Who farted?
- Hitler, 1935
Unless you live in a bubble, you’ve doubtless been informed by countless social media historians that it was gun control that both led to the Nazis and then also was implemented by the Nazis.
Such items often include a likely falsified line from an alleged 1935 speech — likely as true my caption above — that no one has been able to trace to an actual speech or even tie to a specific 1935 action, law, or regulation by the Nazi government.
Indeed, this rapidly emerging discipline within online historical analysis has probably also informed you that every totalitarian regime in history, crossing all vectors of despotic governance, existed solely because the Hitlers and the Stalins, the Mussolinis and the Maos seized the guns from ordinary citizens, thus preventing the inevitable watering of the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, in turn sprouting the new leaves of freedom, unicorns, and licorice-flavored 223 Remington rounds.
I make no claim to being a professional historian, though I had some passion and some initial classwork in the realm, I ultimately decided on the far more lucrative career of an English major1. I also stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night2.
My credentials in order, I thought it would be enlightening to explore these theories and some of the underlying history allegedly behind them. Sadly, I’ve already blown well past the generally functional meme word limit for this to be used in response, but perhaps the Germans, with their linguistic gifts for distilling complex thoughts into compact words could help…. Schwachsinn comes to mind.
Let’s Start with our Old Friend Adolf
Following the defeat in World War I, Germany was in a spasm of revolution verging on anarchy. The Kaiser was deposed, the German army had pledged itself to a state that barely existed, and mobs of nationalists, socialists, anarchists, communists, and probably even a few dentists and podiatrists roamed virtually unfettered. For the most part, they battled each other because there hardly existed a “state” to overthrow and a state that barely exists isn’t a state that can exercise much tyranny.
Socialist workers councils seized control of cities from Bremen to Hamburg. Even more radical Spartacists — who would eventually become the German Communist Party — sought to overthrow them and even managed to control the government of Bavaria for a brief time. Armed nationalist groups — the Freikorps, generally backed by anyone that was not communist — in turn sought to put down the Bolsheviks. Thousands died across Germany in bloody clashes that were sometimes scrums with fists and truncheons, but just as often, disorganized gun battles.
In the throes of virtual anarchy, the shaky, fledgling Weimar Republic did in fact, ban private gun ownership in 1919… and it had precisely zero impact.
Just ask a mustachioed Austrian corporal, who at the tail end of this unrest in 1923, led an armed mob to a Munich beer hall, fired a shot to the ceiling, and took the Bavarian state commissioner, Bavarian police chief, and a Reichswehr general hostage. When these armed criminals attempted to march from the beer hall to the Munich city council and take additional hostages, they were met by police and the German army. You know the rest- Hitler was killed in the crossfire, Ernst Rohm would later add an additional historical footnote as leader of a minor radical party in the early 1930s — no wait, that’s an unfinished Harry Turtledove ode I have not yet completed3.
Anyway, by 1928, when the Weimar Republic passed revised gun laws — revolutionary spasm had at least somewhat abated, hyperinflation somewhat tamed, and the mustachioed corporal was out of prison and finally free of a ban on public speaking, decided that giving the ballot box a try was preferable to fleeing from police.
The new 1928 gun laws ended the 1919 ban on guns in favor of a registration and permitting system. By and large, the change was pushed for business interests — though the hyperinflation of the early/mid-1920s had been tamed, the wreckage still dominated small burgs and the German countryside, making it somewhat dangerous for traveling salesmen and those Germans wealthy enough to own cars to engage in country-side pleasure tours. The relaxed gun laws did, however, include provisions requiring demonstrated trustworthiness — while the Nazis managed less than a paltry 3% in the 1928 elections, the communists had managed more than 10% — so the risk of armed radical groups overthrowing the government was not exactly extinguished.
