HS 235 - Know Your Rights With Stephen Halbrook

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It's my pleasure to welcome Stephen Holbrook to the show. He is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and author of Gun Control in the Third Reich, Disarming the Jews and Enemies of the State. Stephen, welcome. How are you?

I'm good, Jason. Thank you for having me on your show.

Well, the pleasure is all mine. And give our listeners a sense of geography. Tell us where you're located.

Virginia.

Okay. And are you an attorney?

Yes, I am.

Fantastic. So tell us how you came to write the Book and let's dive into your thoughts on the subject.

Well, the book Gun Control and the Third Reich had its inception really decades ago. This is an aspect of Nazi history that's never been documented. It's been talked about a lot. Either the Nazis did or did not disarm political enemies. What role did gun control play in the rise of the Third Reich? When Hitler came to power in 1933 and I found that there was just nothing on the subject in any book. Secondary sources, historians just don't cover that. There's thousands of books on the origin, development and whatnot of the Nazi dictatorship. But the way that the disarming of elected populations took place was never documented by any historian. And so it was my aim to collect material on that. There was nothing in English that I could find and there was nothing even in German secondary sources to speak of. So what I did was to visit archives in Germany. And then I actually retained the services of an expert archivist in Germany who knows all the archives and knows this subject very well. The Third Reich subject that is not the disarming issue. And for several years we collected documents and I've got file cabinets full of documents on the subject. They're in German, they originate from the 20s and 30s basically. And the result is the book.

Fantastic. So, you know, there is a somewhat. Well, it's a semi famous quote that floats around in pro gun circles, pro second Amendment circles, of which I am in those circles. And it is a quote attributed to Hitler saying something along the line. I believe that was the Night of Broken Glass, as it's referred to. Supposedly he said something along the line of this day will go down in history as the day when we made our streets safer, et cetera, et cetera. And you know, what he really was doing is preparing for massive oppression and evil. Do you know about that quote? Are you aware of that?

Yeah, I've seen that on the Internet and I think it's an invented Internet quote. I've never seen any documentation for it and it never appeared in any of the sources that I found. The case is a lot stronger than that though, in terms of what actually happened. I mean, the story starts in the Weimar Republic in the twenties. There was a lot of political violence. The commies and the Nazis were fighting each other in the streets, trying to seize power, things like that. And so they passed gun licensing and registration. They warned that the records should not fall into the hands of radical elements. And lo and behold, in 1933, radical elements took power in Germany. That would be Hitler and the Nazi party and they immediately used those records to find out who among their political enemies had guns and to cancel their gun permits. And that would be Social Democrats and various conservative parties. I mean, all these parties were abolished later in 1933. National Socialism became one party. So it's very clear how the policies were used to disarm political enemies. And then in 1938, at the time of the Night of the Broken Glass, once again, Jewish gun owners were identified as such and disarmed before the violence started against them in the weeks before. And then of course, Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass took place and the Jews were disarmed. The head of the ss, Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's right hand man, decreed that there would be a 20 year sentence in the concentration camp for any Jew who had any kind of weapon. This is the reality. So I don't know why people make up stuff on the Internet the way they do, but the case is much stronger than that single quote.

I mean, that single quote though, certainly sounds like something Hitler would have said or believed, I'll tell you that. But the case is even stronger. I mean, that's interesting. That quote is, you know, like evidence.

Enough whether, you know, yeah, the quote depicts his thoughts. Certainly that's true. It's not quite accurate. But I mean, it was his intent to disarm his political enemies, to incarcerate many of them, to eradicate them even. And that was the policy. And that part's well documented, that's recognized. But what, what's not documented before this book is where did it start? And it started with some bad laws in the Weimar Republic that were made use of by the Nazi dictatorship.

What was in, you know, what else was in Hitler's grand plan here to, you know, to disarm people? I mean, it just seems so obvious. Like, I can't believe people don't learn from history. You know, it is really, really mind boggling. I mean, just look at what happened just a couple of years ago in Iran, you know, when, when Iranian forces were shooting into crowds of unarmed people. And of course, you know, Twitter fortunately got a lot of this news out. That was a huge benefit. Not that it changed the outcome at all because, you know, Obama didn't do anything, certainly. But if the, if the citizens, if the Iranian people had guns, you know, that country would be free and probably unoppressed by now, wouldn't it?

