Gun Control in the Third Reich (20 page)

While the Weapons Law was being developed, Frick was also circulating a draft law for testing firearms.
⁵⁸
Firearms were required to be tested and proofed by Reich authorities. Such a law was not a Nazi innovation in that in previous
decades in Germany minimum standards for firearms quality had been imposed by law rather than by the market economy. Indeed, the draft's explanation stated: “The law is intended to replace the previous law on the inspection of barrels and locks of small firearms of May 19, 1891.”
⁵⁹
The Reich minister of justice recommended that any persons involved in the manufacture or delivery for inspection of improperly marked firearms, even without their knowledge of noncompliance, should be punished.
⁶⁰

Meanwhile, the regime enhanced laws requiring all Germans to report personal information to the authorities. The Reich Registration Order of January 6, 1938, established a registration card for each person with information on residence, convictions, motor vehicles, and emigration.
⁶¹
A further decree on April 27 provided that Jews must register their assets if they exceeded 5,000 marks,
⁶²
which was yet another job for the punch card machines run by the IBM subsidiary Dehomag.
⁶³
About the required filling out of the “Inventory of Assets of Jews,” Victor Klemperer reflected in his diary: “We are so accustomed to living without rights and to waiting apathetically for further disgraceful acts, that it hardly upsets us anymore.”
⁶⁴

“Assassination Plans in Jewish Circles,” a document by the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) dated June 27, 1938, asserted that Jewish groups in Berlin had reacted strongly to the latest boycott measures. “Since the beginning of the action Jewish circles have discussed the carrying out and advisability of assassinations of leading political leaders.” Dr. Bruno Glaserfeld, chairman of the National Association of German Jews, had spoken with associates about bomb assassinations. Günther Salter “likewise spoke of
assassinations as political combat methods against the Third Reich as alone effective.” He advocated surveillance of Hitler's movements on frequently used streets, such as to the airport or on his birthday, and the renting of a room from which an attack would be launched. “Both Glaserfeld and Salter clarified that they were not spinning tales, but that these plans must be carried out because of the desperate situation of the European Jews. They think that the declining power of European Jewry can be stopped only in this way.”
⁶⁵

A follow-up report advised that Glaserfeld had been arrested at a summer home in the vicinity of Potsdam.
⁶⁶
No report could be found on Salter's fate.

In this period, anti-Nazi elements in both the military and the police were plotting against Hitler. Some advocated a coup d'état and then the trial of the top Nazis as criminals. Others held that tyrannicide was moral and that Hitler must be assassinated to preclude his escape and reassertion of power.
⁶⁷
It would take these conspirators six more years before they could set off a bomb, but this attempt on July 20, 1944, failed to kill the führer.

On July 23, Frick decreed that all Jews must identify themselves and register at the local police stations, resulting in the issuance of identification cards. The August 17 Second Decree Implementing the Law Concerning the Change in Family Names required a change in Jews' names: “For males, that name shall be Israel, for females Sara.”
⁶⁸

In this period, Count Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf—the Berlin police president—was leading an increasingly stringent anti-Semitic campaign. After serving in the Great War, he had joined the Freikorps. Bella Fromm described Helldorf as “the Berlin Storm Troop leader…[who] was the instigator of the Jew-baiting on Kurfuerstendamm in celebration of the Jewish New Year's Day” in 1931.
⁶⁹
Helldorf became SA führer for Berlin-Brandenburg that same year. He was appointed police president of Potsdam in 1933, when the news media hailed him as “our savior from Jewish crime,”
⁷⁰
and then of Berlin in 1935.

Now, in the summer of 1938, Jews throughout Germany were identified to the police, and their homes and businesses were registered. Helldorf's Berlin police issued an internal memorandum with a seventy-six-point list of ways to harass Jews legally.
⁷¹
Jews who were registered and licensed firearm owners would have drawn special attention at this time. Helldorf's fortunes were rising in more ways than one, as Bella Fromm's diary entry for September 1 reflects:

The president of police, Count Helldorf, has an enormously profitable racket. He seizes the passports of such emigrants as are still well off and sells the passports back to them for whatever sum he can get. In some instances as much as two hundred and fifty thousand marks.