Following 1930 election — post Wall Street crash, which fatally wounded the German economy moreso than even the American economy (Germany’s economic stability had been largely US-financed) — the KPD gained another 3%, owning 13% of the Reichstag, but the Nazis shot up to 18%, making them the second largest party in all of Germany. Well-armed paramilitaries from both the KPD (communists) and NSDAP (Nazis) were again battling in each other in the streets and the once more shaky Weimar coalition government saw a repeat of events just a decade prior playing out before its eyes.
The Bruning government fell before the 1932 elections were even took place — the Nazis shot up to 37% of the Reichstag; their high point in free German elections, and it proved impossible to form a coalition that didn’t include radicals from the left or right. Another round of elections followed that same November and saw the Nazi vote fall to 33%, still a plurality and still no working coalition to be made that didn’t involve including the NSDAP or KPD (who had risen to nearly 17%). Thus, the “Hitler cabinet” was born — or as Fritz von Papen so infamously said “We’ve hired him” — with Hitler, Herman Goring, and Wilhelm Frick joining the cabinet… ultimately culminating in January 1933 with Hitler becoming chancellor, and Nazis dominating the government.
No changes to gun laws would occur until 1938 — more on that below — but the concentration camp at Dachau was opened mere weeks later, a couple days before even the Enabling Acts gave Hitler near dictatorial power, at least on paper. Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and others would also open before this law, all before Kristallnacht and years before the Wannsee Conference settled on the methodology of the Final Solution Holocaust - initially to house political leaders opposed to the Nazis, but rapidly enveloping Jews as well.
It is true that the loosened gun laws of 1928 meant that gun permit applications went through the police, but until the Gestapo, there was no federal or national police in Germany (indeed, this was why Goring was given ministerial control of Prussia — it happened to have the largest of the individual state police forces). Applicants — to say nothing of enforcement (which was virtually non-existent anyway) — would still avail themselves of and were largely at the discretion of the local police, not all of whom were Nazis. Goring planted the Gestapo seeds in late April 1933, but it would a year later, in April 1934 that Hitler would truly federalize the Gestapo and with the appointment of Heinrich Himmler to oversee it — turn it into the feared element it became.
So — concentration camps already being filled with political opponents, the Weimar Republic essentially dissolved, even hundreds outright murdered and where were the armed patriots to resist tyranny?
There were organized militias of non-police, non-military German citizens well-armed and ready to “resist” — haters of government and the elites, but unfortunately, they generally wore brown shirts and went by the name of the Sturmabteilung or SA… and were actually sworn to the new chancellor, who had ridden roughly 1/3 of the vote to power. The Führerprinzip - or idea that Hitler was the one leader and all power devolved from him — had been established years prior, in the 1926 Bamberg conference during the Nazi’s wilderness years.
Another well-armed group of potential patriots who were sworn to uphold the Weimar constitution — and hated the SA — also existed…. the German army. While there certainly were a few fans of Hitler among the Prussian blue bloods (Goring for one) who made up the higher ranks of the Reichswehr, most were at best skeptical of Hitler. Many thought him a clown and a buffoon. All feared talk of simply replacing the army with the SA. Gordian as dictators are — Hitler solved the problem by decapitating the leadership of the SA (and more than a few remaining political opponents who hadn’t yet fled the country) during the Night of the Long Knives in late summer merging the SA into the new SS, 1934 — earning him the oath of personal allegiance of the German armed forces.
But wasn’t this about gun control and the Nazis? Yes indeed — we should talk about the 1938 German Gun Law… it:
- lowered the age limit to get a gun permit from 20 to 18
- Deregulated rifles and long arms that had previously been subject to the 1928 registration laws
- Allowed hunting permits to substitute for the gun registration permits, as well as exempted government employees and Nazi party members from the permit requirements in total
- Yes — and it banned Jews from owning, making, or possessing guns or ammunition
AH-ha! So — had Hitler not “disarmed the Jews” — an armed resistance to the Holocaust and perhaps even World War II would have been prevented!
