Halbrook - Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and Enemies of the State

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The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way, Oakland, CA 94621-1428 Telephone: 510-632-1366 Fax: 510-568-6040 Email Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Halbrook, Stephen P. Gun control in the Third Reich : disarming the Jews and enemies of the state / Stephen P. Halbrook. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59813-161-1 (hardcover : alk. : alk. paper) 1. paper) 1.

FirearmsLaw and legislationGermanyHistory20th century. 2. Gun controlGermanyHistory20th century. 3. JewsLegal status, laws, etc.History20th century. 4.

GermanyPolitics and government19331945 I. Title. KK6010.H35 2013 363.33094309043dc23 2013022225 Cover Design: Denise Tsui Cover Image: Peter Zelei/iStockphoto Contents xi xii | ContentsAcknowledgmentst h is wor k would not have been possible without assistance by others, in particular the research in numerous German archives by Sebastian Remus and Katya Andrusz. Therese Klee Hathaway assisted with numerous translations, helped along by Oliver Harriehausen and David Moses. I also am grateful to Stefan Grus, Jay Simkin, Lisa Halbrook Hollowell, Heather Barry, Dave Fischer, and Joshua Prince for their research assistance. The author published some preliminary research for this study in Nazi Firearms Law and the Disarming of the German Jews, 17 Arizona Journal ofInternational and Comparative Law 483 (2000), and Arms in the Hands of Jews Are a Danger to Public Safety: Nazism, Firearm Registration, and the Night of the Broken Glass, 21 St.

Thomas Law Review 109 (2009). He is grateful to the editors of those journals for their insights and suggestions. Once the manuscript was created, Alice Rosengard provided invaluable advice in helping to make it more readable, and Professor Alexander Tabarrok, Independent Institute Research Director, challenged me to address hard ques tions about the thesis. Gail Saari and Anne Barva greatly assisted in smoothing out the text. Thanks are due to Independent Institute President David Theroux and Acquisitions Director Roy M. Carlisle for bringing the book to publication.

I alone am responsible for the interpretations given here as well as for any errors. xiii Introductiona l f r e d f l at ow wa s a German Jew who won first place in gymnastics events at the 1896 Olympics. In 1932, he registered three handguns as required by a decree of the liberal Weimar Republic. The government had warned that the police must carefully store the registration records so that no extremist group could ever obtain them. That fear was realized, however, when an extremist group led by Adolf Hitler seized power the following year and used those very same registration records to disarm enemies of the state. In 1938, the records were used to disarm Jewish gun owners such as Flatow, whose arrest report stated: Arms in the hands of Jews are a danger to public safety.