Gun Control in the Third Reich (7 page)

Similar registration decrees were issued by Oppeln, the seat of Upper Silesia in Prussia,
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and by Allenstein in East Prussia.
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Nazi courts would later cite both to uphold convictions for unregistered firearms.

Determining which jurisdictions issued decrees requiring registration of weapons would be a major study, but the Reich's 1931 decree in itself suggests that major areas, in particular more populated centers where disorder had occurred, most likely did so. Moreover, some jurisdictions exercised their powers to declare emergencies and to confiscate firearms. Gunsmith Rudolf Reger
of Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, wrote to President Hindenburg on March 3, 1932, pleading for compensation because the new arms law caused a depression in the arms trade. He referred to a statement by an official of the East Prussian government: “In a meeting, the local government told me that the tightened emergency decree on arms registration has actually had an effect like hitting water, since only the decent and quiet members of the public have registered arms, while nothing has been registered by the radical elements. However, it has had the effect that no one buys a firearm anymore, due to the fear that arms will be confiscated as has been the pattern in some of the governmental districts in the West.”
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The confiscations apparently did not just pinpoint the troublemakers and leave law-abiding citizens alone. In the first quarter of 1932, the SA stepped up attacks on Communists, killing some, and fought with Reichsbanner members in the streets. Police raided the SA headquarters in Berlin. A dispatch by Frederic M. Sackett, the U.S. ambassador in Germany, noted reports of preparations for a Nazi putsch, adding: “To verify these reports the Prussian Government had ordered the police raids…. The confiscated documentary material, said Minister Severing, had proved that the Nazis systematically spied on the civil authorities, the police and the Reichswehr in connection with their plans to seize power by force.” Seized documents resembled “similar disclosures in the past of Communist subversive activities. This is not surprising since many former members and leaders of the Red Front are known to have become members of the Nazi storm detachments following the suppression of the Communist organization.” Sackett continued: “The acts of treason attributed to the Nazis, it appears, consisted of a planned attempt to seize the arms of the Reichswehr, particularly in the eastern frontier sections of Germany, for their struggle against the republican section of the population, notably the Iron Front, from which they expected stiff resistance against a Nazi dictatorial regime. It is pointed out that by disarming the Reichswehr the Nazis would have impaired the national defense by exposing sections of the country to a Polish invasion, and severe punishment is demanded for the Nazi instigators of the plot.”
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On April 14, 1932, President Hindenburg banned the SA, including its Elite Guard (Schutzstaffeln, SS), headed by Heinrich Himmler. Berlin police raided hundreds of SA locations, including dormitories, restaurants, and even the home of Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, who would become the Berlin police president under the Nazis.
⁶⁰

Meanwhile, the prosecution of paperwork violations under the 1928 Firearms Law continued. The Regional Court of Kassel held that the defendants were guilty of obtaining firearms without an acquisition license, even though they had police permits to carry firearms,
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which were more difficult to obtain.

By contrast, the Reich Court held that a person who carried a pistol unlawfully and fired it at a police officer in Berlin could be convicted of attempted manslaughter with a firearm, but not separately of unlawful carry. The court conceded that the 1928 law “failed to reduce the spread of firearms among persons leaning to violence and to limit the illegal use of those firearms. It was therefore necessary to increase the sanctions imposed for illegal assaults with firearms.”
⁶²