Sure…
Because up until 1938, when the Nazis banned Jews from owning guns — they hadn’t noticed the possible encroachment on their freedom and peril to their very lives when the Nazis banned them from civil service posts and the legal profession (April 1933), banned them from the media (October 1933), expelled them from the army (1935), banned them from accounting, educational, and veterinary professions (1936), and even from attending public school period (1937)…. To say nothing of the 1935 Nuremberg laws that reduced them to second-class citizens anyway.
But Whattabout…
Mussolini, forever the second fiddle to Hitler?
Poor, poor Benito… Hitler’s idol and even his original template for seizing power, forever relegated to an afterthought.
Despite being on the winning side in World War I, Italy emerged from the original Great War in as bad a shape as Germany. Its army had been badly mauled; when the corpse of Austria-Hungary stalls you and even manages to invade you, you know you had a rough go of it as several near total mutinies in the Italian army would also agree. What’s more, Italians had not been particularly eager to join the war (and indeed, by treaty, should have done so in support of the Central powers) — but Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, together with a few territory-hungry ministers, went around both parliament and popular opinion to join the Entente.
Italian claims about the injustice of Versailles were nearly as loud as those of Germany, feeling they had been cheated out of their own spoils — and worse, had paid more dearly in blood and especially treasure. On the treasure front, they had a point. Italy’s economy was utterly ruined by WWI, leading to the Biennio Rosso, or “Two Red years”.
The wrecked economy, coupled with Bolshevik and socialist conflagrations breaking out to Italy’s north and east, led to a seemingly unending series of small-scale and large-scale strikes, significant uptick in crime, and a general sense that Italy was racing Germany and Russia to see who would first slide into anarchy.
When trade unionists and socialists launched yet another series of strikes and protests — and armed revolutionaries seized factories, it was Mussolini and his Squadristi or Blackshirts who restored “order” through (notice a theme?) violent and bloody clashes in the Po Valley industrial heartland of Italy.
As up north in Germany, a fragile coalition government failed, Italian fascists coalesced behind new Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti’s attempt to surf the roiling waves…. Until he attempted to disarm and dissolve the Squadristi, leading to the fall of his government after less than a year, and thus began Mussolini’s “March on Rome” — 30,000 armed militia demanding “law and order” and a restoration of Italian pride.
Then-Prime Minister Luigi Facta pleaded for declaration of a state of emergency, in order to bring the armed forces to protect a Rome under siege — instead, King Victor Emmanuel asked Mussolini to form a government… and yet again, the “armed resisters” found themselves in control of the government without actually overthrowing it.
While less famous — and not quite as bloody, but far from blood-free — the Italian fascists likewise began doing away with opposition… and they hardly needed any “gun control” to do it — as elsewhere, they simply arrested or murdered any who couldn’t be brought to heel and far from any armed resistance; the Ceka — the Italian version of the Gestapo — simply did what secret police do. Far from any uprising against this tyrannical government, most Italians were happy with the lack of protests and strikes, not to mention the brutal repression of the (equally brutal) criminal elements that held sway in certain regions.
The Soviets?
20/20 hindsight would certainly say that Tsar Nicholas finished miles behind Stalin (or Lenin before him) in any race of despots, but in early 1917, the faltering Romanov monarchy would certainly have been deemed despotic… Yet — it wasn’t guns that brought down the Tsar, it was bread.
With its front against Germany crumbling, casualties mounting, and growing discontent that had occasionally boiled over for decades prior to Nicholas again boiling over — the toppling of the Tsar was due to some 10s of thousands of women, wholly unarmed, walked off their factory “jobs” and marching in demand of bread in Petrograd. The strikes and marches soon spread, joined by others all equally unarmed — until the government attempted to order the army to suppress the bread riots.
Rather than fire upon the civilians — largely women and children, most of the men off dying to the west — the soldiers simply kept their rifles and join the protesters.