They pay it. No price is too much if it's liberty one is buying.
⁷²

Just days later, Fromm herself would escape Germany and find refuge in New York.
⁷³

As Goebbels wrote in his own diary on August 30, 1938: “Helldorf gives a report on his continuing Jewish operations…. Many Jews have already emigrated from Berlin.” Given that many wealthy Jews remained, “We will therefore continue the campaign.”
⁷⁴

Beginning with his diary entry of October 1 for the next month, Goebbels recorded numerous lengthy meetings with Helldorf. A midmonth entry read: “Helldorf gives me a report on the status of the Jewish operation in Berlin. It continues as scheduled. And the Jews now gradually withdraw.”
⁷⁵

Among all the other incentives for Jews to flee, Helldorf had by now put in motion a campaign to disarm all Jews. It did not matter that the new National Socialist Weapons Law included no prohibition on possession of a firearm by a Jew. As Hitler proclaimed on October 22, “[E]very means adopted for carrying out the will of the Leader is considered legal, even though it may conflict with existing statutes and precedents.”
⁷⁶

1
. Decision of January 21, 1937, 5 D 763/36, Regional Court (Landgericht) Allenstein,
Entscheidungen des Reichsgerichts in Strafsachen
(Decisions of the Reich Court in Criminal Matters) (Berlin: Gruyter, 1938), Band 71, S. 40.

2
. Abschrift, Der Reichs- und Preußische Minister des Innern, Betrifft: Waffengesetz, Nr. I A 13480/6310, Jan. 16, 1937, Bundesarchiv (BA) Berlin, Aktenbandes 0056, S. 145.

3
. Der Reichs- und Preußische Minister des Innern, Mit Beziehung auf mein Schreiben vom 7. Januar 1936, May 5, 1936, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 2, Row 3.

4
. Begründung, No. I A 13258/6310 [May 5, 1937], BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 1, Row 7–R 43 II/399, Fiche 2, Row 1, emphasis in original.

5
. Begründung, No. I A 13258/6310 [May 5, 1937].

6
. Erste Verordnung über den Neuaufbau des Reichs,
Reichsgesetzblatt
1934, I, 81.

7
. Betrifft: Ausstellung von Jagdscheinen an Juden, 21, Mar. 1937, Bestand Rep. C 20 I. I b, Signatur Nr. 1831, Band IV, Landesarchiv Magdeburg–Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, Magdeburg, 6, cited in Michael E. Abrahams-Sprod, “Life under Siege: The Jews of Magdeburg under Nazi Rule,” PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2006, 149–50.

8
. Verordnung zur Anderung der Verordnung zur Ausführung des Reichsjadgesetzes,
Reichsgesetzblatt
1937, I, 179; Richard Lawrence Miller,
Nazi Justiz: Law of the Holocaust
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 69 n. 262.

9
. Der Reichsforstmeister und Preußische Landesforstmeister Schreiben, May 5, 1937, I A 1285/6310, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 2, Row 7.

10
. Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth,
The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich
, trans. Edwin Black and Assenka Oksiloff (Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 2004), 75–76.

11
. Bella Fromm,
Blood & Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary
(New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990), 246 (entry for July 2, 1937), 98 for her meeting with Hitler.

12
. On the origins and variations of the poem, see Harold Marcuse, “Martin Niemöller's Famous Quotation,”
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm
(visited Feb. 9, 2013).

13
. Hans Bernd Gisevius,
To the Bitter End: An Insider's Account of the Plot to Kill Hitler, 1933–1944
, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 216.

14
. Gisevius,
To the Bitter End
, 216, 241, 266–67, 277.

15
. Blaine Taylor, “A Sex Scandal Ended the Career of High-Ranking Nazi Official Werner von Blomberg,”
http://www.historynet.com/the-blomberg-sex-scandal-march-99-world-war-ii-feature.htm
(visited Feb. 9, 2013).

16
. Der Reichs und Preußische Minister des Innern, An a) die Herren Reichsminister [et al.], Dec. 18, 1937, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 2, Row 7.

17
. Der Reichskriegsminister und Oberbefehlshaber der Wehrmacht, Betrifft: Entwurf des Waffengesetzes, Jan. 15, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 3, Row 3.

