herring. The government always has guns on its side - whether among the general populace or only within the military. What Hitler did was disarm the people he didn’t like - the Jews - and that made it easier to kill them.
If German civilians had had guns, they would have used them to kill more Jews.
A couple of things to think about.
- If Hitler banned private gun ownership in occupied France, would that imply they would also be banned in Germany?
- Let’s say he did make them more strict. Therefore guns were easier to obtain under the Weimer Republic. The Nazis came to power in some part because they organized a private army. Perhaps loose gun laws helped in the creation of an oppressive state.
He also build highways. These highways were used to efficiently move around military assets. I haven’t yet met anyone who was afraid of highways because the government might use them to take away people rights.
Which is a load of bull.
European city and townsfolk did not have any guns to take away in the first place.
Maybe an occasional handgun, from gramps, who was an officer in the army.
In the countryside it would be different. Nearly every farm would have a shotgun and the richer people would also have hunting rifles.
The implication is like there were assaultrifles and machineguns galore that Hitler took away so he could have his eeeevil ways.
According to members of my family that were also around at that time, Hitler actually handed out quite a lot of firearms in occupied lands to collaborators like the Croatian Utasha who then used them to kill neighbors. The shortages of weapons for resistance groups in the Balkans which did occur in some areas were never caused by gun control laws, but usually by extreme poverty. Dirt poor laborers don’t buy rifles if hunting is not likely to substantially increase the family food supply. And of course some places like Montenegro and parts of Albania had large amounts of weapons (and sixteen year olds that had never seen the world outside of family compounds because of the risk of them being shot in blood vendettas).
Grin! They actually were crawling around back when Bill Clinton was President. The Interstate System was going to be used by Chinese tank units to invade from their vast encampment in Mexico, on a signal given by the Emergency Broadcast System.
This was back when “Black Helicopters” first made it as a conspiracy meme.
I believe Cecil even had a column on the mysterious symbols and letters on the backs of the big Interstate Highway road signs, which were said to be navigation directions for the invaders.
Nostalgic paranoia!
Agree with others, the question is pretty irrelevant. The bad things about Hitler don’t have anything to do with his gun policies, whatever they were.
But in anycase, I don’t think the 70 year old memories of one Austrian woman are particularly convincing evidence, given that by 1938 the Germans had in fact developed writing, and thus German gun laws were written down and people today can read them to find out what they were. Treating it like some sort of mystery we can meaningfully debate about is silly.
I think it’s a valid debate.
Some conservatives argue that you can never be too conservative - that no matter how far you move to the right, things are always improved by moving further in that direction. Opponents will counter this idea by offering Hitler as an example of a right wing leader who “went too far” - their argument is that you need to reverse direction at some point and move away from the right and back towards the center.
So the debate over Hitler’s ideology because a central issue of this current debate. Conservatives who favor the “keep moving to the right” argument will rebut the Hitler argument by saying that Hitler was not a right winger at all. They argue that Hitler was a left winger and therefore by moving further to the right, you’re moving further away from Hitler not nearer to him.
Really? You believe, for example, that it’s a complete coincidence that the very next day after Krystallnacht, the Nazis announced a law called Regulations Against Jews’ Possession of Weapons?
So they didn’t do it BEFORE? Just how effective were Jewish weapons in preventing it?
They did do it before, that’s just the one which didn’t bother to hide it behind a more neutral title.
Wellll… the US interstate highway system was built by a general who had admired how quickly the Germans could move their men and materiel around, with the idea that the US might -* ahem *- need to move a lot of troops and materiel around some sunny day. He even ensured that the highways had long straight stretches that could land transports and bombers.
So maybe we should be afraid. 
(Even if it were true in the past…would it be true today? Billboards, and roadside businesses, and power pylons, and trees, and… I sure as heck wouldn’t want to try to land a plane on an interstate!)
That doesn’t strike me as much of a debate - just an effort at keeping extremists in check. Seriously, how long would you indulge someone who thinks full-on fascism (or communism, or utterly unrestrained free-market capitalism etc.) is a good idea?
And this is why debating them is a waste of time - they’ll handwave away any cautionary examples by trying to redefine the terms. “Hitler believed in X and we don’t, so there’s no chance we’ll end up like Hitler”, as though Hitler had a monopoly on evil.
Snopes missed one other important point in their rebuttal of this rumor. The only way the American military would need a network of emergency runways would be if we were fighting a war here in America. And if we were fighting a war like that, the last thing we’d want to have is hundreds of runways all over the country for the enemy to use for his aircraft. Eisenhower, who had led one of the biggest invasions in history, would have completely understood the value of captured runways to an invader and certainly wouldn’t have supported creating them in his own country.
Even if the citizens of Germany had had plenty of guns, it would have done nothing to prevent the holocaust. Most of German citizens either (a) didn’t know it was happening, or (b) would have approved, at least in broad terms, or © both. If there had been more guns about in private hands, more Jews would have been killed earlier on in the Nazi era, such as during Kristalnacht and similar events. If the Jews themselves had had more guns, they might have taken a few Nazis with them, but they wouldn’t have won.
Guns are primarily good for causing deaths, not for preventing them.