Alan Steinweis’s bad history

Yesterday, Holocaust historian Alan E. Steinweis wrote a New York Times op-ed which began “To anyone who studies Nazi Germany and the Holocaust for a living, as I do, Ben Carson’s statements about gun control are difficult to fathom.” However, Professor Steinweis does not speak for all Holocaust historians. His op-ed contained major factual errors, and demonstrates a lack of awareness of scholarly literature on Nazi gun control.

First of all,  there are many historians who have studied the effect of Nazi gun prohibition on Jewish populations. The Nazis were obsessed with disarming the Jews, and for good reason. As conquered Jews came to recognize that the Nazis were exterminators, rather than just enslavers, many Jews fought back. When they could obtain firearms, they fought effectively. They constituted half of the guerrilla resistance in Eastern Europe in 1943. They shut down the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps. Among the scholars who have described this history are Nechama Tec, “Jewish Resistance: Facts, Omissions, Distortions” (United States Holocaust Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, 1997); Tec, “Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust” (Yale Univ. Pr., 2003); Yehuda Bauer, “The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness” (Univ. of Toronto Pr., 1979), Yuri Suhl, ed., “They Fought Back” (Crown Pub. 1967); Abram L. Sachar, “The Redemption of the Unwanted: From the Liberation of the Death Camps to the Founding of Israel” (St. Martin’s Pr., 1983).

Professor Steinweis says that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising “saved few Jewish lives, and had little to no impact on the course of either World War II or the Holocaust.” Well, the point of the Uprising wasn’t to save the lives of the participants; they knew that they were almost certain to die to no matter what. They tied down Nazi forces for over fourth months — whereas the French and Polish armies had been unable to resist the Nazi invaders for even two months. In a world war, it is not easy to show that any partisan unit had a major impact on the outcome. But the nature of war is that small unit actions, while not decisive in themselves, may play an important role in weakening the enemy. The largest Jewish partisan unit in Eastern Europe, led by the Bielski Brothers, between the fall of 1943 and the summer of 1944 carried out 38 combat missions — destroying two locomotives, 23 train cars, 32 telegraph poles, and four bridges. Over the course of the war, the Bielski unit killed 381 enemy fighters and collaborators. That is a good record for a unit which had 149 armed combatants, and which sheltered and saved a thousand non-combatant Jews.

Perhaps the single most important Jewish partisan action which affected the war on the front lines took place in Greece. There, as everywhere else, Jews were disproportionately involved in the resistance, notwithstanding intense Nazi disarmament efforts. In Thessaly, a Jewish partisan unit in the mountains was led by the septuagenarian Rabbi Moshe Pesah, who carried his own rifle. The Athenian Jew Jacques Costis led the team which demolished the Gorgopotoma Bridge, thereby breaking the link between the mainland and Peloponnesian Peninsula, and obstructing delivery of supplies to Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Among the biographies of Jewish resisters are Yechiel Granatstein, “The War of a Jewish Partisan: A Youth Imperiled by this Russian Comrades and Nazi Conquerors,” transl., Charles Wengrov (Mesorah Pubs., 1986); Peter Duffy, “The Bielski Brothers” (HarperCollins, 2002); Nechama Tec, “Defiance: The Bielski Partisans” (Oxford Univ. Pr., 1993); Harold Werner, “Fighting Back: A Memoir of Jewish Resistance in World War II” (Columbia Univ. Pr., 1992).

Professor Steinweis writes: “If, as Mr. Carson maintains, the Nazi regime made it a priority to disarm the German population, why did it wait more than five years to issue” its own gun control law in 1938? He continues that “Mr. Carson also fails to mention that the democratic Weimar Republic, which had preceded the Nazi regime, had passed its own gun control law….” The answer to Professor Steinweis’s question is that the Weimar law for comprehensive gun-owner licensing and gun registration worked very well for the Nazis. Almost as soon as they obtained power, they began using the gun registration lists to disarm all political opponents, such as Social Democrats. Opponents of Weimer gun registration had worried about registration lists falling into the hands of extremists; that happened in 1933, when the government itself fell to extremists.

Professor Steinweis accurately states that the Nazis introduced their own gun control law immediately after Kristallnacht in November 1938. He describes this law as less “restrictive” than the prior Weimar law. Although Professor Steinweis does not cite a source for his claim, he may be relying on an article by Prof. Bernard Harcourt, “On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws,” 73 Fordham L. Rev. 653 (2004). As Harcourt demonstrates, the 1938 law was in some respects textually less restrictive for non-Jewish Germans than was its Weimar predecessor. But subsequent research has demonstrated that as enforced, the 1938 Nazi law was even more oppressive than the Weimar law, denying arms to anyone not verified as politically correct. See Stephen Halbrook, “Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the State'” (Oakland: Independent Inst., 2013).

Aggressive use of the Wiemar and the 1938 statutes was not the only form of Nazi gun control. The first years of the Nazi regime were dedicated to Gleichschaltung (“forcing into line”) — to suppress any aspect of civil society which might offer resistance. That is why the Nazis required that every gun club and every hunting club submit to the supervision of a Nazi political officer. Some clubs disbanded rather than comply.

Pointing out that Jews constituted less than one percent of the German population, Professor Steinweis says that “It is preposterous to argue that the possession of firearms would have enabled them to mount resistance against a systematic program of persecution implemented by a modern bureaucracy, enforced by a well-armed police state, and either supported or tolerated by the majority of Germans…Inside Germany, only the army possessed the physical force necessary for defying or overthrowing the Nazis…” But that is the point! Using gun licensing and gun registration laws enacted by a democratic government, the Nazis by 1938 had disarmed everyone who was not a certified supporter of the regime. Once everyone except the pro-Nazis was disarmed, only the German Officer Corps had the ability to overthrow Hitler, and they did not choose to act. The point of the Second Amendment, as Dr. Carson rightly said, is that obstructing tyranny should not hang on the fragile thread of military good will.

Even if fully armed, the tiny Jewish minority could not by itself have toppled the Nazis. Yet, there are many forms of effective armed resistance short of immediately removing a tyrant. When Europe’s Jews were able to obtain firearms, they caused the Nazis much trouble. In the Warsaw Ghetto, a revolt which began when the Jews acquired ten handguns tied down over 2,000 Nazi troops for months — troops which were therefore not available to help the Nazis defend against the Soviet offensive in eastern Ukraine. Whenever the Nazis had to fight Jews, or had to add extra guards for armories, depots, and trains — because of the risk of armed Jews — the consequence was fewer Nazi troops on the front lines in Russia, Africa, Italy, or France. The more fighters behind the lines, in enemy territory, the fewer resources for the enemy on the front lines. If the number of armed Jews had been ten times greater, so would the problems for the Nazis. That would not have shut down the Holocaust, but it would have contributed to ending the criminal Hitlerite regime and its Holocaust all the sooner.

Professor Steinweis’s assertion that fighting Jews were made no difference is contrary to the historical record. His speculation that Jewish disarmament was irrelevant to Holocaust is belied by the intensity of Nazi efforts to disarm their intended victims. Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and other 20th century mass murderers did not start their genocides until after they had disarmed whom they planned to exterminate. Murdering an armed person is harder than murdering the defenseless. The immediate victims may end up dead regardless, but they can still kill perpetrators, so that fewer perpetrators are available to murder the next victims. More guns, less genocide.

[This essay was partly based on my forthcoming book, The Morality of Self-Defense and Military Action: The Judeo-Christian Tradition (Praeger, forthcoming 2016).]