Author: Jeff Fenske Page 234 of 612

Gun Control in Germany, 1928-1945

by William L. Pierce (1994)
A common belief among defenders of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is that the National Socialist government of Germany under Adolf Hitler did not permit the private ownership of firearms. Totalitarian governments, they have been taught in their high school civics classes, do not trust their citizens and do not dare permit them to keep firearms. Thus, one often hears the statement, “You know, the first thing the Nazis did when they came to power was outlaw firearms,” or, “The first thing Hitler did in Germany was round up all the guns.”
One can understand why many American gun owners want to believe this. They see in the current effort of their own government to take away their right to keep and bear arms a limitation of an essential element of their freedom and a move toward tyranny, and they want to characterize the gun-grabbers in the most negative way they can. Adolf Hitler has been vilified continuously for the past 60 years or so by the mass media in America, and certainly no politician or officeholder wants to be compared with him. If the gun-confiscation effort can be portrayed convincingly as something of which Hitler would have approved, it will have been effectively tarred.
This identification of the inclination to deny citizens the right to keep and bear arms with National Socialism and Adolf Hitler has been strengthened recently by clever magazine advertisements which show Hitler with his arm outstretched in a Roman salute under a heading: “All in favor of gun control raise your right hand.” A Jewish group, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO), quite noisy for its size, has been especially zealous in promoting the idea that the current gun-control effort in America has its roots in Germany during the Hitler period. This group has gone so far as to claim in several articles published in popular magazines read by firearms enthusiasts that the current restrictive legislation being proposed by the U.S. government is modeled on a gun-control statute enacted by Germany’s National Socialist government: the German Weapons Law (Waffengesetz) of March 18, 1938.
Again, one can understand the motivation of the JPFO. Many non-Jewish firearms owners are well aware that the movement to restrict their rights is led and promoted primarily by Jews, and anti-Jewish feeling has been growing among them. They know that the controlled news media, which are almost unanimously in favor of abridging or abolishing the Second Amendment, are very much under the influence of Jews, and they know that the most vocal anti-gun legislators in the Congress also are Jews. It is natural for a group such as the JPFO to mount a damage- control effort and attempt to prevent anti-Jewish feeling from becoming even stronger among gun owners. Their strategy is to deflect the blame from their kinsmen in the media and the government and direct it onto their most hated enemies, the National Socialists — or at least to create enough smoke to obscure the facts and keep the gun-owning public confused.
Unfortunately for those who would like to link Hitler and the National Socialists with gun control, the entire premise for such an effort is false. German firearms legislation under Hitler, far from banning private ownership, actually facilitated the keeping and bearing of arms by German citizens by eliminating or ameliorating restrictive laws which had been enacted by the government preceding his: a left-center government which had contained a number of Jews.

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