The firearm laws had caused an economic crisis in the arms industry, the Prussian minister for trade and industry wrote to the Reich interior minister on February 29, 1932. Urgent matters, he stated, included internal security and the political unrest of unemployed gunsmiths, the value of the arms industry for national defense, and amendments to the law to help the industry. Conditions in Suhl and adjoining Thuringia contributed to a radicalization of the population. Regulations that were not absolutely necessary to the police interest should be moderated to prevent the collapse of the industry. He argued that exceptions should be considered for long arms, which—unlike handguns—did not figure in offenses involving arms misuse. “The misuse of long arms is probably only to be feared in larger organized rebellions.” Even then, hunting rifles, Schuetzen rifles, and high-quality arms would not play an essential role in any such rebellions.
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The Gun Making Association of Zeller-Mehliser (Verband Zeller-Mehliser Waffenfabriken) in Thuringia wrote to the interior minister of that state to present a proposal to exempt from the law hunting firearms of various types as well as Flobert rifles and pistols, which were low-power, single-shot guns used for sport and plinking.
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The minister forwarded the proposal to the Reich interior minister, recommending approval.
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Reich interior minister Groener rejected it, however, claiming that decontrol even of Flobert pistols was a threat to internal security.
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However, Groener wrote an urgent missive to the state governments supporting a narrow liberalization. He recognized that, from the Versailles Treaty to the 1928 Firearms Law and now the 1931 decree, the noose on the firearms industry was steadily tightening. Moderation of the current rules was in order. That did not mean that it would be made easier for the ordinary citizen to acquire ordinary arms. Instead, expensive hunting arms, such as those with gold engraving, which only the wealthy could afford, would be the subject of a limited deregulation: “The large size of these arms, the unwieldiness of their cartridges, and their slow rate of fire render them unsuitable for use in political riots. Furthermore, their relatively high price makes their acquisition in the present economic situation more and more a luxury item, precluding any tendency that members of radical organizations would be armed with these costly arms.”
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In June 1932, the regulations were amended to exempt narrowly defined hunting and sporting arms from the requirement of an acquisition permit.
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This included certain double- and triple-barreled combination shotguns and rifles selling for at least 135–200 marks, which would have been several weeks
wages for the average worker. It included a narrow class of target rifles, those weighing at least four kilos and using rimmed 8.15-by-46-mm cartridges with lead bullets. Also included were guns of at least one meter overall length and costing at least 200 marks. All these arms were highly specialized and expensive guns that the average person would not have possessed.

The new regulations had a single provision for the common person: a permit for possession of .22-caliber cartridges would no longer be required unless the quantity exceeded 1,000 rounds.
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The Reich Association of German Gunsmiths and Firearm and Ammunition Dealers (Reichsverband Deutscher Büchsenmacher, Waffen und Munitionshändler) protested to the Reich interior minister that the new regulations disarmed the law-abiding population while the smugglers and black market traffickers provided radicals with arms. So many restrictions had been imposed that the lawful trade could not survive without relaxation of the rules. “We for our part still think that draconian penalties would be the best solution for any willful offense against the Firearms Law and also for the misuse of arms.”
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On “Bloody Sunday,” July 17, 1932, in Altona, a working-class suburb of Hamburg, Communists shot it out with police at a Nazi demonstration; eighteen people were killed, and many more wounded.
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Carl Severing, formerly the Reich interior minister but now holding that position in Prussia, sought to curb violence from the left and right by cracking down on illegal possession of weapons and authorizing local officials to prohibit demonstrations.
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This tactic may have heralded a new phase in the struggle against political violence, but it was no more successful than the other disarmament measures decreed since 1918.
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As 1932 progressed, one shaky government replaced another as the Weimar Republic went into its death throes. In mid-January 1933, the short-lived Reich chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher made a futile stab at removing the
Versailles Treaty's strict limits on the German armed forces. That was a primary issue on which the Nazis were winning electoral support. Speaking as defense minister, Schleicher demanded an equality of arms with the Great War's victors, reflecting: “Since time immemorial the right to bear arms has been to a German the sign of a free man. Our opponents know well that they struck at Germany's very marrow when they rendered her defenseless and, thereby, a second-class people. The army, which after all represented the German people under arms, felt nothing to be so unkind, undeserved, disgraceful, and, yes, unchivalrous on the part of her enemies as the prohibition to bear arms.”
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This concept of a “right to bear arms” was in the Hegelian statist tradition, meaning compulsory military service rather than an individual liberty. German military leaders rejected the Swiss militia system of “a people in arms” in which the citizen soldier kept his arms at home.
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In post–World War I Germany, this rejection manifested itself as a standard of police and state protection of individuals.

