Skip to content

1938 Germany: Registration Before Confiscation

Summary. The gun records that disarmed Germany's Jews in 1938 were not created by the Nazis. A democratic government, the Weimar Republic, built them between 1928 and 1931 to keep order in a violent time. When Hitler came to power in 1933, those files came with the job. Five years later, the police used them to find and disarm Jewish gun owners in the weeks around Kristallnacht. This article follows that road with dates and documents. Our claim is narrow: registration records made it easier to disarm a targeted group.

1. A republic in chaos (1919)

Germany lost the First World War, and the new Weimar Republic faced street battles between government forces, the paramilitary Freikorps and Communist uprisings.1 Its 1919 Regulations on Weapons Ownership banned firearms possession outright and ordered guns turned in.4 Contemporaries saw the order as harsh and mostly unenforceable.4

2. Licensing replaces the ban (1928)

In 1928 the Republic passed the Law on Firearms and Ammunition. It repealed the 1919 ban and set up a police licensing system for buying and carrying firearms, along with licensing for making, selling and repairing them.42

  • Permits were "only to be granted to persons of undoubted reliability," and carry permits required "a demonstration of need."4
  • The law denied permits to "Gypsies" and "persons who are itinerant like Gypsies."4 Takeaway: a German gun law singled out a disfavored minority by name a full five years before Hitler took power.

3. "Must be registered with the police" (1931)

In late 1931, with Nazis and Communists fighting in the streets, an emergency decree amended the 1928 law. It let each German state order that "the possession of firearms and ammunition ... as well as of slashing and thrusting weapons ... must be registered with the police authorities."2 The same decree let police take those weapons "into police custody" if "public security and order" required it, and required owners to "deliver them to the police authority on demand."2

Officials at the time saw the risk. Government commentary noted the danger that, "in chaotic times, the lists of firearms owners would fall into the wrong hands," and the Interior Ministry told the states to keep the lists away from "radical elements."3 Within weeks of the decree, the "Boxheim documents" exposed a Nazi plan to seize power in which anyone who failed to surrender a firearm within 24 hours could be shot.3

The decree had a second problem. A local official in Königsberg was quoted as saying that "only the decent and peaceable members of the public have registered arms."2 Criminals and the street militias did not.

4. The "wrong hands" arrive (1933)

The Nazis came to power in January 1933. The registration lists and license files now belonged to the most radical party in Germany. According to historian Stephen Halbrook's archival work, the new regime used them to identify, disarm and arrest political opponents, mainly Social Democrats and Communists.2

5. The Nazi Weapons Law (March 18, 1938)

On March 18, 1938, the regime replaced the 1928 statute with its own Weapons Law (Waffengesetz). It kept the same basic structure: licenses for handguns and for the gun trade.4 Two changes matter here:

  • It barred Jews from holding licenses to manufacture or deal in firearms and ammunition.4
  • For ordinary Germans, it loosened some rules. Rifles, shotguns and ammunition were partly deregulated, and more people were exempt from permit requirements.4

That second point is fair to state plainly. For the "reliable" majority, the Nazi law was in some ways less strict than Weimar's. The Nazi pattern was not to disarm everyone. It was to arm its friends and disarm its targets.

6. Disarming the Jews (October–November 1938)

  • October–early November 1938: Berlin police carried out what the Police President called "a general disarming of Berlin's Jews" over "recent weeks."2 Archival police reports cited by Halbrook show the police knew who owned guns from the registration records. In one case, an officer noted that the owner "had registered this weapon on February 13, 1932, at Police Station 105." Halbrook concludes that registration "seems to be the most likely reason why the police knew that they possessed firearms and were able to confiscate them."2
  • Nov 7, 1938: Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew whose family had just been deported from Germany, shoots German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris.6
  • Nov 9–10, 1938, Kristallnacht: The regime unleashes a nationwide pogrom. More than 1,400 synagogues are burned, and police send about 26,000 Jewish men to the Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.6
  • Nov 11, 1938: Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick issues the Regulation Against Jews' Possession of Weapons, under the authority of the March 1938 Weapons Law.25

The regulation reads, in part:

"Jews ... are prohibited from acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as cutting or stabbing weapons. Those now having in their possession weapons and ammunition must at once surrender them to the local police authority."2

"Weapons and ammunition found in a Jew's possession will be forfeited to the Reich without compensation."2

Violators faced prison, and in "especially severe cases," up to five years in a penitentiary.5 The rule covered Germany, annexed Austria and the Sudetenland.5 The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum lists the ban on Jews carrying firearms among the wave of anti-Jewish decrees that followed Kristallnacht.6

What historians dispute

Two arguments get mixed together in public debate, and they should be kept apart.

  1. Did the Nazis "ban guns"? No, not for most Germans. Legal scholar Bernard Harcourt, who is sharply critical of Halbrook, shows that the 1938 law loosened several Weimar rules for the general population while tightening them for Jews.4 We agree with that reading of the statute.
  2. Would more armed Jews have stopped the Holocaust? Many historians doubt that a few thousand privately owned guns, held by a small and isolated minority, could have changed the outcome against a modern police state and army. We do not claim they would have.

What neither side disputes is the sequence: a democratic government built registration lists; a dictatorship inherited them; and those lists helped police find, disarm and arrest people the regime had marked as enemies.

Why it matters today (opinion)

  1. Registries outlive the governments that create them. Weimar's officials meant well and even warned about the "wrong hands." The files lasted longer than their republic.
  2. Lists are neutral until they are not. A record of who owns what is only as safe as the most dangerous government that will someday hold it.
  3. Disarmament is usually selective. The Nazis loosened rules for the favored and confiscated from the targeted. The 1928 law's exclusion of "Gypsies" shows the habit was there before them.
  4. The law-abiding register; criminals don't. Officials noticed that in 1932.

The Founders wrote the right to keep and bear arms into the Bill of Rights so that it would not depend on any one government's good intentions. Any proposal to build a list of American gun owners should be judged by what the worst future government could do with it.

  1. Stephen P. Halbrook, "Nazi Firearms Law and the Disarming of the German Jews," 17 Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law 483 (2000): http://hdl.handle.net/10150/659228. (Halbrook is a pro-gun litigator; we cite him for archival documents he quotes, and cross-check statutory points against Harcourt.) ↩

  2. Stephen P. Halbrook, "Arms in the Hands of Jews Are a Danger to Public Safety: Nazism, Firearm Registration, and the Night of the Broken Glass," 21 St. Thomas Law Review, no. 2, quoting the 1931 decree, Berlin police reports and German press of November 1938 from the Bundesarchiv: https://scholarship.stu.edu/stlr/vol21/iss2/2 ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  3. Stephen P. Halbrook, Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and "Enemies of the State" (Independent Institute, 2013), ch. on the 1931 registration decree and the Boxheim documents. Excerpt: https://www.independent.org/article/2013/12/05/how-the-nazis-used-gun-control/ ↩↩

  4. Bernard E. Harcourt, "On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (A Call to Historians)," 73 Fordham Law Review 653 (2004): https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol73/iss2/11 ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  5. Verordnung gegen den Waffenbesitz der Juden (Regulation Against Jews' Possession of Weapons), Nov 11, 1938. English translation reproduced in Halbrook (2009), above; also at JPFO: https://jpfo.org/filegen-n-z/NaziLawEnglish.htm ↩↩↩

  6. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Kristallnacht," Holocaust Encyclopedia: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht ↩↩↩