Could the Holocaust have occurred if Jews had been Armed and resisted? (WWII, Great Britain)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The way I see it: when Jews were first rounded up, I don't think anyone really knew how this nightmare would end for them. Very few people could imagine the scale of the horror to come and well, since there was war, no internet or whatnot(read: the flow of information was very limited), even if people knew or suspected, getting the word out was very difficult.
If there was a rifle in every Jewish home, what I predict would happen is most would be disarmed when they were arrested, those who would decide to flee, hide or fight along with the local resistance if possible, thy wouldn't make a crucial difference.
Making a difference would require stockpiles of weapons, military training for the masses (both regular army training and maybe guerrilla tactics), organization, and last but not least - knowledge of the looming threat. Enough credible information to rally people behind the idea to oppose it. And to be honest I don't see a chance of that in such a decentralized ( and scattered among many countries) civilian population.
Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had nothing to lose and they were very aware of it. But when the whole nightmare started, very few were as determined.
Yac.
Everyone looks at the Holocaust with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight but in reality the Jews didn't figure out what was going on until it was too late. If thy had of known in the very begining they would have fought whether they had guns or not.
But no, you won't have a holocaust if the citizenry is armed. Take America's example...
No, the public stands almost no chance of winning a direct war against the military industrial complex... but if they tried, it would open a can of worms so big that it would threaten their existence too. Basically it's "mutually assured destruction"... the same dynamic that has saved us from nuclear war.
Back to the Nazis... if they had been in the same conundrum as the military industrial complex, the Nazis never would have been able do move ahead with a 10th of their plans.
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing." -Adolph Hitler (HITLER'S SECRET CONVERSATIONS 403 (Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens) trans., 1961).
Those who were Jews did not resist so much because they knew they were
going to the labor camps, and once the war ended they would be released.
It didn't work out that way because the Germans were no longer able to care
for the workers due to the Allied bombing campaigns.
Everyone looks at the Holocaust with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight but in reality the Jews didn't figure out what was going on until it was too late. If thy had of known in the very begining they would have fought whether they had guns or not.
But no, you won't have a holocaust if the citizenry is armed. Take America's example...
No, the public stands almost no chance of winning a direct war against the military industrial complex... but if they tried, it would open a can of worms so big that it would threaten their existence too. Basically it's "mutually assured destruction"... the same dynamic that has saved us from nuclear war.
Back to the Nazis... if they had been in the same conundrum as the military industrial complex, the Nazis never would have been able do move ahead with a 10th of their plans.
This is not merely theory - we know what happened to armed groups in Germany.
As I pointed out earlier in this thread, in 1934 the Nazis took down, rather handily, the SA - a paramilitary organization with over three million members that was heavily armed. In Germany proper, Jews were a minority of those killed in the Holocaust. The communists, other leftists, various other political opponents of the Nazis, Protestant and Catholic opponents of the regime, unionists - these effectively serve as control groups because they faced no special restrictions on their rights to bear arms. How did they fare against the Nazis?
Like I said before, there's your answer.
Nazi Germany conquered France, defeating both the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force - but if a quarter million German Jews had possessed small arms, they'd have stopped the Holocaust cold?
Nazi Germany killed millions of Red Army troops, destroyed tens of thousands of Soviet tanks and planes and artillery pieces and trucks - but if the German Jews just had had pistols and rifles, the Holocaust would not have happened?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Retroit
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing." -Adolph Hitler (HITLER'S SECRET CONVERSATIONS 403 (Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens) trans., 1961).
Of course, Hitler was speaking of the people he conquered and not Germans themselves. You wouldn't know that because you've never read Table Talk, published in 1951, the book from which the quote was ultimately plucked. Specifically, Hitler was holding one of his regular monologues as he expounded on how to deal with the conquered territories in eastern Europe.
