FTA: Aptly called “the day the Holocaust began,” Kristallnacht was met with virtually no resistance; the Hitler regime already had disarmed the more than half-a-million Jews who called Germany home at the time.
One of them was Alfred Flatow, the renowned German gymnast who had won three gold medals at the 1896 Olympics in Athens. In 1932, Flatow had registered three handguns as required by the democratic Weimar Republic. A year later, after Adolph Hitler seized power, such registration records fell into the wrong hands and were used to identify and disarm “enemies of the state.”
Massive searches and seizures of guns and “subversive” literature followed. As the terror intensified, Jews were deprived of the rights of citizenship. The Gestapo, the not-so-secret police, ordered that gun permits not be issued to Jews.
By 1938, the Nazis were expropriating the assets of Jews. To ensure they had no means of resistance, Jews were ordered to surrender their firearms.
Last weekend marked the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, when Nazi thugs went on a rampage against Germany’s Jewish community.
Aptly called “the day the Holocaust began,” Kristallnacht was met with virtually no resistance; the Hitler regime already had disarmed the more than half-a-million Jews who called Germany home at the time.
One of them was Alfred Flatow, the renowned German gymnast who had won three gold medals at the 1896 Olympics in Athens. In 1932, Flatow had registered three handguns as required by the democratic Weimar Republic. A year later, after Adolph Hitler seized power, such registration records fell into the wrong hands and were used to identify and disarm “enemies of the state.”
Massive searches and seizures of guns and “subversive” literature followed. As the terror intensified, Jews were deprived of the rights of citizenship. The Gestapo, the not-so-secret police, ordered that gun permits not be issued to Jews.
By 1938, the Nazis were expropriating the assets of Jews. To ensure they had no means of resistance, Jews were ordered to surrender their firearms.
“One of the first legal measures issued was an order by Heinrich Himmler, commander of all German police, forbidding Jews to possess any weapons whatever and imposing a penalty of twenty years confinement in a concentration camp upon every Jew found in possession of a weapon hereafter,” the New York Times reported on Nov. 11, 1938. This was the National Socialist version of “common-sense gun safety” measures, to use today’s jargon.
by Stephen P. Halbrook
