Thinking on the margin about the Holocaust.
January 27 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I got thinking about it and remembered a back and forth I had had a few years ago with a Jewish friend.
I had said that if Hitler had not had gun control, a lot of Jews would have been able to defend themselves. He argued that Hitler’s enforcers had so much power that a few hundred thousand Jews having guns wouldn’t have made much difference. I agreed that we still would have had the Holocaust but that it would have been slightly less bad. A few extra thousand lives, or maybe more, might have been saved.
To him that wasn’t so important.
Since then he has died and so I can’t make this point to him, but I can make it to you. And I’ll make it with the following rhetorical question: Was Oskar Schindler unimportant?
My guess is that you have seen or know of the movie Schindler’s List. This is the 30th anniversary of the movie, by the way. In it we see businessman Oskar Schindler hiring Jews to make pots and pans so he can make money. And then he discovers that he cares about them. Imagine that! An employer caring about employees? What will they think of next?
Because he cares about them, he creates a scheme to save as many of their lives as possible. He ends up saving over 1,300 Jews.
In my view, that’s important. What’s your view?
READER COMMENTS
OneEyedMan
Jan 31 2023 at 8:10am
I totally agree. 1300 lives saved is a lot.
Arming the Jews of Europe would likely have saved far, fat more lives because it would have slowed the extermination and diverted resources from the Reich’s war effort, making them easier to defeat.
Jim Glass
Jan 31 2023 at 2:51pm
Arming the Jews of Europe would likely have saved far, fat more lives because it would have slowed the extermination and diverted resources from the Reich’s war effort
Aside from the absurdity of people with pistols defeating an invading totalitarian army, and not suffering massive retribution for the attempt (see Warsaw ghetto uprising, 7,000 armed Jews killed and the surviving rest of the population shown no mercy) there’s another problem with this…
At the Wansee Conference the German leadership explicitly decided that if there was any conflict between eliminating the Jews and winning the war they’d solve the Jewish problem first. That was the first purpose of the war. If they had to lose the war, at least they’d leave Germany and Europe freed of any Jewish problem for generations to come.
Also – historians have been all over this – the amount of military force needed to suppress any imaginable civilian resistance was a triviality compared to that used to fight the Soviets.
Todd Kuipers
Feb 1 2023 at 10:20am
It’s not about defeating the enemy, it’s about actions at the margin. At the margin, with a large enough number of participants, even small percentages can yield large absolute changes. Schindler affected the problem at the margin, and changed the lives of more than a thousand people and their families. Guns in private hands could be unlikely to defeat the Nazis but it may have saved thousands more – rounding that to zero because it’s a small percentage hides the potential benefits. Alternatively those living in ghettos were probably smart enough to choose whether to take up arms rather than have that option taken away for reasons of seemed insignificance. Zapata’s quote about dying on your own terms is pretty relevant.
Jim Glass
Feb 1 2023 at 11:23pm
1) You are overlooking the fact that the Holocaust occurred entirely in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and western Russia. There was no gun control there, there were plenty of guns, and there was plenty of armed resistance by Jews, nationalists, and partisans of all sides. So what you are imagining you’d want is what actually happened in real life.
2) If you are imagining that inside Germany, individual Jews pulling pistols and shooting Nazis somehow would “have saved thousands”, you are going to have to explain how — after giving your estimate of the retaliation the Nazis would have visited upon the Jews, and the scope of its cost to them.
I mean, even here in the freedom-loving USA you just can’t expect to kill a cop or two without a SWAT team showing up at your door with a bunch of itchy trigger fingers. How do you expect Nazis would respond to murderous Jews, and their families, and neighbors…?
One mustn’t try to claim a benefit without considering how much it cost – not on a web site dedicated to economics!
Fazal Majid
Jan 31 2023 at 8:54am
Compared to the scale of the atrocity that was the Holocaust, perhaps, but how many people in history can legitimately claim to have saved that many people? Jewish scriptures say that saving the life of a single human is as saving all of humanity.
MarkW
Jan 31 2023 at 10:19am
I had said that if Hitler had not had gun control, a lot of Jews would have been able to defend themselves.
