One can imagine Berlin Jews standing in line to surrender weapons to the police. Perhaps it took ten minutes for Sergeant Weiser to process Flatow, collect his weapons, write the arrest report, then pass immediately on to Gold. The fact that the police arrested both men and turned them over to the Gestapo might mean that they had been discovered through the registration records or through house searches and had not obeyed an announcement that Jews must surrender arms. Or it may reflect the official attitude that any Jew with a weapon—even if both the weapon and the Jew were lawfully registered—was dangerous to the state and that the Jewish gun owner needed to be arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo.
As noted, Gold turned in only a Walther pistol with six rounds of ammunition, suggesting that it was his personal weapon that he perhaps discreetly kept or carried loaded with these six cartridges for self-defense. The police report did not state the model of the pistol. In World War I, German servicemen acquired numerous civilian pistols, and large numbers of Walthers were sold, in particular the 7.65-mm Model 4.30 Many German officers had carried the Model 1 pocket pistol. Gold, who was twenty-five years old when the war ended in 1918, could have acquired the pistol in service. In 1929, Walther introduced the Model PP pistol and shortly thereafter the more compact Model PPK.31 Maybe Gold turned in one of these popular Walther pistols.
Finally, Adler possessed only a “double-barreled hunting shotgun,” also described as a “rifle” with “an extra barrel.” Adler was Austrian, and Austrian gunmakers crafted very fine and expensive double guns of this type. German gunmakers produced similar fine hunting guns. The Nazis obviously felt that any firearm, including hunting shotguns and rifles, was a danger to the state when possessed by a Jew.
Dr. Sohn had an army revolver left over from his service in the Great War and had forgotten about it in an attic.
Under the type of police intervention, the arrest forms for the three men indicated “special operation” (Sonderaktion) instead of “routine patrol.” Do the arrests indicate an orchestrated police campaign to disarm all Jews in Berlin? October 1938 was a time of great crisis in which the Nazi regime was attempting to confiscate Jewish assets and to expel Jews from Germany. Disarming all Jews would prevent any armed resistence, whether by groups or by individuals.
The literature on Reichskristallnacht suggests that the Nazis were making ready for a major new action against the Jews, evidenced by the vast expansion of concentration camps in the previous months and their ability to absorb some 20,000 Jews during that pogrom.32 Equally significant evidence of an invigorated anti-Jewish campaign was the special operation that sought to confiscate firearms from Jews in order to render them defenseless from attack.33
The Nazis found just the incident and excuse they needed to unleash an unprecedented pogrom against the German Jews when, on November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year old Polish Jew, shot and mortally wounded Ernst vom Rath, the third secretary in the German embassy in Paris. Grynszpan was despondent because his parents were among thousands of Polish Jews deported from Germany who became stranded at the border with Poland, which refused to accept them because they were no longer regarded as Polish citizens.34
The “special operation” involving Flatow and other Berlin Jews was not initially reported in the highly censored German press. But with the shooting at the embassy in Paris, German newspaper headlines on the morning of November 9 reported variously “Police Raid on Jewish Weapons,” “Armed Jews,” “Berlin’s Jews Were Disarmed,” “Disarming the Berlin Jews,” and “Surrender of Weapons by Jews in Berlin, a Measure by the Police President.”35 All these articles contained substantially the same text:
In view of the Jewish assassination attempt in the German Embassy in Paris, Berlin’s Police President made known publicly the provisional results so far achieved, of a general disarming of Berlin’s Jews by the police, which has been carried out in recent weeks.
The Police President, in order to maintain public security and order in the national capital, and prompted by a few individual incidents, felt compelled to disarm Berlin’s Jewish population. This measure was recently made known to Jews by police stations, whereupon—apart from a few exceptions, in which the explicit nature of the ban on possession of weapons had to be articulated—weapons until now found by the police to be in the possession of Jews who have no weapons permit were voluntarily surrendered.
The provisional results clearly show what a large amount of weapons have been found with Berlin’s Jews and are still to be found with them. To date, the campaign led to the taking into custody of 2,569 stabbing and cutting weapons, 1,702 firearms, and about 20,000 rounds of ammunition.
