Michigan Republicans are using inaccurate Holocaust history in opposing proposed gun control legislation. falsely claiming Nazi gun control laws left German Jews defenseless.
Prior to the Nazis coming to power, Germany had very strict gun laws. The Nazis made them stricter.
In 1939 about 237,723 German Jews remained in Germany. They were up against the population of greater Germany of just under 80 million, most of whom actively or passively supported the Nazi police state.
Few German Jews had handguns and hunting rifles along with members of the opposition who had not been interned or murdered.
The most frequent ways the Nazis responded to armed resistance by civilians was summary execution on the spot along with the execution of their families and sometimes their neighbors.
German Jews who resisted with their personal firearms would have been killed on the spot instead of being transported to death camps. That would neither have saved 165,200 German Jews from being murdered nor stopped the Holocaust.
What happened to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising would have been the fate of any significant armed resistance by German Jews with handguns and hunting rifles. civilian firearms.
In the spring of 1943 about 1000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto with very few mostly civilian firearms resisted the last deportations of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis deployed both police and the military including gas grenades, artillery, and combat aircraft. They set fire to the ghetto. The Nazis killed 13,000 including almost all the armed resisters and captured 56,000 who they sent to slave labor and death camps. Very few Jews escaped.
Photograph from SS General Juergen Stroop’s report showing the
Warsaw ghetto after on fire after the Nazi suppression of the ghetto uprising.
On the right is a column of Jews being transported out of the ghetto for deportation.
Warsaw, Poland, April–May 1943.
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
Tyranny on the scale of Nazi Germany cannot be resisted by civilians with civilian firearms.
The issue within Nazi Germany was not that the individual victims lacked access to personal firearms.
The issue was the breakdown of the rule of law. Nazi Germany withdrew protection from a religious and ethnic minority of its citizens and used state power to exterminate them. The survivors were ultimately rescued by the combined armed forces of more powerful nations, not individual citizens within Nazi Germany with handguns and hunting rifles.
In the two countries where most Holocaust victims were from, Poland (up to 3 million Jews murdered) and the Soviet Union (up to 1.5 million Jews murdered), armed Jews resisted most effectively by serving in their nations’ armed forces.
On September 1, 1939, the first day of WWII in Europe, about 95,000 Polish Jews were among the 950,000 members of the Polish armed force who resisted the Nazi invasion of Poland. Among the first Holocaust victims were Polish Jewish POWS summarily executed by the Nazis in the field because they were Jewish.
Polish Jewish soldiers who escaped were among the Poles reformed into units that served with the Allied and Soviet armed forces. Polish Jews served in the armed resistance in occupied Poland.
350,000 to 500,000 Soviet Jews served in the Soviet armed forces. Soviet Jews fought in the resistance against Nazi-occupied parts of the Soviet Union. Up to 250,000 Polish Jews from eastern Poland were able to get into areas beyond the advance of the Nazis into regions of the Soviet Union under the protection of the Soviet armed forces to survive the Holocaust. Many of the 1,688,538 Soviet Jews who survived the Holocaust fled or were evacuated to areas beyond the advance of the Nazis and protected by the Soviet armed forces.
In other Allied countries such as France, French Jews served in the armed forces that resisted the Nazi invasion, in the armed resistance after the defeat of France, and in the reformed French armed forces that participated in the 1944 liberation of France and the defeat of Nazi Germany.
550,000 American Jews fought in all theaters. They were among the Allied troops that defeated Nazi Germany and ended the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was ended not by civilians with their personal firearms but by the military defeat of Nazi Germany by the armed forces of an alliance of powerful nations including 900,000 to over one million armed Jews over about six years at the cost of millions of casualties.
People who for partisan political reasons claim that Jewish civilians with handguns and hunting rifles could have successfully resisted the Holocaust and that Nazi gun control was among the causes of the Holocaust are ignorant of the history of the Holocaust and historically illiterate. They disrespect the victims of the Holocaust and dishonor the service of the members of the Allied and Soviet armed forces including Jews who defeated the Nazis and ended the Holocaust.
Personal Note:
My late father Private Felix A. Cizewski served in the 45th Signal Company, 45th Infantry Division, one of the three co-liberating divisions of Dachau. On April 19, 1945, He and the Signal Company were several miles from Dachau providing communications support among the division’s units while members of the combat units liberated the camp. The 45th Infantry Division was stationed on occupation duty near Dachau and assisted in the care of the liberated inmates.
As the son of a Dachau liberator, I am committed to sharing accurate Holocaust history. Most of the liberators and liberated have passed away. Telling their accurate story has passed to their descendants.
Acknowledgment:
Marshall Begel reviewed the draft of this post.
For more information:
No, gun control regulation in Nazi Germany did not help advance the Holocaust
Michigan GOP chair not apologizing after comparing gun reform to Holocaust: ‘We’re a different Republican Party
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