You know, this is what militaries do when they occupy territory, right? It's what NATO and the U.S. did in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003 - they did everything they could to disarm the militias. I'll wait while you explain how this was very Nazi-like. Well? I'll bet I'll be waiting a long time for that
To further underscore the fact that this quote is not about Germany proper, I'll repeat what I wrote earlier - the Nazis liberalized gun laws for everyone but the Jews. In 1938, they completely deregulated sales and possession of long guns (which previously need a permit for acquiring, though they were still fairly accessible even then). And, no, there never was a systematic seizure of firearms. Like pre-2003 Iraq, which was awash in guns, Hitler - like Saddam Hussein - had no fear that a few locals with rifles could be anything but a minor inconvenience to the power of the state.
And he was right. Because despite all the private firearms that existed in Germany, they were never more than a minor annoyance to Nazi plans. That's not some vague theory or dogma, that's what actually happened.
Do people not realize that? Dogma, repeated over and over, isn't relevant. Out-of-context quote-mining tells us nothing. But what actually happened tells us volumes. And when what happened doesn't jibe with your dogma or some pithy quote you got in some email that had been forwarded 37 times before it got to you, you have two choices:
*Reassess, in light of the evidence
or
*Double down, disregard the evidence, and insist that the dogma is right
The way I see it: when Jews were first rounded up, I don't think anyone really knew how this nightmare would end for them. Very few people could imagine the scale of the horror to come and well, since there was war, no internet or whatnot(read: the flow of information was very limited), even if people knew or suspected, getting the word out was very difficult.
If there was a rifle in every Jewish home, what I predict would happen is most would be disarmed when they were arrested, those who would decide to flee, hide or fight along with the local resistance if possible, thy wouldn't make a crucial difference.
Making a difference would require stockpiles of weapons, military training for the masses (both regular army training and maybe guerrilla tactics), organization, and last but not least - knowledge of the looming threat. Enough credible information to rally people behind the idea to oppose it. And to be honest I don't see a chance of that in such a decentralized ( and scattered among many countries) civilian population.
Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had nothing to lose and they were very aware of it. But when the whole nightmare started, very few were as determined.
Yac.
Good points. Re: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this seems to be a new meme floating around the internet that the pro-gun folks are using as an example of armed resistance. However, it completely belies the point. They didn't resist initially because, as you pointed out, they didn't think that the unspeakable would happen, this was just another pogrom to be lived through. Once reality set in it took years of planning for the uprising to be carried out like it was. Even then it was ~1,000 fighters using a well planned network of tunnels and safe houses among the tens of thousands of people in the ghetto. The Germans committed on a daily basis roughly 2,000 troops to put it down. The result was over 13,000 people killed and the ghetto being emptied anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chango
Everyone looks at the Holocaust with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight but in reality the Jews didn't figure out what was going on until it was too late. If thy had of known in the very begining they would have fought whether they had guns or not.
But no, you won't have a holocaust if the citizenry is armed. Take America's example...
No, the public stands almost no chance of winning a direct war against the military industrial complex... but if they tried, it would open a can of worms so big that it would threaten their existence too. Basically it's "mutually assured destruction"... the same dynamic that has saved us from nuclear war.
Back to the Nazis... if they had been in the same conundrum as the military industrial complex, the Nazis never would have been able do move ahead with a 10th of their plans.
You are missing the most salient point, the Holocaust focused on a minority of the population. A minority that the majority could largely care less about. You're "MAD" example for the US doesn't work because you are assuming some odd government versus the people scenario. What if it was the government and 95%+ of the people versus 1% of the population? See the problem? How do you think Japanese-Americans (who had every right to be armed like any other American) would have fared if they engaged in armed resistance?
Hitler's decrees were met with thundering applause and support, not apprehension and resistance. Hitler did not "enforce his will" upon the German people, they openly embraced it. Remember, when Hitler passed his gun laws (another meme floating around lately) it was a modification of the laws the Weimar government had passed to try and keep arms out of Nazi and Communist hands. The laws restricted Jews, but drastically relaxed and even encouraged regular Germans to purchase personal firearms.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Retroit
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing." -Adolph Hitler (HITLER'S SECRET CONVERSATIONS 403 (Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens) trans., 1961).
The rest of the quote...
"Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police."
He was directly speaking of the need to disarm non-Aryan civilians in the areas of Russia that had been conquered by the German army. He directly was speaking of the need to not allow the existence of local militias or police forces composed of the "subject races". He was discussing occupation policy during the war, not a broader domestic policy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Snowball7
Those who were Jews did not resist so much because they knew they were
going to the labor camps, and once the war ended they would be released.