Throughout most of 1917 — the Russians attempted to organize a fledgling democratic government — far from a pure Bolshevik revolution, it was in fact, a popular uprising that certainly included the communists, but was far broader than that.
Far from the spark; Lenin wasn’t even in the country — the Bolsheviks simply usurped and co-opted the transition, in no small part due to Alexander Kerensky asking for Bolshevik assistance in suppressing counter-revolutionaries (or counter-counter-revolutionaries… or counter-counter-counter-revolutionaries. Multi-volume books are necessary to unwind it all). Further failures in the still ongoing war — no doubt exacerbated by believing a barely constituted government had any business launching new offensives, further weakened the government.
This time, it wasn’t armed paramilitary militias — but the military itself that led to the downfall of the new government, as the fabled Kronstadt sailors refused orders to the front and disposed of their officers (yes, with guns). In fact, their revolt was disavowed by Lenin — the Bolsheviks were rather surprised at quickly their ranks had swelled and weren’t even prepared to take power, playing the safe coalition card.
By late summer, it had become apparent that to Lenin that their time had come — so the Bolsheviks simply promised “peace and bread”, and refused further cooperation with the other various elements attempting to hold Russia together. It wasn’t guns or armed citizens — it was speeches and printing presses that ultimately led to the fall of the new government, which wasn’t necessarily despotic, but was still somewhat despotically trying to fight a world war it had no business participating in any longer.
The following years were pock-marked in open warfare between the “red” armies and the “white armies” — both sides constituted of former Russian army troops as well as paramilitary groups of armed citizens choosing sides. Perhaps as many three million died in the fighting of the Russian Revolution that continued until nearly the end of 1922… by which point, seizure of guns took a deep back seat to the seize of grain… and two years before Joseph Stalin would seize power of the Soviet.
Armed uprisings would continue well into the 1930s — largely against Stalin’s collectivism schemes, but most were suppressed not just by the Red Army, and not for a lack of ammunition, but for a lack of food. Millions starved in the infamous famines that wracked the USSR, most famously, the Ukraine.
Lack of Guns Doesn’t Kill Freedom, People Do
The myth of gun control as a prime factor in the rise of the Nazis or any totalitarian regime — or a laughable manner in which it would have been stopped short by people who wore out Red Dawn VHS tapes - is traceable almost entirely back to a couple of NRA fanatics, David Kopel and Stephen Halbrook, who authored a pair of books some 20 years ago… And as Bernard Harcourt wrote in response back in 2004 — the problem is that actual historians, rather than rigid ideologues cherry-picking anecdotes to build a flotsam case, haven’t really bothered to rebut the idea.
As not-a-professional historian, I’d probably guess that virtually all of them would say because the idea is… well, let’s use that German word again — Schwachsinn.
Time and time again, totalitarian states do not rise — much less, subsist — because the citizens lack guns to prevent it; we haven’t even talked about the rise of Franco — ask the republicans how well their guns served to stave off the Franco fascists.
Totalitarian states rise because enough people view them as the best — or at least, “least-bad” option… They become “least bad options” due to no shortage of causes — from economic collapse to political revolution to war. And historically — their vanguard is actually made up of the armed citizens and militias.
They don’t get overthrown by armed citizenry because they’ve managed to co-opt a large enough portion of that armed citizenry. They persist because the true believers now likewise have an inevitably large and well-armed army at their beck and call.
Pretending that gun ownership — or lack thereof — has any real place in such historical analysis is a nonsensical extension of chaos theory where a butterfly flapping its wings spawns a hurricane. You might as well say — and be no less wrong — that it was lack of unicorns firing rainbows of love from their horns that led to Totalitarian regimes and it was the failure to enshrine the right to bear magic rock that allowed them to persist.
1Both History and English have taught me that footnotes are important
2Dear Holiday Inn — my contact info should be in my profile, so you may contact me for the product placement
3See above, Mr. Turtledove