Upon completion of the weapons campaign, if a Jew in Berlin is found still to possess a weapon without having a valid weapons permit, the Police President will, in every single case, proceed with the greatest severity.36
The Berlin police president, Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, had apparently announced the results of the sweep the day before the newspaper reports. As noted, the “general disarming of Berlin’s Jews by the police” carried out in the previous weeks—the net in which Flatow and other Jewish firearm owners had been caught—was now made public because of the wholly unrelated shooting of a German diplomat by a Polish Jewish teenager at the Paris embassy. The implication was that because of the act of a single foreign Jew in a foreign country, no German Jew could be trusted with a firearm.
Although none of the “few individual incidents” were specified, disarming the entire Jewish population was necessary to maintain “public security and order” (“öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung”). Helldorf was thus invoking the very power granted by the 1931 Weimar firearm registration decree, which authorized confiscation of registered weapons and ammunition “if the maintenance of public security and order so requires.”37 The police knew that Jews such as Flatow and Gold possessed firearms because of the Weimar registration requirement, and the Weimar confiscation power made the seizures legal, even if the arms were registered. Police president Helldorf had merely to find that the seizures were necessary for “public security and order.” In short, the Nazi government relied precisely on the legal authorizations decreed by the Weimar Republic.
The order to surrender weapons was “made known to Jews by police stations,” and the process of identifying whom to arrest could have been carried out in a variety of ways. As the Flatow and Gold arrest records suggest, the police located and notified some Jewish weapon owners based on the firearm registration records, which may have identified such persons as Jewish or which could have been compared with other records that identified Jews. As the Adler arrest record exemplifies, police discovered other Jewish firearm owners through interrogations and house searches, which could well have been assisted by informants. Police may have posted notices in locations such as the Jewish Quarter, the Scheunenviertel (Barn District) in the east of the Spandauer Vorstadt.38
The result of the sweep was that, as the November 9 editions of the newspapers quoted above pointed out, “weapons until now found by the police to be in the possession of Jews who have no weapons permit were voluntarily surrendered.” This seems to be belied by the broad statement in the previous sentence that the police president “felt compelled to disarm Berlin’s Jewish population,” not just Jews with no weapons permit. Flatow and Gold, for instance, had duly registered their weapons. Of course, additional or renewal permits may have been required to continue possession of registered weapons. After all, Werner Best’s 1935 Gestapo directive declared that “there will be very few occasions where concerns will not be raised regarding the issuance of weapons permits to Jews.”39
Notably, the articles indicated, there were “a few exceptions, in which the explicit nature of the ban on possession of weapons had to be articulated”—perhaps a euphemism for police brutality against Jews who were reluctant to surrender their property and means of protection. The police may have revoked Flatow’s and Gold’s registrations, cau
sing them no longer to have valid permits, thus in Kafkaesque fashion justifying their arrest. The weapon ban definitely “had to be articulated” to Jews such as Adler, who sought to secret his weapon with an apparent “Aryan” friend.
The November 9 press announcement declared “that a large amount of weapons have been found with Berlin’s Jews,” noting the confiscation of “2,569 stabbing and cutting weapons, 1,702 firearms, and about 20,000 rounds of ammunition.” The edged weapons could have been anything from kitchen knives to bayonets left over from the Great War. Assuming that the statistics are reliable, the number of weapons do not indicate the number of weapon owners. Gold had a pistol, and Adler had a long gun, but Flatow had a pistol and two revolvers, not to mention a dagger and thirty-one knuckledusters (which were blunt weapons, not cutting and stabbing weapons).
As to the “20,000 rounds of ammunition,” one can imagine petty Nazi functionaries counting each cartridge. That amounts to approximately ten rounds per firearm—a low number suggesting that many firearms may have been inherited or war souvenirs not kept functional with many cartridges for ready use. Firearms possessed for hunting or sporting use would have needed far more cartridges for practice and use.
