Extensive record keeping was required. A manufacturer—the definition of which included not only the original producer, but also a person who assembled firearms in his shop from parts made by others—was required to keep a book with each firearm identified and its disposition. A handgun seller was obliged to keep books on the acquisition and disposition of each handgun. Once a year, the book for the previous year was submitted to the police authorities for certification. All records were subject to police inspection on demand. The records were to be kept for ten years and on discontinuance of business were required to be turned over to the police.49
Licenses to obtain or carry firearms, the form of which was prescribed, were issued by the district police authority where the applicant lived. A firearm acquisition permit was valid for one year, and a license to carry a specific firearm was valid for three years.50 When a person obtained the handgun authorized by an acquisition permit, the transferor, whether a dealer or a private person, submitted to the police the permit showing the acquisition.51 Muzzle-loading pistols and revolvers as well as blank and gas firearms were exempt.52 “Individual exceptions” were continued to be permitted to the 1933 ban on importation of handguns.53 Apparently because the law itself covered the subject in detail, the regulations did not mention the prohibition on Jews being licensed as manufacturers or sellers or the numerous exceptions for government and National Socialist party members.
The Völkische Beobachter, Hitler’s newspaper, had this to say about the revised Weapons Law the same month it was decreed:
The new law is the result of a review of the weapons laws under the aspect of easing the previous legal situation in the interest of the German weapons industry without creating a danger for the maintenance of public security.
In the future, the acquisition of weapons will in principle require a police permit only when the weapons are pistols or revolvers. No permit will be required for the acquisition of ammunition.
The restrictions on the use of stabbing and hitting weapons, restrictions that originated at the time of emergency decrees, have basically been revoked. Compared to the previous law, the statute also contains a series of other alleviations. From the remaining numerous new provisions, the basic prohibition to sell weapons and ammunition to adolescents below the age of 18 should be emphasized. Further, the issuing of permits for the production or commerce with weapons is linked to the possession of German citizenship and to the personal reliability and technical fitness. No permits may be issued to Jews.54
Although this description makes the new law sound as if it were deregulatory, the Nazis were masters of propaganda. The Berliner Börsenzeitung produced identical commentary but added the following rather ominous language that had been a premise of the discussion since 1933:
The prerequisite for any easing of the applicable weapons law had to be that the police authorities would remain able ruthlessly to prevent any unreliable persons from acquiring or possessing any weapons. The new law is meant to enforce the obvious principle that enemies of the people and the state and other elements endangering public security may not possess any weapons. It does so by authorizing the police to prohibit such persons from acquiring, possessing or carrying weapons of any kind. Because it is possible in this way to prevent any weapons possession that the police considers undesirable, the authorities were justified to ease the previous restrictions.55
In short, the police determined who could and who could not possess firearms. Aryans who were good Nazis could acquire some firearms with relative ease. Any possession of firearms by a person considered “undesirable” by the police was prohibited. The Nazis thereby imposed on the German people a firearms “law”—a law in name only—based on totalitarianism and police-state principles.
The 1938 Weapons Law was the subject of two legal commentaries, one by Fritz Kunze and the other by Werner Hoche, both of whom had published commentaries on the 1928 Firearms Law.56 The top legal experts who explained the intricacies of the Weimar Republic’s firearm prohibitionist laws continued to fulfill the same service to the Nazi dictatorship, with complete details on the amendments banning Jews from the firearms industry and the special exceptions for Nazi Party members.
Hoche was a legal technician whose expertise extended far beyond advising whoever was in power on how to limit firearms possession to the populace and then rendering detailed commentaries on the meaning of the resultant laws. He was a leading legal expert in the Interior Ministry of both the Weimar Republic and the Hitler regime. He edited a quarterly series on the Hitler regime’s decrees, including the various anti-Semitic measures.57
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.
<
br /> 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).
57. See, for example, Werner Hoche, ed., Die Gesetzgebung Adolf Hitlers für Reich, Preußen und Österreich (Adolf Hitler’s Legislation for the Reich, Prussia, and Austria), vol. 27, Apr. 16–July 15, 1938 (Berlin: Franz Vahlen, 1938).
58. Entwurf einer Verordnung zur Durchführung des Gesetzes über die Prüfung von Handfeuerwaffen und Munition (Beschußgesetz), 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 4, Row 1.
59. Der Reichsminister des Innern, Betrifft: Gesetz über die Prüfung von Handfeuerwaffen und Munition (Beschußgesetz), Aug. 25, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 3, Row 7.
60. Der Reichsminister der Justiz, Betrifft: Gesetz über die Prüfung von Handfeuerwaffen und Munition (Beschußgesetz), Sept. 16, 1938, BA Berlin, R 43 II/399, Fiche 4, Row 3.
61. Verordnung über das Meldewesen, Reichsgesetzblatt 1938, I, 13. See Aly and Roth, The Nazi Census, 38–40.
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