Gun Control in Nazi Occupied-France

by Stephen P. Halbrook

  It’s done. Hitler wanted Laval to be the head of the French government and he is. The old man is giving him his full power and has now become a ghost even before he has died. He spoke last night without much energy. We can guess that he yielded to an ultimatum. Two weeks of intrigues ended in a strange combination. There are, when all is said and done, two governments: military power in the hands of Darlan, and civil power in the hands of Laval.62

  De Gaulle reacted to Laval’s appointment as prime minister with this broadcast from the BBC: “It is the duty of every Frenchman and French-woman to fight actively, by all means in their power, against the enemy itself and against the agents of Vichy who are the accomplices of the enemy.”63 That meant carefully organizing the Resistance, not using arms without strategic goals.

  At this stage, firearms were more for protection than attack. Combat leader Claude Bourdet related that, until his arrest, his role in organizing and writing resembled that “of an ordinary bureaucrat except its precarious state, a habit of looking both ways when leaving a building, and the frequent presence of an automatic pistol under my left arm.”64 Among Jewish resisters, weapons were few—some were obtained from dealers who hid their stocks—and novices had to be trained in firearm use.65

  On May Day, Resistance groups organized an enormous demonstration in the unoccupied zone, in Lyon at the Place Carnot under the statute of the Republic. Between 50,000 to 100,000 demonstrators cried “Death to Laval!” and sang the Marseillaise, with its line “Aux armes, citoyens (To arms, citizens).”66

  The SS Takes Over

  At this time, Berlin was changing the leadership role for repressive policies from the military to the SS. Karl Oberg, SS and police head in Radom, Poland, was appointed as senior SS and police leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, or HSSuPF), who Hitler authorized to “supervise and issue instructions to French authorities and police forces.” Reinhard Heydrich, SS-Obergruppenführer and chief of the Reich Main Security Office (which included the Gestapo and SD), flew to Paris on May 5 to present Oberg to French functionaries, including Fernand de Brinon, the Vichy ambassador, and Douis Darquier de Pellepoix, commissioner-general for Jewish affairs (Commissaire-général aux questions juives, or CGQJ). Heydrich and Oberg met with René Bousquet, secretary-general of the police (Secrétariat-général à la Police), about closer German-French police collaboration.67

  Earlier that year, Heydrich had orchestrated the Wannsee conference, which outlined the “final solution” of the Jewish question—a euphemism for what became the Holocaust. Now in Paris, he laid the groundwork for the mass deportation of the French Jews to the death camps in the East. Just a month later, on June 4, Heydrich would be assassinated by a Czech hit team in Prague.68

  While an amnesty to surrender weapons existed under the March 5 decree, the issue arose of arms retained as evidence in French court cases.69 Dr. Grohmann discussed the matter with Dr. Gilsdorf of the justice group, and pointed out that the situation should not arise. That was because the French prosecutorial and judicial authorities were required to turn over all proceedings concerning weapons possession to the German authorities without delay. If a person committed a homicide using a firearm, then the German authorities would first conduct proceedings for illegal weapons possession. Usually, these cases ended with a death sentence and the French proceedings became moot when the defendant was executed. If the defendant was not sentenced to death, the French prosecution would proceed and the German court would make the weapon available to the French court as evidence.70

  In practice, the Germans lacked the resources to prosecute all firearm possession cases, but could review all cases and select those of particular interest for prosecution, such as possession of military firearms and use of firearms in crimes like sabotage and attacks on Germans. This work focuses on gun control under the occupation authorities based on the German military archives. It should not be forgotten in context that the Vichy authorities had their own priorities and practices as to enforcement of gun control, executions, and such matters.

  District A at Saint-Germain reported 130 cases of illegal weapons possession in the period March 16 to May 12.71 But the good news was the success of the decree for amnesty for turning in weapons, which netted 1,404 hunting guns, 657 military weapons, 507 other weapons, and 823 pistols and revolvers.72

  However, the MBF had more grisly statistics for April and May—142 sentenced to death, compared to 113 for the past period, of which 60 were for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, 47 for weapons possession, and 25 for guerrilla activity. Sentences for espionage dropped considerably to just 5.73

  On June 1, SS General Karl Oberg officially assumed his duties in France. This gave the SS far more power over the German and French police to enforce Hitler’s reprisal measures, anti-Jewish policies, and other Nazi agendas in lieu of the military’s more cautious approach. Answering directly to Heinrich Himmler, Oberg assumed direction of the French police and took over major security policies from the Wehrmacht.74

  In just a week, Nazi authorities ordered that Jews wear the Star of David. When diarist Hélène Berr’s father was arrested for not wearing the badge in the correct manner, the French police who took him prisoner expressed so much sympathy that she commented, “You might have wondered what we were all doing there. But that was because there were no Germans present. The full meaning, the sinister meaning, of it all was not apparent because we were among French people.”75 The sad truth was that the French police, at the behest of the SS, would brutally round up and supervise the deportation of the Jews.