To illustrate, Flatow had “1 revolver with 22 rounds of ammunition, [and] 2 pocket pistols” with no ammunition mentioned. “Gold was in possession of one Walther pistol with 6 rounds.” No ammunition was recorded in relation to Adler, who to be sure had sought to secret his weapon and could have been more successful in secreting his ammunition.
The announcement concluded that “if a Jew in Berlin is found still to possess a weapon without having a valid weapons permit, the Police President will, in every single case, proceed with the greatest severity.” Because Flatow, Gold, and Adler had been arrested and turned over to the Gestapo, they presumably had been treated with such severity. And the entire Jewish community of Germany would be attacked the day following the publication of the November 9 articles on Helldorf’s disarming of the Berlin Jews—on Reichskristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass.
Orders to disarm the Jews were not limited to Berlin but included all of Germany, as confirmed in a memoir by Hans Reichmann, a lawyer who worked during 1924–39 for the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, or CV), one of the most important organizations defending Jewish interests. It was renamed the Jewish Central Association (Jüdischer Central Verein) in 1936, the year Reichmann was named its new syndic.40 In spite of Nazi policy, the CV sought to protect Jews’ legal rights, at times actually finding officials who were responsive.41 Reichmann has been called “the leading Centralverein functionary for Jewish self-defence.”42
During September, anti-Semitic actions combined with the official economic policies to seize Jewish assets caused the Nazi hierarchy to perceive the need to nip in the bud any resistance from Jews by disarming them. Reichmann wrote about related events and talks in Bavaria:
As I had feared, during and after the September crisis, pogromlike riots had taken place in the villages of Franconia. My colleague, Dr. Otto Weiler, went and talked to the State Secretary of the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior and to Freiherr von Eberstein, police president of Munich, who was also Bavaria’s highest-ranking SS leader. Both were polite and disapproved of the riots, but approved of the economic takings. Although so far no victim had been able to defend him-or herself, weapons in the hand of Jews were deemed extremely dangerous. Therefore, the Nazis ordered [the Jews] in the entire Reich to turn in their weapons.43
The “September crisis” he refers to concerned the aftermath of the negotiations cumulating in the Munich accord in which England and France agreed to Germany’s taking of the Sudeten German territory from Czechoslovakia. Hitler used international tension to stir up the German people. There were disturbances in the Bavarian region of Franconia, including the smashing of windows of Jewish houses and shops and the burning of synagogues.44
Dr. Otto Weiler seems likely to have represented the CV in the meeting described by Reichmann. Like his counterpart Helldorf in Berlin, Munich police president Eberstein would have been the official to administer the weapon confiscations. The mantra about arms in the hands of Jews being dangerous was Gestapo policy that had been in existence since Werner Best’s 1935 directive. The time had now come to confiscate all arms from all Jews.
Reichmann proceeded to explain how the confiscated arms included anything that might be used as a weapon, including his own recently-acquired Browning firearm: “Old sergeants at police stations grudgingly accepted Chinese daggers so far used to peacefully open letters, admired colorful student sabers and regretted that they had to take my new Browning without paying me for it. The Reich Association of Jewish War Veterans (Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten) requested that the War Ministry let Jewish reserve officers keep their officers’ swords. We did not know why the Nazis were so eager in their collection of letter openers and blunt officers’ swords.”45 The Association’s petition to the War Ministry is another example of a Jewish organization attempting to communicate rationally with a Nazi government agency, but usually without success. Although the response, if there was any, is unknown, Jewish officers’ swords would be confiscated in the coming November pogrom. Along with other Jewish organizations, the Association would be banned shortly after Reichskristallnacht.46
Although a shooting by a foreign Jew in a foreign country could not have been anticipated, the Nazis were ready for any reaction to their own aggressive policies. Writing about the happenings of mid-October, Reichmann commented: “We did not suspect that three weeks later one Jew by the name of Grynszpan would deliver a shot and that the German people would take spontaneous revenge for that assassination. The SS, however, clearly had a presentiment that this would happen and therefore preventively disarmed the dangerous future victims of the spontaneous action.”47
As events would have it, the coming pogrom was anything but a spontaneous reaction by the populace. It was carefully ordered and orchestrated by Hitler and Goebbels and was executed by the SA and other Nazi thugs. Having in Reichmann’s words “preventively disarmed” the Jews, the Nazis rendered them defenseless.