I’d like to think that’s true, but most of the Jews Hitler murdered were non-German. Almost 20 times as many Polish Jews as German Jews died in the Holocaust. Was there gun-control in Poland before the war that disarmed the Jews? Did differences in gun control laws among any of the countries listed above make any difference in the survival rate of Jews in those places?
Jim Glass
Jan 31 2023 at 2:23pm
I’d like to think that’s true, but most of the Jews Hitler murdered were non-German.
That’s exactly true. The Holocaust occurred in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and didn’t start until the German’s invaded there. See Timothy Snyder’s great work on this.
Is anybody really thinking that if every Jew in Poland had a pistol in 1941 the German and Soviet armies would have been beaten back?
As for the idea that citizens shooting with pistols at invading totalitarian armies would reduce casualties, in fact there was no shortage of guns in these areas and plenty of partisans did shoot back. Is anyone here aware of the massive reprisals taken both the Nazis and Soviets in response, exterminating all the men, women and children in entire towns and regions? That’s how to save lives?
This type of thinking is both delusional and shows real ignorance of factual history. If Bryan Caplan were still here he could use it to illustrate two of his favorite claims: the benefits of pacifism, and the ignorance of the average voter.
Normally I’m entertained by all kinds of strange ideas, but the Holocaust is nothing to be glib about.
Philo
Feb 1 2023 at 8:47pm
You ask: “Is anybody really thinking that if every Jew in Poland had a pistol in 1941 the German and Soviet armies would have been beaten back?” This is missing the point of the post, which concerned the *marginal* effect of a well-armed Jewry. But, since you raise the question: If every Gestapo agent who came to a Jewish apartment to arrest the residents expected to be shot at, that (while not “beating back” any army) might have discouraged the Nazi government from attempting the Holocaust. To return to the point of the post: It certainly would have led to a different scenario, one which might well have been more favorable to the survival of Jews.
Mark Z
Jan 31 2023 at 11:46am
I’m doubtful gun control laws made a difference. Most German Jews didn’t know where things were leading, which is why far fewer tried to flee than one would expect. I would think anyone who was sufficiently convinced that they were facing immanent danger that they were prepared engage in a – likely fatal – shootout with the police would have already fled the country or at least gone into hiding, so armed altercations would be extremely rare even if many owned guns. I also wouldn’t assume that the occasional gunfight between the Gestapo and its victims would actually deter its efforts. In fact every gunned down Gestapo member would likely serve as useful propaganda to the regime to justify its efforts. It’s not even clear it would have been a net positive.
MarkW
Jan 31 2023 at 1:18pm
One reason more Jews did not leave was because there was nowhere to go — many countries refused to accept Jewish refugees (remember the ill-fated voyage of the St Louis). And was this a net negative? How about this? Or this?
Mark Z
Jan 31 2023 at 6:03pm
The Sobibor camp escapees used clubs to subdue the camp guards; the assassination of Heydrich led to massive reprisals killing many thousands, and probably did little to actually impede the holocaust. Would it have been better if he’d been hanged at Nuremberg? Maybe. And I’m pretty sure most of the weapons used in the Warsaw uprising were appropriated military weapons, not personal firearms owned before the war.
MarkW
Feb 1 2023 at 6:01am
the assassination of Heydrich led to massive reprisals killing many thousands, and probably did little to actually impede the holocaust. Would it have been better if he’d been hanged at Nuremberg?
Yes, and French resistance activities resulted in massive reprisals, too (in Oradour-sur-Glane for example). Do you think resistance activities against the occupying Nazis were a mistake too? And wasn’t getting the people to think that way the very goal of the reprisals?
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 31 2023 at 12:00pm
What contributions to the world did those 1,300 people made? Or their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren? What contributions will the descendants of their great grandchildren make? By saving those 1,300 people, did Oskar Schindler save humanity 10,000 years from now?
David Seltzer
Jan 31 2023 at 2:33pm
Richard, If only one in 1300, .0007692, were Jonas Salk or Albert Einstein, I suspect their contributions would have been transcendent. Yes. On the margin, Oskar Schindler was important.