  The Yellow Star

  Imposing the yellow star on Jews illustrated the cleavage between the new SS commanders and the more restrained military authorities. “I suddenly felt embarrassed to be in uniform,” Captain Ernst Jünger confided to his diary after first seeing three Jewish girls with the yellow star.76 A literary figure before and after the war, Jünger was now on the command staff at the MBF as a censor of French newspapers and as a cultural attaché. He collaborated and socialized with the likes of Werner Best, who made Wehrmacht policy to repress firearm possession by the French. Jünger had no affinity for Hitler, who he codenamed Kniébolo in his diary.77

  Oberg’s appointment and resultant staff changes pushed Werner Best out of his duties. Best was then appointed German Reich plenipotentiary in Denmark, where he again implemented a decree threatening execution for anyone not turning in their firearms in twenty-four hours.78

  Raiding a Gun Depot

  Since the occupation began, many surrendered arms had been stored by French mayors or local German forces. Resistance groups were eyeballing these depots to see what they could take back. The experience of one group was related to me in response to my questionnaire.

  Guy Faisant was born in 1925 in Rennes, a city in the east of Brittany, and was a fourteen-year-old student in a private school when the Germans invaded. Recalling the order to surrender arms published in newspapers and public notices, he stated, “Upon the arrival of occupation troops, those in possession of firearms were invited to turn them in to their local police stations. In Rennes, the weapons were stored in an ‘unguarded’ warehouse.”79

  French gun owners, in Faisant’s experience, had firearms mostly for hunting and shooting matches, and not so many had handguns. Many complied with the decrees for fear of reprisals. Arrests occurred after denunciations to the police, and those who possessed arms were deported.

  The young Faisant joined a resistance group at the end of 1941, and his duty was to distribute anti-German leaflets. But a more dangerous mission was in store—the unguarded arms at the warehouse mentioned above did not go unnoticed. He remembered:

  I was in a professional school, l’École pratique d’industrie, and with a few of my classmates, we carried out our mission. We had learned that the requisitioned arms were stored at the depot, as indicated above. So, we went to retrieve those arms—revolvers and pistols. Three of us went together; two entering the depot after having sc
aled the wall, the third person keeping watch—giving the order to retreat.

  The heist was successful. More counterseizures of arms were to come: “Some members from our group stole revolvers from the Germans when they took their belts off in a restaurant or at the barbershop.” When engaged in operations, Resistance members would hide their firearms “in varied caches; personally, I used a rabbit cage with a false bottom.”

  Unfortunately, a medical student who had been arrested for gold trafficking began working for the Germans and infiltrated the group. Faisant explained:

  We were denounced by a French informer of the Nazis, and ten of my coworkers were arrested. Searches were performed in our homes by the SD. We were incarcerated in the Jacques Cartier Prison in Rennes. Those in whose houses the Germans found arms were deported on June 4, 1942, to concentration camps in Germany in accord with the “Nacht und Nebel” German decree of December 7, 1941.

  The SD was the Sicherheitsdienst (Nazi security service); the Jacques Cartier Prison was a maximum security prison taken over by the Nazis; and Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) was the program under which enemies of the occupation would be arrested and transported to concentration camps in Germany without any trace so that no one would know their fate.

  One member of the group, Jean Renault, tried to flee and fired at the Germans, who shot him dead. The others were deported. Faisant himself was arrested on March 5, and deported with the rest on June 4. He was imprisoned at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in lower Silesia in Hirschberg, where he was freed on May 8, 1945, by the Soviet army.

  The above experiences are revealing in that execution for firearm possession was by no means automatic, even for members of a subversive group. Deportation to a concentration camp could lead to death, but not always. Methods of enforcement of Nazi gun control varied, depending to some degree on who made the decisions in specific cases.

  Denunciations Based on Ulterior Motives

  A legal system based on denunciations can have detestable results, even from the perspective of those in power. On June 5, the MBF ordered an amendment to the March 5 decree concerning weapons possession stemming from the increase of cases where Wehrmacht courts sentenced defendants to death after their own relatives turned them in. While it was necessary to prosecute gun possession cases without leniency to confiscate as many arms as possible, “the death penalty is odious in cases where the French person makes the report based on ulterior motives (revenge, jealousy, etc.) and uses the German legal system to get rid of an unwanted family member.”80

  In such cases, the MBF continued, the guilty person should be sentenced to jail or prison rather than death, except for severe cases involving possession of numerous weapons or where family members had a valid motive for their report. Section 2 of the decree as written provided for the death penalty in paragraph 1, but paragraph 2 provided that “[i]n less serious cases the sentence may be forced labor or imprisonment.” The amendment added the following to paragraph 2: “The same will happen to any offender who shall be taken to court following a report against him or her by his or her spouse, parents, children, or brothers and sisters.”81

  The issue continued to be debated by German authorities in Berlin. In response to a German decree, or draft of a decree, requiring that a person with knowledge that another possesses a firearm report it to the nearest police headquarters, French authorities protested that if the French occupied Germany, a person who denounced others to the occupying power would be considered as having no honor.82 In the post-war Nuremberg trials, a French prosecutor stated that the policy was “so obviously contrary to international law that the Foreign Ministry of the Reich itself took cognizance of it.” In a note signed by a Herr Strack, the ministry in Berlin opined on June 29:

  The Foreign Office considers it questionable whether punishment should be inflicted on whomsoever fails to denounce a person possessing or known to possess arms. Such a prescription of penalty under this general form is, in the opinion of the Foreign Office, the more impracticable in that it would offer the French the possibility of calling attention to the fact that the German Army is demanding of them acts which would be considered criminal if committed by German citizens.

