Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, but it was only in March 1938 that the Third Reich promulgated its Waffengesetz, or weapons law, which required police permission for ownership of a handgun. Other firearms were left unregulated. If, as Mr. Carson maintains, the Nazi regime made it a priority to disarm the German population, then why did it wait more than five years to issue such a law, and why did it limit licensure to handguns?
.. The Jews of Germany constituted less than 1 percent of the country’s population. 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 the German population. Mr. Carson’s suggestion that ordinary Germans, had they had guns, would have risked their lives in armed resistance against the regime simply does not comport with the regrettable historical reality of a regime that was quite popular at home.
.. Mr. Carson’s remarks not only trivialize the predicament in which Jews found themselves in Germany and elsewhere in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.
.. The origins of the Nazi dictatorship are to be found in the authoritarian legacy of the German Empire, the inability to cope with the defeat in World War I and the failure to achieve political compromise during the Weimar Republic.
.. If the United States is going to arrive at a workable compromise solution to its gun problem, it will not be accomplished through the use of historical analogies that are false, silly and insulting. Similarly, coming to terms with a civilizational breach of the magnitude of the Holocaust requires a serious encounter with history, rather than political sloganeering that exploits history as a prop for mobilizing one’s base.
What was the general moral belief among German troops during World War II?
I served in the U. S. Army for 27 years, with my service starting with the war in Vietnam and ending with Operation Desert Storm. Since my primary area was Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, I got to speak with or interrogate soldiers and intelligence operatives (spies, if you will) from many other countries – the Soviet Union, the various countries which were part of the Warsaw Pact (Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, etc.), Cuba, North Korea, Iraq as well as American allies like England, France, Italy, etc.
The one thing common to just about all was the belief that they were patriots serving their country.
I have no reason to doubt that the average German solider in World War Two felt the same way.
Ethics of a Nazi judge
But, as he explained after the war, that machinery was set in motion by Hitler, whose will was law in the Führer-State: mass murder had become ‘technically legal’. All he could do, he said, was to forge ahead with prosecuting the perpetrators for ‘illegal’ killings and lesser crimes, in the hope of somehow throwing sand in the works. He even sought an arrest warrant for Adolf Eichmann – but only for embezzling a pouch of diamonds.
.. Whoever takes so much as a mark of it, is a dead man. A number of SS men – there are not very many of them – have fallen short, and they will die, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette or anything else.
.. Morgen had reached the limits of his judicial powers. So he did the only thing he could think of, by bringing some of the perpetrators to trial on other charges. He found that Maximilian Grabner, chief of the Gestapo at Auschwitz, routinely killed prisoners in the camp jail when it became too crowded. Of course, Morgen realised that these murders paled in comparison with the horrendous crime he had uncovered, but that crime had been ordered by Hilter, and so prosecuting ‘illegal’ killings such as Grabner’s was all he could do to interfere.
.. Thus, when Morgen reported the mass extermination to superiors, his ‘most emphatic and most crucial advice’, he says, ‘was that the SS members who participated in the gassing were thereby so corrupted that they would in future prove no longer serviceable as normal soldiers or even as citizens, and furthermore that the leadership of the state was destroying its own moral foundations with these monstrous crimes’.
If France wanted to stop the Nazi blitzkrieg, what could they have possibly done?
The “Racial Hatred” aspect of Anglo-American French baiting has some root in the experiences of 1917 and 1918 when the British and American forces found the French unwilling or unable to press an attack, though still dogged in defense.