David Seltzer
Jan 31 2023 at 2:38pm
From the Holocaust Encyclopedia: On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. Seven hundred and fifty fighters fought the heavily armed and well-trained Germans. The ghetto fighters were able to hold out for nearly a month, but on May 16, 1943, the revolt ended. The Germans had slowly crushed the resistance. Of the more than 56,000 Jews captured, about 7,000 were shot, and the remainder were deported to camps.
NEVER AGAIN!!!
steve
Jan 31 2023 at 2:54pm
Beat me to it. There are number of very good accounts on how the people in the Warsaw ghetto leveraged the few weapons they had to hold out unexpectedly long. So if a few thousand people armed with handguns and sporting rifles/shotguns met up against a military force on an open field in a pitched battle they would get slaughtered, but when you are talking about an urban setting or a guerrilla effort its a lot different. Hard to know how many more would have survived but people would have at least had the option to fight.
Steve
David Seltzer
Jan 31 2023 at 3:28pm
Steve, thanks for your comment. French military were in Vietnam for eight years and were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Tonkin Resolution came in July, 1964. American troops left in 1975. American and allied forces killed Charley at a rate of 2.5 to 1 and we couldn’t defeat him. Guerrilla warfare in the bush is nasty.
Jim Glass
Jan 31 2023 at 3:15pm
A few extra thousand lives, or maybe more, might have been saved.
Where does this assumption repeatedly come from? That if slaves with pistols in the 1850s had started shooting slave owners and slave hunters, and Jews with pistols had started shooting Nazis during the Holocaust, lives would somehow have been “saved”. Why is there no consideration of the massive retribution against them to follow, and the tally of lives lost in that?
This is just factual history, there were armed slave revolts through the 1800s, each crushed with the likes of heads put on pikes and black communities destroyed. And there many cases of civilian armed resistance to Nazis and Soviets, resulting in men, women and children being exterminated en masse.
Oskar Schindler used guile, craft and deceit to get 1300 people out. If he’d pulled out a gun and started shooting Nazis, what would have been the result?
Peter Gerdes
Jan 31 2023 at 3:49pm
I think it matters alot how you define important here. I don’t think any sane person doesn’t think saving more Jewish lives during the Holocaust wouldn’t have been good.
However, in the broader debate about the desirability of gun control laws it likely isn’t very important. I mean, the number of people killed by guns each year in the US is on the order of 20k. Preventing a few thousand deaths during an event which you might (even very pessimisticly) estimate might occur once every 100 years in one of many countries and it becomes a rounding error.
Also, the assumption that it would have saved lives isn’t clear. Armed resistance can also be used as an excuse (or merely make it expedient) to oppress or kill members of a group. And for every Holocaust how many Japanese internments do you have? As unjust as japanese internment in the us was armed resistance would have likely made things much worse and possesion of guns makes those situations more likely as well.
Peter Gerdes
Jan 31 2023 at 3:51pm
Sorry I garbled the wording there a bit. My point was that this kind of event seems rare enough that, if your goal is to minimize total gun deaths or even just gun homicides, it’s unlikely this would make a difference one way or the other.
Mactoul
Jan 31 2023 at 10:12pm
There were plenty of weapons floating around in Stalinist USSR and Saddam era Iraq but it didn’t stop or even hamper tyranny.
BC
Feb 1 2023 at 12:43pm
“He argued that Hitler’s enforcers had so much power that a few hundred thousand Jews having guns wouldn’t have made much difference.”
For reference, Ukraine’s Armed Forces in 2021 numbered about 200k. They seemed to have made a difference against Putin’s enforcers.
Jim Glass
Feb 1 2023 at 10:43pm
For reference, Ukraine’s Armed Forces in 2021 numbered about 200k. They seemed to have made a difference against Putin’s enforcers.
Yes, an organized military trained, supported and largely armed by NATO forces can make a difference.
I wonder how a bunch of civilians with pistols would have done?
Jon Murphy
Feb 2 2023 at 10:07am
Let’s ask the Afghans. Somehow they were able to beat the British Empire at its height (twice), the Soviets, and the US.
