Gun Control in Nazi Occupied-France Read online

  Praise for Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France

  “Stephen Halbrook has done it again, broken new ground with meticulous historical ‘gun control’ research. This is the harrowing story of Nazi and Vichy government savage repression of French gun owners, in part made possible by pre-war French firearms registration. Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France is an important and highly readable addition to scholarship on how dictators and invaders have disarmed conquered populations.”

  — James B. Jacobs, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts; Director, Center for Research in Crime and Justice; New York University; author, Can Gun Control Work?

  “In the outstanding book, Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France, Halbrook shows that although the French government did not intend to disarm the population when it mandated the registration of firearms, the very existence of registration records made it possible for the Nazis who occupied France during WWII to tighten their bloody grip on the country by hunting down gun owners. The applicable lesson here is that the intentions behind gun control measures aimed at the general population don’t matter as much as the inevitable result: subtracting from the people’s power to guard their own freedom. His mixture of anecdotes and statistics makes for sobering reading.”

  — Angelo M. Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Boston University; author, Informing Statecraft, War: Ends and Means (with Paul Seabury), The Character of Nations, and Between the Alps and a Hard Place: Switzerland in World War II and the Rewriting of History

  “In this detailed and fascinating book, Stephen P. Halbrook gives us a companion volume to his superb Gun Control in the Third Reich. Relying on French archival sources and German occupational records as well as a truly illuminating set of eyewitness questionnaire responses and more, Halbrook demonstrates the extent to which modern dictatorship relies on the control and confiscation of weapons and fears what French socialist Jean Jaurès once praised as ‘the general arming of the people.’ Like Halbrook’s study of the Third Reich, Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France greatly expands our historical knowledge about the relationship between private gun confiscation and the Holocaust. As a work of scholarship, the book is—simply put—conclusive. But it is also an intensely interesting and at times inspiring account of how some French people collaborated with dictatorship and occupation, how some complied and just went along, and how some resisted heroically.”

  — T. Hunt Tooley, Professor of History, Austin College; whose books include Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, Battleground and Home Front in the First World War, and National Identity and Weimar Germany

  “The theme of Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France is new, and Stephen Halbrook conveys it with laudable precision. In the early 1980s, I spoke to French Resistance fighters who told me how difficult it was to hide weapons during the German occupation. But never before had I read anything about it. We owe Halbrook tremendous gratitude for illuminating a crucial issue that had not been addressed by either the Germans or the French.”

  — Wieland Giebel, Founder and Curator, Berlin Story Museum, Germany; author, The History of Berlin, The Brown Berlin, Goebbels’s Propaganda, and Hitler’s Terror in Berlin

  “Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France is an impressive addition to the already vast literature on the Second World War. The book is filled with useful information from primary sources, much of it previously unpublished. Halbrook vividly depicts the terrible years of the occupation of France by German armed forces, in particular from the viewpoint of French owners of firearms, mainly hunting weapons but also miscellaneous military arms retained by the families of soldiers in prior wars. One of Hitler’s major objectives was to see France (and other conquered territories) completely firearms-free, and major efforts to this end were expended by the German armed forces and their French collaborators. Two aspects of Halbrook’s story are of obvious relevance for contemporary debates about civilian possession of firearms. First, although the Germans collected truckloads of firearms from all over France, they didn’t get all of them—or even, perhaps, most of them. Despite threatening the most draconian penalties (including the death penalty, which was carried out in thousands of instances), and despite unlimited powers to search any premises at any time without giving reasons, occupation authorities simply could not successfully disarm a population that was unwilling to cooperate with them. Second, many of the guns that remained in civilian hands found their way to the Resistance, which valued handguns in particular. It is not that people with side arms could credibly threaten to take on organized formations of the German army. But as Halbrook shows, guns played an indispensable moralizing role for the Resistance. Because its members were able to arm and protect themselves, the Resistance was able to survive and grow, and as it grew stronger it did play an increasingly important role in harrying occupation forces, providing vital intelligence to the Allied armies, and preparing the ground for Europe’s eventual liberation.”

  — Daniel D. Polsby, Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

  “‘Get your guns out of the straw, your stens, your grenades…’ These words of the popular 1943 Chant des Partisans, by Joseph Kessel, Maurice Druon and Anna Marly, only make sense if there are hidden guns, sten guns, and grenades to fight against the evil Nazis in the first place. As Stephen P. Halbrook’s splendid new book, Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France, makes perfectly clear, the not so-well-intended but comparatively harmless administrative registration of firearms by the French government before World War II made the goal of the Nazis to disarm the liberty-loving people of France much easier. The heroic fight of the resistance against the invader became harder. Until there are no more aggressions—and I fear we still have some distance in front of us until we arrive on that bright sunlit upland of human history—until there are no more wars, a lesson remains: When the battle cry of freedom is heard, people should be well-armed to respond.”

  — Jürg F. Stüssi-Lauterburg, former Director, Library Am Guisanplatz BiG; former President, Foundation Council of the Foundation for Democracy

  “Talk of Nazi gun confiscation has long been a staple of American gun debates, but until recently the scholarly work had not been done. In this book, Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France, Stephen Halbrook continues his extensively researched history of Nazi gun controls and gun confiscation, revealing in particular how prewar French gun registration laws made the Nazis’ task easier, and how French disobedience to those laws preserved a reservoir of firearms that made the Resistance’s task easier. Highly recommended!”

  — Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Tennessee College of Law

  “With Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France, Stephen Halbrook cements his position as one of the leading scholars on the right to bear arms. Halbrook provides us with an important cautionary tale. A seemingly harmless firearms registration measure enacted by France’s prewar democratic government would allow a later sinister regime, the forces of the Nazi occupation and its collaborators, to round up firearms and to imprison and execute those who resisted confiscation. Anyone who doubts that disarming a people makes it easier to oppress a people would do well to read Halbrook’s well-researched study.”

