In a speech, sometimes said to have been delivered in 1935, Hitler is supposed to have exclaimed: “This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!”
This quote has been popular with Americans who defend the constitutional right to “keep and bear arms.” It’s cited to discredit those who support restrictions on firearms ownership and use. It’s also cited to support the often-made charge that Hitler and his government curtailed gun ownership in Germany, and confiscated weapons held by private citizens.
The truth is rather different. When Hitler and his National Socialist Party took power in early 1933, they inherited a somewhat restrictive firearms law that the liberal-democratic “Weimar” government had enacted five years earlier. In 1938 Hitler’s government revised the earlier law by loosening those restrictions, thereby enhancing the rights of Germans to own weapons. The most thorough confiscation of firearms ever imposed on Germans was carried out at the end of the Second World War by the occupation forces of the United States and other victorious Allied powers.