It didn't work out that way because the Germans were no longer able to care
for the workers due to the Allied bombing campaigns.
This is straight Jeff Rense, Holocaust denial bull****. Nazi Germany enacted a plan to exterminate those they deemed undesirable and acted upon that plan on an industrial scale, period.
"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing." -Adolph Hitler (HITLER'S SECRET CONVERSATIONS 403 (Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens) trans., 1961).
This purported quote from Adolf Hitler about the disarming of citizens being essential to "conquering a nation" is frequently cited in discussions about gun control in the United States, but as far as we know no one has ever turned up a source documenting that Hitler literally said this (or something very similar).
Bernard Harcout, political science chair at the University of Chicago, writes of it that, “[This] infamous quote is probably a fraud and was likely never uttered. The citation reference is a jumbled and incomprehensible mess that has never been properly identified or authenticated, and no one has been able to produce a document corresponding to the quote. It has been the subject of much research, all of it fruitless, and has now entered the annals of urban legend.”
Both authors point out that if anything, Hitler liberalized the ultra strict gun controls enacted by the Weimar Republic as an attempt to disarm the Nazis and the German Communist Party who were waged regular battles against each other in the interwar years, a fact that is illustrative of the futility of Jewish armed resistance.
After the collapse of the Weimar Republic the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and the Nazis fought pitched armed battles with one another as they tried to step into the political vacuum that existed. The open warfare didn't end until the Reichstag fire when the Nazis blamed the KPD for the act which gave them to power to drive the communist underground. And while the KPD continued resistance to the Nazis their ranks were decimated by the arrest of over 40,000 of its members and supporters. So much for armed resistance.
This is straight Jeff Rense, Holocaust denial bull****. Nazi Germany enacted a plan to exterminate those they deemed undesirable and acted upon that plan on an industrial scale, period.
I was going to hit that one next. Deported Jews for the most part had absolutely no idea what they were being led to, be it immediate extermination at the rail head or death by deprivation and exhausting work. For those who were selected for immediate extermination their fate was unknown until the last possible moment. For those selected to work as slave laborers it didn't now take long to recognize they were purposely being worked to death with little hope of being freely returned to their homes. For them liberation came as a result of escape, the Red Army or death.
mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city,
Can someone please provide solid link to those numbers? Leningrad was a large city, several million population. The only reference I could find was 1970 trials related to plane hijacking, which is crime in any state and pilitical system.
Germans never entered iLenigrad during the Holocaust time.
Six members of the Leningrad organization were arrested on the same day as the “hijackers,” on June 15, 1970
July 8, Boguslavskii was also arrested as were Viktor Shtilbans on August 20 and Mikhail Korenblit on October 27. (that's two more) April 1970, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov had informed the CPSU Central Committee of “the existence of a Zionist organization in Leningrad consisting of five groups of nationalistically minded citizens, with five individuals in each.” That's 25.
So even if all this added together, it's roughly 40 people?
You are missing the most salient point, the Holocaust focused on a minority of the population. A minority that the majority could largely care less about. You're "MAD" example for the US doesn't work because you are assuming some odd government versus the people scenario. What if it was the government and 95%+ of the people versus 1% of the population? See the problem? How do you think Japanese-Americans (who had every right to be armed like any other American) would have fared if they engaged in armed resistance?
Hitler's decrees were met with thundering applause and support, not apprehension and resistance. Hitler did not "enforce his will" upon the German people, they openly embraced it. Remember, when Hitler passed his gun laws (another meme floating around lately) it was a modification of the laws the Weimar government had passed to try and keep arms out of Nazi and Communist hands. The laws restricted Jews, but drastically relaxed and even encouraged regular Germans to purchase personal firearms.
In America: The Indian Wars.
Let's not forget, too, that a Jewish revolt in Germany would have evoked no sympathetic response from other nations at that time, not even the US. Rather, every other Western nation (plus the USSR) would have responded to such a revolt by more tightly controlling their own Jewish populations.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