  — Robert J. Cottrol, Professor of Law, History, and Sociology and Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law, George Washington University; author, The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere

  “Stephen Halbrook has done it again. Building on the case he made in Gun Control and the Third Reich that gun registration efforts in the Weimer Republic contributed to Hitler�
��s rise to power in Germany, he demonstrates in his newest book, Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, that similar policies in pre-war France facilitated Nazi-occupation of France. Gun registration laws put in place in 1935 by then Prime Minister Pierre Laval made easy pickings of those who failed to surrender their arms under Nazi occupation—a failure whose penalty was execution. But Halbrook also tells the other side of the story—that the many French people who refused to register their firearms in 1935, or who owned hunting guns not subject to the registration laws-were often key cogs in the resistance movement that contributed ultimately to France’s restoration of freedom. ‘Tis an important lesson that cannot be told too often: Tyrants seek to disarm the citizenry because a well-armed citizenry is the surest defense of freedom.”

  — John C. Eastman, Henry Salvatori Professor of Law and Community Service, Chapman University; Founding Director, Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence

  “After the conquest of France in 1940, the Germans made intensive efforts to remove guns from French civilians. French civilians took great risks to keep their guns. Secret caches of firearms provided weapons for guerilla bands in the last months of the occupation. They also bolstered the confidence and spirit of a wider range of resisters. Stephen Holbrook’s Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France tells this story in vivid detail, drawing on official documents of that era and a range of post-war reminiscences.”

  — Jeremy A. Rabkin, Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

  “Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France makes evident several inescapable conclusions: first, a disarmed populace is a priority for tyrants; second, disarming a populace is an achievable bureaucratic process done with relative ease over a short span of time; third, once disarmed the populace must choose either submission to tyranny or death; fourth, the natural right to self-preservation is inextricably tied to the natural right to keep and bear arms; and fifth, effective resistance to tyranny does not start at the knock at the door, but at the politicians’ call for gun registration. There was a time when most Americans understood these unpleasant truisms. Stephen Halbrook’s timely book is an urgent reminder.”

  — Marshall L. DeRosa, Professor of Political Science, Florida Atlantic University; author, The Ninth Amendment and the Politics of Creative Jurisprudence and The Politics of Dissolution and the Rhetorical Quest for a National Identity

  “Stephen P. Halbrook’s, Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France, will be received with the same controversy as his previous work, Gun Control in the Third Reich. Gun control advocates will hate it and gun ownership supporters will love it. Irrespective of what side of the gun control debate you are on, you should read it. It is meticulously research, but that will not deter critics from saying that an example from occupied France is as irrelevant as that of the Third Reich. But is it? The venerated sociologist Max Weber instructed us to look at the ‘extreme case’ as a way of understanding social reality, and Halbrook does precisely that. In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, do you want to seize guns? Well, even on pain of facing a firing squad, gun owners in Nazi-occupied France largely held on to their weapons. Seizing weapons is not as accessible a social policy as one might assume. An armed populace in Nazi-occupied France formed the foundation for the resistance to the brutality of the occupation. While the resistance could not overthrow the Nazi regime, it undermined it and was able to join the allied invasion force in pushing the Nazis out of France. Critics of Halbrook’s earlier work have stated that since Jews were less than 1% of the population of Germany when the Nazis took over, what good would their armed resistance have been? This critique ignores the triumph of the human spirit in its desire to resist oppression, to make the oppression burdensome and odious. In his Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued for resisting the heavily-armed state organs with clubs in the absence of guns because resistance is important. Some of those who seek to join the oppressors will be deterred by the prospect of their own deaths. At a time when the debate over gun control is front and center on the political stage, Halbrook’s meticulously researched work on Nazi-occupied France is a welcome contribution to that debate, and one that cannot be easily dismissed.”

  — Abraham H. Miller, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Cincinnati; Distinguished Fellow, Haym Salomon Center

  “The sophisticated analysis in Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France shows how Nazi gun control enforcement was affected by military events, international law, civilian cooperation, and the special situation of the nominally independent Vichy government. Halbrook demonstrates how gun registration laws enacted by a democratic government may later be exploited by a tyranny—with registration leading to confiscation and then to mass murder.”

  — David B. Kopel, Adjunct Professor of Advanced Constitutional Law, Sturm College of Law, University of Denver; author, Guns: Who Should Have Them?; Research Director, Independence Institute

  Also by the Author

  Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State” (2013)

  Translations:

  Fatales Erbe—Hitlers Waffengesetze: Die legale Entwaffnung von Juden und “Staatsfeinden” im “Dritten Reich” (2016)

  Bas les armes! Le désarmement des Juifs et des “ennemis du ille Reich” (2016)

  Hitler e o desarmamento—Como o nazismo desarmou os judeus e os “inimigos do Reich” (2017)

  The Swiss and the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich (2006)

  Translations:

  Schweizer Widerstand gegen Nazi-Deutschland (2010)

  La Suisse face aux nazis (2011)

  Szwajcaria i naziści (2015)

  Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II (1998)

  Translations:

  Die Schweiz im Visier (1999)

  La Suisse encerclée (2000)

  La Svizzera nel mirino (2002)

  Cel: Szwajcaria (2003)

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  Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance

  Copyright © 2018 by Stephen P. Halbrook

  ISBN: 978-1-59813-307-3

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by electronic or mechanical means now known or to be invented, including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Nothing herein should be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Institute.