18
. “Changes in Ballot Arouse Rumanians,”
New York Times
, Jan. 20, 1938, 10.

19
. “Carol Gives Army Control in Nation,”
New York Times
, Feb. 12, 1938, 2.

20
. Der Reichs und Preußische Minister des Innern, Betrifft: Entwurf des Waffengesetzes, Feb. 9, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 3, Row 3.

21
. Betrifft: Entwurf eines Waffengesetzes, Feb. 9, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 3, Row 6.

22
. Betrifft: Waffengesetz, Feb. 23, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 3, Row 6.

23
. Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Betrifft: Entwurf des Waffengesetzes, Mar. 2, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 3, Row 6.

24
. Vermerk, Mar. 4, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 3, Row 6. See also Der Reichs und Preußische Minister des Innern, Betrifft: Entwurf des Waffengesetzes, Mar. 5, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 3, Row 6.

25
. Der Reichsminister und Chef der Reichskanzlei, An den Herrn Reichs-und Preußische Minister des Innern, Mar. 4, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 3, Row 6.

26
. Anton Gill,
An Honourable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933–1945
(New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 19–20.

27
. Waffengesetz,
Reichsgesetzblatt
1938, I, 265.

28
. Victor Klemperer,
I Will Bear Witness 1933–1941
, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 255 (April 18, 1938).

29
.
Reichsgesetzblatt
1938, I, 265, § 3. English translations of the law are published in
Federal Firearms Legislation: Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency
, U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 90th Cong., 2d Sess., 489 (1968). See also Jay Simkin and Aaron Zelman,
“Gun Control”: Gateway to Tyranny
(Milwaukee, WI: Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, 1993), 53.

30
. Reichsgesetzblatt 1938, I, 265, § 29(1).

31
.
Id
. § 7.

32
.
Id
. § 9.

33
.
Id
. § 11.

34
.
Id
. § 12.

35
.
Id
. § 14.

36
.
Id
. § 15.

37
. See, for example, Klemperer,
I Will Bear Witness
, xi, xiv, 275 (entry for Nov. 27, 1938). In 1933, the head of the Reich Association of Jewish War Veterans (Reichsverband jüdischer Frontsoldaten ) actually sent a copy of a memorial book with the names of 12,000 Jewish German soldiers killed in World War I to Hitler, who acknowledged receipt with “sincerest feelings.” Saul Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews
, vol. 1:
The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939
(New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 15. Jewish participation was in proportion to the rest of the German population. See Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews
, 1:75. Jewish service in the armed forces was not banned until 1935. Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews
, 1:117.

38
.
Reichsgesetzblatt
1938, I, 265, § 18.

39
.
Id
. § 19.

40
.
Id
. § 23.

41
.
Id
. § 25.

42
.
Id
. § 26.

43
.
Id
. § 27.

44
.
Id
. § 15.

45
.
Id
. § 23.

46
.
Id
. § 31.

47
. Verordnung zur Durchführung des Waffengesetzes (Ordinance for the Implementation of the Weapons Law) ,
Reichsgesetzblatt
1938, I, 270.

48
.
Id
. § 1. English translations are in
Federal Firearms Legislation
, 496, and Simkin and Zelman,
“Gun Control,”
64.

49
. Verordnung zur Durchführung des Waffengesetzes, §§ 15–19.

50
.
Id
. at Anlage (appendix) I and II.

51
.
Id. § 25
.

52
.
Id. § 20
.

53
.
Id. § 36
.

54
. “Ein neues Waffengesetz,” Völkischer Beobachter, Mar. 22, 1938, 11.

55
.
Berliner Börsenzeitung
, Mar. 22, 1938, 11.

56
. Fritz Kunze,
Das Waffenrecht im Deutschen Reich
(Weapons Law in the German Reich) (Berlin: Paul Parey, 1928–1938 [at least 5 editions]); Werner Hoche,
Schußwaffengesetz
(Firearms Law) (Berlin: Franz Vahlen, 1928, 1931; Werner Hoche,
Waffengesetz
(Weapons Law) (Berlin: Franz Vohlen, 1938).