  The French prosecutor commented, “There is no more severe condemnation of the German Army than that expressed by the Reich Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself.” But in a response dated December 8, the High Command of the Wehrmacht said to the Ministry that “since it does not seem desirable to enter into discussion with the French Government on the questions of law evoked by them, we too consider it appropriate not to reply to the French note.” Any relaxing of orders, it added, would be considered a sign of weakness.83

  Examples of arms that were confiscated without criminal charges are contained in reports of the district military unit at Bar le Duc. Heinrich Dargent, aged sixty-two, who resided in Chardogne, found a pistol in his house’s ash container, which was built into the kitchen wall. The family had been evacuated during the German invasion, when it was assumed that a soldier threw the pistol into the container. Dargent turned the pistol in at the mayor’s office immediately when he found it, and the military police believed his account. He thus complied with the March 5 decree.84

  In a second incident, the mayor of Noyers-le-Val emptied a pond in a park and found a French infantry rifle model 1874 and two live, egg-shaped hand grenades. The military police assumed that the weapons dated back to the time when there had been combat in the park.85

  In a third incident, Louis Mercier found a pistol in his attic at his house in Ligny and turned it in to the French police, who turned it over to the Germans. He had been evacuated in June 1940 and returned in June 1942. When he cleaned up his apartment, he found the pistol and ammunition in the clutter. The messy apartment had been occupied by German soldiers for a year, and it was concluded that the items were left by German or French soldiers.86

  The SS Terror

  For those who chose to resist in any manner, it was a different story. “For some time now our guests have been committing their crimes in silence,” wrote Jean Guéhenno in his diary on July 10. “They have been executing people every day in the prisons, but no notice was published.” But that afternoon, in the corridors of the République Métro station, he saw crowds, with horror written on their faces, gathered around yellow posters with an announcement by the SS:

  All male relatives of the runaways over eighteen (cousins and brothers-in-law included) will be shot;

  The women will be sentenced to hard labor;

  Children under eighteen will be sent to reform school.87

  The above was SS General Karl Oberg’s new policy that applied to relatives of resistance fighters who did not turn them in within ten days of the crime.88

  “It appears that the SS have taken command in France and that terror must follow,” wrote Hélène Berr in her diary. The word was going around that a massive roundup of Jews was coming, and it took place on July 16–17. “In Montmartre there were so many arrests that the streets were jammed…. Mothers have been separated from their children.” Not all French police officers were accomplices: “Apparently several policemen have been shot for warning people so they could escape.”89

  The Jews were thrown into the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a cycling stadium. Hélène Berr noted, “Twelve thousand people are incarcerated, it’s hell. Many deaths already, sanitary facilities blocked up, etc.” They were then taken to the rail center at Drancy and forced into trains, “stacked like cattle, without even any straw, for deportation.”90 Concentration camps and death camps awaited them in the East.91

  Resistance to the Terror

  Members of the Resistance operated in countless ways to save lives. Louis Charmeau, whose recollections on German disarming policies was reported to me in 2003, lived in the region of Bourgogne in eastern France. Charmeau saved a number of people by diverting mail being sent to the German command: “As a mail carrier, every morning I took letters addressed to the Kommandantu
r, transported them in my countryside route the distance of 49 kilometers, and opened them in the evening. From July 1942 through the date of my arrest on May 22, 1944, I was able to save two Jewish families and twenty-five persons denounced for possession of arms or other offenses that would have led them straight to deportation or execution.” The Jews he helped included a doctor and a tailor. He also smuggled people across the demarcation line near Charolles, transported arms, and sabotaged the SNCF (Société nationale des chemins de fer français) railroad central hub depot in Paray-le-Monial. He was captured, and when he was liberated on May 5, 1945, he weighed 116 pounds.92

  Charmeau commented, “The underground resistance became really organized and armed only after the reunification of the different resistance ‘branches’ by Jean Moulin in May 1943 as the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (United Movements of the Resistance, MUR). Arms from civilians were only used, from the end of 1940 to the end of 1941, by scattered groups, who often were adventurers, or even for settling political scores.” Where did arms used in the Resistance come from? “Maybe 15 percent came from civilians who had left for the Maquis [rural resistance fighters] with their old arms, often without ammunition. Eighty-five percent came from airdrops. Yes, some were taken from German soldiers, but only after 1944, when they were prisoners.”

  During this period, weapons were literally falling from the sky, including items parachuted by the Allies to resistance groups and Allied airplanes crashing. The MBF declared the death penalty for anyone who discovered any object dropped from an airplane or taken from a downed airplane without informing the nearest German military post.93