Jim Glass
Feb 2 2023 at 12:29pm
“Let’s ask the Afghans. Somehow they were able to beat the British Empire at its height (twice), the Soviets, and the US.”
Note how…
‘Individuals shooting individual oppressors — Nazis, slave hunters & owners — with pistols, will “save thousands of lives’”
… has turned into…
‘The population of an invaded nation may fight a war of resistance for years and, hopefully with significant help from abroad (e.g. Afghanistan repeatedly), may even win.’
When two Czech resistance fighters killed the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, it may have been a victory to be celebrated forever in their war of resistance. It also resulted in the extermination of the town of Lidice, men, women and children, 1,327 Czechs being sentenced to death, and thousands of Jews in Prague being deported to concentration camps.
That’s a lot more innocent people lost than Oskar Schindler saved, and those lives count too.
I’m no pacifist, I’m all for armed resistance. I’m not for the fantasy that some 2nd amendment type gun-toting violence by individuals against an oppressive regime (Slaving/ Nazi/ Soviet/ Theocratic Iran/ whatever) somehow is going to be ignored by the regime and allowed to pay free dividends! Oppressive regimes defend themselves with retribution. That’s pretty much definitional.
I’m all for violence, when fully aware that violence is met with violence. The question always is whether or not it is worth it.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Feb 1 2023 at 5:42pm
Laws that limited guns to people who were willing to register them with higher bar for weapons that can fire many rounds in rapid succession, be reloaded quickly would probably over time save a lot more than 1300 lives.
David Henderson
Feb 1 2023 at 6:06pm
Do you realize how irrelevant your point is to this discussion? It’s about gun control in Germany under Hitler. If Germany had had the gun control you seem to want, there still would have been many Jews with guns. Maybe not hundreds of thousands, but tens of thousands. So my point still stands.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Feb 2 2023 at 4:47pm
I have heard similar arguments made in support of status quo gun regulation in the US. I’m glad you find it irrelevant.
Jim Glass
Feb 1 2023 at 10:36pm
Some notes via Timothy Snyder….
~~~
…if Hitler had not had gun control…
[] “98% of the victims of the Holocaust did not speak German and had no contact with Germany until the Germans arrived in their lands. 100% of the victims of the Holocaust were killed in the lands east of Germany.”
German gun control laws seem hardly relevant.
[] From 1933 thru 1938 Stalin killed 4 million people, Hitler killed a few hundred, Stalin killed 1,000 times as many Jews as Hitler did.
[] The initial German ‘Hitler-approved’ plan for the Solution was to expel the Jews to Madagascar (or perhaps Siberia after the Soviets collapsed) and this remained so until 1942 when the course of the war made it implausible. That’s when the German mass killing started.
[] All the Holocaust killing occurred where states had been destroyed first by the Soviets, then a second time over by the Germans. The Germans began to catch up to the Soviets as to killing civilians with their invasion of Poland, while the mass racial killings of Holocaust began only with their invasion of the USSR.
[] Where states survived, even under German occupation or as German allies, Jewish populations generally survived. (The one exception being the Netherlands.) States want to control affairs within their own borders and retain significant ability to do so even when defeated in war. Mussolini had a Jewish mistress and refused to take part in the Holocaust. French-citizen Jews survived — non-citizens, including many “stateless” Poles, were deported to the Eastern camps.
State bureaucracies have power and in many cases used it to stymie the Germans. Raoul Wallenberg, while a Swedish diplomat in Budapest, saved tens of thousands of lives — until captured by the Soviets and dying in a Soviet prison. Many other state actors protected Jews, and the protectors of Jews, on local scales.
[] In contrast, where states were destroyed the Jews were exterminated. In Denmark 99% of Jews survived. In Estonia, 99% were killed. The reason being that the state of Denmark survived under occupation while the Estonian state had been destroyed two times over, by the Soviets and Germans both.
All the Holocaust killing occurred in the “destroyed state” areas of Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and Western Russia. Even those persons in the Western European surviving states who died in the Holocaust — such as the Poles in France — where shipped to the east to meet their fate.
“If there is a robust finding in ‘genocide studies’, it is that genocide occurs where there is state failure, no state or civil war.”