Well, yeah, this comes up in any repressive society. It's always the case that political elites disarm people they don't trust. And James Madison talked about that in the Federalist Papers. He said, in Europe they're afraid to trust the people with arms, even though they have huge monarchies with huge armies. And here in America we do trust the people with arms. And that was the whole basis of having the Second Amendment. But it's just by definition that an authoritarian regime is going to disarm the population, or at least those that it distrusts. It will arm those that it trusts, all the while keeping heavy regulation and restriction over them to make sure they stay in line. I mean, the Hitler dictatorship armed a lot of people in the Wehrmacht, the armed forces, they didn't take their guns at home though in Switzerland they have a militia army, where that's even the case today. But it was never the case that the German people were trusted with arms. Even at the end of the regime when they had the so called People's army, the old men and the boys, they didn't have any guns at home either. They were armed on the spot and told to go commit suicide fighting the Russians.

Yeah, yeah. That's just incredible. So, you know, could anything have been done back then to change the outcome? I mean, what, what did the Jews think? Did they just think. They just sort of went along with it? They thought, you know, were there any sort of second Amendment type thoughts going through the population at that time?

Well, first off, you turn the clock back to the Weimar Republic. They had the same gun debates, gun control debates as you hear today. Proponents of restrictions wanted to monopolize the means of violence into the hands of the police and the military. Law abiding people opposed that. Persons who were gun owners, sportsmen, hunters, things like that, and they lost the debate. There never was a constitutional tradition like the second Amendment in Germany. And so when the Nazis came to power, people didn't really think they were going to last very long because none of the coalition governments that had existed up to that time lasted very long. But they had tremendous staying power because they immediately smashed their enemies and disarmed them. You can go down the list of license holders and find that, oh, this person's a social democrat, we're going to cancel his gun license. I've got documentation of that in the book. And then gradually, as the power increases in every aspect of life, they had what they called forcing into line every aspect of society. And that would mean sports organizations, labor unions, religions, everything. And to brainwash the young people, get them in the Hitler Youth and all that, so that you had a population that was cowed into obedience. I mean, you still had a lot of dissent from that. It's not like they were all marching in the same direction. You know, the propaganda films show all those cheering people, but life wasn't like that in reality. Could it have made a difference if people had been armed more or had Germany recognized a constitutional right to arms before all of this happened? Maybe so. The Nazis certainly thought so because they took great pains to disarm people, any kind of person, who they did not trust. When the time came in 1938, the Jews of Germany were ordered to turn in their guns. And it was known who had them because of the registration records. And there were some who didn't comply, and they were rounded up. I mean, they were taken in by the Gestapo. Even those who turned in their guns were interrogated by the Gestapo. So would it have made a difference? Nobody knows what would have happened. But I can tell you that a lot of people sure wish they had had a chance to defend themselves. It certainly could have made differences in individual cases. And whether there would have ever been an armed partisan movement, nobody knows.

Yeah, well, it certainly would have saved some lives. I, I don't think anybody can argue that there would have been a few resisters that, that would have been saved, you know, as, as the, the SS was rounding people up and, you know, committing their evil. So where, where does it stand now in Germany is just all of Europe sort of, you know, anti gun. I mean, I kind of amazes me that, you know, after they've got the history right there, it's relatively recent.

Right.

You know, it seems like that place would have the strongest, you know, gun freedom laws, you know, the strongest second amendment type of mentality would be in Europe.

Right. And here's the irony of this. In 2013, January 1st, Germany proudly announced that it had complete computerized centralized records on all legal gun owners. That was in 2013, the 70th, if I'm doing my math right. Anniversary of the Third Reich coming into power in 1933. They didn't learn any lesson whatever. And of course, these are just the legal gun owners. What good does that information do other than if a regime wants to confiscate those guns? I mean, the illegal people, criminals, they didn't register any guns. And this is the requirement of the European Union. So all the other European Union countries are falling into line. So no, the lessons were not learned.

Wow. It's amazing that those lessons were not learned. So where do we stand now, in your opinion, in the United States and Other countries around the world.