When Reichskristallnacht finally descended, Reichmann would be imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. As it was for thousands of others, his arrest was a pretext because he had surrendered his Browning firearm in October and thus was not in violation of November decrees banning possession of firearms by Jews. Shortly after the pogrom, the CV was banned. Reichmann and his wife, Eva Gabriele, a prominent historian and sociologist, were able to immigrate to England.
It was only when the November pogrom erupted that the events of the previous weeks and months could be put in perspective. Newspapers in Paris and Geneva carried an article under the headline “The Anti-Semitic Measures of the Reich”: “To illuminate the recent events, one now better understands the special liabilities imposed on the Jews in recent times. Events since last June make clear the obvious methods of their measures. They have simplified the destruction. One method was to confiscate their arms from them, rendering the operation without danger. The other demanded from them a formal declaration of assets (currency, jewelry, pieces of furniture, carpets), which facilitated the confiscation thereof. All was ready.”48
*
1. Bericht über einen polit. Vorfall, Oct. 4, 1938, Alfred Flatow, A Rep Pr. Br. Rep. 030/21620 Bd. 5, Haussuchungen bei Juden 1938–39 (FB Bd. 5), Landesarchiv Berlin.
2. Hajo Bernett, “Alfred Flatow—vom Olympiasieger zum Reichsfeind” (Alfred Flatow—from Olympic Victory to Reich Enemy), Sozial-und Zeitgeschichte des Sports, 1st ed. (1987), 2:94. See also Arnd Krüger, “‘Once the Olympics Are Through, We’ll Beat Up the Jew’: German Jewish Sport 1898–1938 and the Anti-Semitic Discourse,” Journal of Sport History 26, no. 2 (Summer 1999), 353, 367; Joseph Siegman, Jewish Sports Legends: The International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1997),
92.
3. Bericht über einen polit. Vorfall, Oct. 4, 1938, Alfred Flatow.
4. Unless otherwise indicated, all facts in reference to the Flatow arrest are from Bericht über einen polit. Vorfall, Oct. 4, 1938, Alfred Flatow.
5. See the map of police precincts in the central districts of Berlin for 1930 in Hsi-Huey Liang, The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 12–13.
6. Unless otherwise indicated, all facts about Flatow’s life other than the arrest report are from Bernett, “Alfred Flatow.”
7. Gerd Steins, “Gustav Felix Flatow: Ein vergessener Olympiasieger” (Gustav Felix Flatow: Forgotten Olympic Champion), in Sozial-und Zeitgeschichte des Sports, 2:103, 109.
8. Ergänzungskarten der Volkszählung von 17.05.1939, Bundesarchiv R2/GB. This source also shows: RAD: J. Datum: 22091941 [Sept. 22, 1941].
9. Michael Stolleis, The Law under the Swastika (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 134; Edward Crankshaw, Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny (London: Greenhill Books, 1956), 89.
10. Police Station 106 was located in Luisenstrasse 37 Kreuzberg, as indicated in Berlin Adressbuch 1938. In 1938, the street was renamed “Curthdamm,” and the station’s new address was Curthdamm 16, as indicated in Berlin Adressbuch 1939. More precisely, Luisenstrasse became Curthdamm on May 20, 1937, and was renamed “Segitzdamm” on July 31, 1947. Hans-Jürgen Mende, Lexikon. Alle Berliner Strassen u. Plätze. Von der Gründung bis zur Gegenwart Bd. 1 A-Fre (Berlin’s Streets and Squares – from Foundation to Present) (Berlin: Luisenstadt, 1998). Curthdamm was named for Udo Curth, an SA man who was killed in street riots in 1932.
11. Betr.: Erteilung von Waffenscheinen an Juden, Preußische Geheime Staatspolizei, B.Nr. I G–352/35, Dec. 16, 1935, DCP 0072, BA R 58/276.
Gun Control in the Third Reich Page 20