Schleicher hoped that channeling young men into military service—a million of them younger than twenty-five were unemployed in Germany at the time—would reduce the appeal of National Socialism. He even suggested the combining of the Reichsbanner and the Stahlhelm into a militia to promote national defense and to stabilize the domestic scene.
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But it was too late for such illusions.

In the years from 1918 through 1932, Germany had gone from a brutal policy that in times of unrest entailed immediate execution for mere possession of a firearm to a modern, albeit imperfectly executed, gun control law. Passed by a liberal republic, this law initially ensured that the police compile records of all lawful firearms acquisitions (but, of course, not of unlawful ones) and that the lawful keeping and bearing of arms were subject to police approval. In its final period, the Weimar Republic authorized the registration of all firearms and the confiscation of arms at the discretion of the authorities.

Yet the attempts to control violence in the country meant that private and generally harmless citizens were primarily the ones whose names found their way onto firearms lists. This period also established a chaotic legal environment
for gun control laws. Police authorities were given limitless discretion, and the laws themselves would be decreed and redecreed to focus on whatever weapon or activity (such as public demonstrations) needed controling for the moment. This firearms control regime and generally the power to issue emergency decrees would be quite useful to the coming Nazi regime.

The ad hoc, arbitrary execution of ever more stringent and “progressively modern” gun control restrictions was a constituent part of Germany's political order and was thus as unstable and uncertain as that deteriorating order. It was a dangerous dance between political parties, police forces, and state controls on the backs of the citizens at large. And firearms prohibitions became a key opening step for the Nazi Party as the spotlight turned to shine on it.

The dance would soon end, for the volcano that roiled beneath Germany erupted.

1
. Wilhelm Elfes Polizeipräsident to Reichsminister des Innern (RMI) Dr. Wirth, Mar. 20, 1931, Bundesarchiv (BA) Lichterfelde, R 1501/125939, Gesetz über Schußwaffen und Munition Bd. 3, 1929–31, S. 475–76.

2
. Gesetz gegen Waffenmißbrauch,
Reichsgesetzblatt
1931, I, 77, § 3.

3
.
Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung
, July 15, 1931, S. 949.

4
. Decision of July 9, 1931,
Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung
, Dec. 15, 1932.

5
.
Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung
, Aug. 1, 1931, S. 1015.

6
.
Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung
, Sept. 1, 1931, S. 1171.

7
. Hsi-Huey Liang,
The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 112.

8
. Niederschrift über Ministerkonferenz, Sept. 26, 1931, BA Lichterfelde, R 1501/125940, Gesetz über Schußwaffen und Munition Bd. 4, 1931–32, S. 198–99.

9
. Dem Herrn Min., Nov. 23, 1931, BA Lichterfelde, R 1501/125940, Gesetz über Schußwaffen und Munition Bd. 4, 1931–32, S. 275–77.

10
. Ulrich Herbert,
Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989
(Best: A Biographical Study of Radicalism, World View, and Reason) (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1993), 112–19. See also Hubert Beckers, “Das Boxheimer Dokument vom November 1931” (The Boxheimer Document of November 1931),
http://www.shoa.de/content/view/590/102/
(visited Feb. 3, 2008).

11
. Quoted in Martin Loiperdinger, “Das Blutnest vom Boxheimer Hof” (The Bloody Nest of the Boxheimer Hof), in
Hessen unterm Hakenkreuz
(Hesse Under the Swastika), ed. Eike Hennig (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1983), 435, and in Anton Maria Keim, “Entwurf einer Diktatur: Am 26. November 1931 wurden die ‘Boxheimer Dokumente' enthüllt” (Blueprint for a Dictatorship: The “Boxheimer Documents” Revealed on November 26, 1931),
Mainzer Vierte1jahreshefte
4 (1981), 117, 119.