~~~~
Here are two very good talks on all this by Timothy Snyder. They are full lectures at the LSE with interesting Q&As afterward (but one can listen to them at 2x speed). For all the endless chants of “Nazi” and “Hitler” in our twitter-world politics, it’s good to be informed about the real deal. As this is an important subject.
The Origins of the Final Solution: Eastern Europe and the Holocaust
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxyHV90ESIY
The Origins of Mass Killing: the Bloodlands Hypothesis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXrqGlgufCA&t=1
David Henderson
Feb 2 2023 at 1:14pm
Thanks, Jim. There’s a lot here that I didn’t know.
You write:
So this is about where they were killed, not whether they were Germans, right? It’s hard to believe that the Holocaust killed zero Germans.
Also, from some of your other comments, I’m getting the idea that you think that tens of thousands of armed Jews would have saved, on net, zero lives (taking into account ugly retribution by the German government.) Is that what you’re contending?
Jim Glass
Feb 3 2023 at 1:17pm
Snyder:
“98% of the victims of the Holocaust did not speak German and had no contact with Germany until the Germans arrived in their lands.”
Interestingly, the Soviets and Nazis were mirror images of each other. The Soviets killed millions of people in their own territory during peacetime, then cut back the killing when the war started. The Nazis began their mass killing only during the war, and did it all abroad.
Snyder’s “Bloodlands” is a great book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands
Jim Glass
Feb 3 2023 at 2:26pm
Also, from some of your other comments, I’m getting the idea that you think that tens of thousands of armed Jews would have saved, on net, zero lives (taking into account ugly retribution by the German government.) Is that what you’re contending?
I think it would have on net cost a great number of lives. Killing one Nazi, Heydrich, cost thousands of lives. The Nazis and Soviets were really really into retribution and repression. When you calculate “net expected lives saved” , what number do you calculate for “lives lost to retribution”?
Moreover, I don’t see how shooting Nazis would save any lives even “gross”. A Jew pulls out a gun and shoots a Nazi. So the Nazis shoot him (for a start). What life is saved?
And, how were there ever going to be “thousands of armed Jews”? They were never armed to begin with. Hitler didn’t disarm them, Weimar passed Germany’s gun control laws. But the Jews weren’t particularly armed anyhow. Why would they be? They were a civilized, peaceful, disproportionately educated and academic urban people. They weren’t living in the US Wild West.
And, in 1938 Jews were all of 0.32% of the population of Germany. Let’s give guns (by magic wand, or whatever) to their entire male population of shooting age. Now 0.1% of the population, dispersed over the entire country, is going to use pistols, on an individual basis, to stymie a totalitarian state? Really?
Hey … Before, during, and for 50 years after WWII, no Jewish rights group, historian, or scholar of the Holocaust ever had the thought: “Hitler’s gun control laws enabled the Holocaust”. That’s how absurd the idea is. Then in the 1990s it was whipped up as a bit of rhetoric in the US domestic gun control political fights. Which, IMHO, is a pretty sorry use of the memory of 6 million dead.
But why stop there when using bizarre counterfactuals? How about: If the Ukrainians had more guns, Stalin could never have pulled off Holodomor!
David Henderson
Feb 4 2023 at 10:26am
Thanks, Jim.
I think it’s important to stay on topic and not to misstate my original point. You do that admirably in your February 3, 2:26 p.m. comment above.
Except for a slip at one point. You write:
Remember that the discussion is about whether a thousand or more Jewish lives would have been saved if Germany had not had gun control. I took as given, as I know you must realize, that the Holocaust would have happened with or without gun control.
Mactoul
Feb 3 2023 at 2:33am
Isn’t Hungry also a counterexample to the thesis that preserved states saved their Jews?
Also, the killings started immediately following the German invasion of Russia in June 41.
nobody.really
Feb 4 2023 at 10:36pm
Perhaps so. Or perhaps Schindler created a mechanism to get 1,300 specific people saved in his factories–and the 1,300 other people that would otherwise have been sent to work in those factories were instead sent to gas chambers. Can we demonstrate that Schindler’s conduct resulted in fewer net people getting sent to the gas chambers?
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