Kristallnacht began on 12th April 1928. The event itself took place on November 9th and 10th 1938. No, this is not a typo. When I interviewed Moshe Feiglin, leader of Zehut, he asked me when WWII started. I told him the night hitler was born. He agreed with this viewpoint. So I would maintain that Kristallnacht started on the 12th of April 1928. That was when the Reich Law on Firearms and Ammunition was enacted. That law enacted weapons purchase permits, and only authorized persons were allowed to buy and possess firearms. Mandatory registration allowed the authorities the ability to access the weapon and or it’s owner at any time. No doubt to check for “mandatory safe storage”. Manufacture and sale of weapons was also allowed only by permission of the authorities. The carrying of weapons in public also required a permit. In 1930 bladed weapons were added in. All this was to maintain only trustworthy people had weapons. Trustworthy as determined by the authorities.
In April 1933 the nazis enacted laws that prevented Jews from being in civil service, universities and most professions. In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. These determined who was a Jew, who wasn’t, how much Jewish, and deprived Jews of their civil rights. In fact, Jews were no longer considered citizens of Germany. When hitler first came to power and started his anti-Semitic odure the German people wanted none of it. But after time, the media, the entertainment industry, the schools and the constant blaming had their desired effect, the German people began to despise the Jews and see them as other than humans.
It was easy to begin disarming the Jews, the authorities knew who had weapons, what they were and they could go into homes at any time to search for weapons, and their owners. Or anything else they took a notion to search for. By this time since Jews were perceived as less than human or trustworthy and helpful citizens and bureaucrats doing their job were happy to join in if needed.
In March 18th, 1938 came the German Weapons Act, which superseded the 1928 laws. These in general appear more lenient. Only handguns would be regulated now, not rifles, shotguns or ammunition, and it deregulated their purchase and transfer. The legal age at which you could acquire a gun was lowered from 20 to 18 years of age, and the permits were now good for 3 years instead of 1 year. Before the more lenient laws of 38 only officials of the government and states, and employees of the German Railways were excused from the mass of hoop jumping. The laxer laws of 1938 added to the privileged group, holders of annual hunting permits, government workers, and nazis were now deemed reliable and trustworthy enough not to need gun ownership restrictions. This was determined by the authorities, the nazis. Manufacture of arms and ammunition though still required a permit. And those permits would no longer be issued to Jews. Any company even partly owned by Jews could no longer manufacture arms, or ammunition or sell them. As determined by the ……authorities.
Under all regulations though, manufactures and sellers were required to maintain lists of who bought guns, and the serial number of the gun. These records were turn into the ATF police every year for inspection.
On October 27th of 1938 Hitler ordered 17,000 Jews of Polish origin to be shipped back to Poland. They were allowed one night to leave Germany with one suitcase. They were put on a train and taken to the Polish border at Zbaszyn. There they were dropped off. Poland would eventually allow 4,000 in, but the rest were trapped at Zbaszyn with no food, virtually no money, no place to stay and no clue what was going to happen.
One of the families affected was the Grynszpan family. Zindel had moved from Poland to Hanover and established a store in 1911. When they were stranded at Zbaszyn one of the daughters sent a postcard to her brother, Herschel, who was living with his uncle in Paris. Herschel was livid when he received the postcard on November 3rd . He bought a gun and some bullets on November 6th and headed to the German Embassy intending to kill the Ambassador. The German Embassy was fresh out of Ambassador that day, and he ended up settling for the third secretary in the German Embassy, Ernst von Rath. The secretary died 2 days later on November 9th. This provided joseph gerbils (yes, I do know it’s goebbels, but this seems more fitting for the rat-faced nazi) the excuse he needed to label the act a conspiratorial attack by “International Jewry” against the Reich and, against the Fuehrer. When gerbils and nazi party officials found out about the death, gerbils gave a speech that urged all good Germans to take to the streets and make the Jews pay for von Rath’s death. Reinhard Heydrich said business could be destroyed but not looted. CNN and MSNBC The German newspapers claimed the Jews were murderers, and blamed the Jewish people as a whole for the killing of von Rath. And so the all the propaganda, the disarming of the Jews, the dehumanization erupted in a conflagration of hatred.
On the nights of November 9th and 10th the mobs throughout Germany and the territories of Austria and Sudetenland attacked Jews in the street, in their homes and at their places of work and worship. At least 96 Jews were killed and hundreds more injured, more than 2,000 synagogues were burned, almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, cemeteries and schools were vandalized, and 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The mobs knew that it would be easy, who could fight back? And just to make sure that peace remained in Germany, the next day on November 11th new laws were passed that forbade any Jew from owning any weapon.
I read a column in Salon on line that maintains that gun control is good and wonderful, and just because hitler misused it doesn’t mean it can’t be just peachy. That the very idea of Jews fighting back is absurd. Really? באמת
I only have two words for them, the idiots. WARSAW. GHETTO.
A fearful price was paid the 9th and 10thof November 1938, but it started long before that. People live and learn.