Well, just in terms of the European context, for example, there's a lot of support for the right to keep and bear arms. I would say Switzerland and Finland are the two foremost countries in that regard. They have very high rates of gun ownership, a long tradition of gun ownership. But there's significant aspects of German and French society, for example, where gun owning is a long tradition, and there's a number of hunters, there's target shooters, and there's people who realize that with all these registrations and restrictions that the guns can be confiscated. I mean, Spain is another country like that. In the United States, we have mixed results. We have probably, oh, I don't know, a handful of states, maybe eight, that have repressive gun laws. They have certain kinds of registration. They ban guns that they don't like. They pejoratively call them assault weapons. We're talking about New York and Connecticut and California and New Jersey, a few states like that. But that's not the case in most states. I would say maybe 42 states are relatively free in terms of gun ownership. Here in the US The Second Amendment is recognized finally by the supreme court as of 2008, in a very comprehensive opinion. It was a slim margin. It was five to four.

Is that the Washington, D.C. case?

Yeah, the D.C. handgun ban. D.C. versus seller. And we know that that was.

That was refreshing, though. I'm glad. I'm. I'm glad they recognized that even in D.C. that, you know, D.C. was being unconstitutional.

Right. And then two years later, Chicago, their gun ban was thrown out. In the McDonald case, which held that the Second Amendment applies to the states, not just the federal government, that was a big victory, but again, it was five to four. So it's a slim margin in the Supreme Court. There's a lot of. There is support for restrictive measures in the Congress, but they don't have the support of any majority. And this election year, I mean, the Democrats are running from the issue. They don't want to have anything to do with that issue, most of them. And so it's not a popular idea in Congress right now.

Yeah, it's just amazing. I mean, you know, when we look around the U.S. we see these. These police forces all over the country with military equipment. I mean, tanks, you know, grenade launchers. It's. What the heck are they preparing for? It's crazy.

Well, we have a militarization of law enforcement in this country. It's fueled in part by forfeiture law, where they're able to basically seize assets of people who can't challenge it or would not challenge it because they might not win. It's expensive to litigate cases like that. But what do they use the money for? I'm sure some of it goes to good purposes, but a lot of it goes to buying this kind of equipment, military surplus equipment, for example. So you end up having police officers looking like they're no different than the soldiers fighting in Afghanistan or someplace like that. So we have an unfortunate rise in SWAT type tactics used to arrest people for just fairly innocuous crimes like gambling or things like that. So it's a growing trend and I think there's more recognition for this being a problem today because it's an unfortunate incidents and publicity about forfeiture law.

It's really, really something. I mean, it seems like even if the US population keeps their guns, even has more guns than they have now. And by the way, I love that quote from years ago about the, the Japanese, I guess it's Emperor. And it was, I think it was Hirohito that said, you know, someone asked, are you going to invade America? And he basically responded with, are you kidding? There's a gun behind every blade of grass in America.

Well, there's actually a gun in about half the households and that's a pretty good record. And I think that that's a dissuasive factor in dissuading repressive government. I mean, we have, despite all the problems, we have the jury box, the ballot box and the cartridge box. And even though the government forces are very, very powerful, they're populated by our friends and neighbors, soldiers and police officers are. Many of them are gun owners and supporters of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. And so it'd be very difficult, I think, to go the ultimate route like you do see in other countries where you have a takeover of the government and a total destruction of a constitution by military and police forces.

The thing is though, even with all of that, with the police departments becoming so militarized, a bunch of handguns won't stand a chance against the kind of equipment the police are using nowadays. I mean, they're basically the military. It's not like it used to be where, where it could be, you know, somewhat of a level playing field with, with local government and police forces if they ever did get incredibly oppressive and if the population ever had to defend itself against its government.

Well, I mean, hypothetically though, I mean, okay, so they have M4s and M16s that are full auto, but full auto is not accurate. I mean, American citizens have Semi auto rifles and they're very accurate and you've got to be, you know, if you want to hit a target, you've got to be a fool to put it on full auto. So there's a lot of advantages to ordinary guns that civilians have in this country very widely.

Yeah, interesting. Okay, so what would you say are some action steps that people can take, you know, in the, in the US for sure. But you know, any other advice around the world too, in order to keep or promote more gun freedom or to just to maintain what they have?

