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One opinion here, but dealing with the Soviet Union instead:
Quote:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Keep in mind that a handful of Jews, armed with a few dozen firearms, took longer to subdue during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising than all of Poland took to conquer by the Nazis.
I don't have single doubt in my mind that the Holocaust would have taken place even if every Jewish man woman and child had had a weapon.
First, the vast majority of Jews in western Europe had any idea that the mass deportations would result in being murdered in mass until it was too late. The Jews that became victims of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe became vulnerable only after the Polish and Red Armies had been swept off the battlefield. If armored units with tanks and artillery could not stop the Germans it is totally implausible that armed civilians would have faired any better. The only thing that I believe would have been different is that more Jews might have gone down in a valiant fight but futile fight, but at the end of the day, the results would have been the same.
This meme has been floated by NRA types for years and I just don't see it.
Including Austria (post-Anschluss), the German Jewish population by 1938 was roughly 250,000 - there was quite a bit of Jewish emigration since 1933. One wonders what such a minority was going to accomplish against the totalitarian Nazi state governing a population of roughly 65 million Germans proper (excluding annexed territories).
And for comparison purposes, how well did firearms work for everyone caught up in the Holocaust in Germany who wasn't a Jew? After all, the oft-cited German Firearms Act of 1938 specifically forbid Jews from owning/possessing firearms. What the propagandists invariably fail to mention is that the Act liberalized the already-existing gun laws for pretty much everyone else.
*Permitting for firearms purchases, previously applied to all firearms, were lifted for rifles and shotguns.
*The minimum purchase age was lowered to 18.
*Permit duration was extended from one to three years, and exemptions for permits (still generally required for handguns) were extended to government workers and hunting licensees.
In Germany proper, Jews were a minority of those killed in the Holocaust - most Jews killed were Polish, Soviet, or Hungarian. How did the SA, which was armed to the teeth, fare in 1934? How did communists fare? How did gays and lesbians fare? How did political opponents fare? How did Catholic and Protestant opponents of the Nazi regime fare? You know, all those people whose right to own firearms were not restricted but expanded under Nazi rule.
One opinion here, but dealing with the Soviet Union instead:
Keep in mind that a handful of Jews, armed with a few dozen firearms, took longer to subdue during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising than all of Poland took to conquer by the Nazis.
Yes, but only for a reason of Jews being dispersed so much throughout different countries. There was no way those armed groups would have been able to successfully resist the advancing German army, particularly with women and children in tow.
Now that Soviet example is not a really good one for the subject of Holocaust I think ( I assume it's Solzhenitsyn's writing.) Because when he is speaking about "we" ( as in "us being armed,") - there was no clearly identifiable marker in Stalin's times who was going to be arrested and for what exactly. But in case of Jews the marker was clearly identified, as in "ethnicity."
It ain't just the arrow, it's more about the Indian who shoots it. Consider the Afghan tribesmen - armed with relatively primitive firearms, they are formidable. I'm not sure just passing out rifles or pistols to the German Jews in the late 30's would have helped that much. Now if they had a long term history of being armed, being hunters, they would have been formidable like the Afghans are.
It ain't just the arrow, it's more about the Indian who shoots it. Consider the Afghan tribesmen - armed with relatively primitive firearms, they are formidable.
Well there were armed Jewish resistance units that operated in both France and Eastern Europe. And there there were of course the famous revolts in the death camps themselves, namely Auschwitz and Sobibor but none of these incredibly brave and valiant efforts had little effect on the final outcome.
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