Well, I think the founders of our country had it right. They basically first of all intended that we would know our rights and be ready to protect them. That's a very general statement to make. But knowing your rights means, for example, you can read what the Bill of Rights States and Americans have always understood the second amendment to mean exactly what it said. But we went through a long phase where courts were saying that, oh, it doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't protect the right of the people to do anything. It's the power of states to maintain militias. Well, the population saw right through that. And I think you do have a pendulum where people vote different ways. But I think that sometimes it comes down to it where they finally see the light. So at any rate, the first step is understanding that you have certain rights, having those rights recognized and then following up by any means to enforce those rights. And that has to do with exercising your right to speak and to assemble the press and the jury system. I mean, these are all ways that we have. And ultimately we have the second amendment, right?

Yeah, most definitely. How about around the world?

Well, it's the same story everywhere, isn't it? I mean, you've got a lot of repressive dictatorships worldwide, particularly in the third world countries. Europe is more relatively free, but you have way too many restrictions and the issue becomes do they repeat the mistakes of the past or do they learn from them? I mean, there's so much going on internationally that it's difficult to bring it all within one formula. But I mean, I know in the Ukraine just a year ago I published an article in the Second Amendment in the Ukrainian Law Review and there's a lot of interest there and in Russia itself for gun ownership by law abiding people. So I mean, this is a two sided story and there's not one side that prevails.

Yeah, it definitely is. Steve, give out your website and tell people where they can find out more.

Stephenhallbrook.com S T E P H E N H A L B r o k.com and you can get my book Gun Control in the Third, right, just by googling the book name and putting my name in there. You can get it from Amazon or virtually anywhere. That's, that's the nice thing about getting books today. They're so easy to get. You never have to leave your home. And if you look at my website, you'll see information on other books that I've published on the Second Amendment and otherwise.

You know, last question for you. I remember years ago reading Dennis Prager's book. And Dennis is, he's a great author and radio talk show host in the Los Angeles market. And in his book Think a Second Time, he talked about how Judaism tends to be liberal and liberals don't like guns. And it's just kind of ironic to me, you know, that just doesn't make sense, you know, it's a non sequitur. You'd think that a population that has been so oppressed throughout history would be the first to be all for the Second Amendment, you know, and your book certainly addresses this with what happened in Germany under Hitler. Do you have any thoughts about that or reason why that, why that is so? Or maybe, maybe you disagree. I kind of doubt you do, but.

Well, first of all, I'd like to just debunk a myth. The German Jews were, they were very assimilated in the German society. They were patriotic. Many of them had served in the Great War honorably. There were a number of officers and they were gun owners. As my book documents that there's no data on that, of course, there's no data on any type of group that how much they had guns at that time. We can only speculate even today in terms of the United States. But they were very much part of German society and they hunted and they owned guns for various purposes and they were widely disarmed because the authorities knew they had these guns. They were registered. And so if you look at Israeli society, you'll see a society where there's very significant training of all sectors of the population, men and women in use of firearms. There are different kinds of regulations in terms of private keeping of arms, but, but you'll see guns galore throughout that society and they use them to protect themselves, to protect schools from terrorist attacks, you know, mass transit.

Oh, in Israel for sure. But I'm talking about in the U.S. you know, it's like you've got the Hollywood crowd, the anti gun crowd, and every time, every time there's a shooting. You know, they're all decrying how we need more gun control. Yet the movies they publish are full of gun violence. In fact, some of them even give the perpetrators of these heinous acts the ideas for their crimes.

But I can say this. The Jewish people in the United States are no more a monolith on this issue than are Protestants or Catholics or any other group of people. And there's a group, Jews for Preservation of Gun Ownership. And they, they filed briefs in the Supreme Court cases in favor of Second Amendment rights. And you had other Jewish and Christian groups that filed briefs for the District of Columbia basically advocating pacifism. So there's a lot of diversity in this society and it's not the same in African American community, in any community, of course, very significant support for gun ownership.

Good stuff. Well, Stephen Holbrook, thank you so much for joining us today. Again, the title is Gun Control in the Third Reich, Disarming the Jews and enemies of the state. Go out and get it, take a look at it and learn more about this very, very important subject. Stephen, thank you.

Thank you. Jason, thank you very much. Take care.

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