kolesar: My grandparents were Catholic, not Jewish: from what my grandfather told me, they did not have it any better. That is how it was in Western Ukraine and Poland, where most of the victims of the Holocaust lived.
There is a small country called Ruthenia (~1 million) which is wedged in between west ukraine & poland (& also then czecho & now czech republic), which is comprised of a blend of polish & ukrainians. I trace ancestry to this region, mostly polish ; nowy targ near zackopane (no vee targ, zats ko panny).
link: Advocates who cite Hitler in the current U.S. debate overlook that Jews in 1930s Germany were a very small population, owned few guns before the Nazis took control
In january 1939 there were about 400,000 jewish in germany out of maybe 60 million germans (dunno but not far off). Of these 400,000, half were women & children of which firearms would've been of little help. Of the other 200,000 men, near half were children or elderly, and most the others were fathers, who would not have risked owning a gun due to threats of nazi reprisals such as sending his beloved family to a concentration camp or getting shot (death camps not yet in vogue in '39). So 100,000 jewish men spread out over the eastern half of germany, unorganized, untrained, lightly armed - the notion to put up armed resistance was never seriously considered (in strength) by them, they had endured anti-semitism from the nazis before & did not/could not comprehend how it would escalate post warstart.
conservative commentator decried efforts to restrict guns, he argued that if only Jews in Poland had been better armed, many more would have survived the Holocaust
Jewish in pre-war poland, about 10% of 30 million poles, were also subject to anti-semitism from polish (predominantly catholic), & whether they could own guns, or proscriptions, dunno.
here's what happened in the warsaw 'armed' uprising of jan-april 1943: ... only around 20 Germans were killed during the Warsaw Uprising while approx 13,000 Jews were killed in the ghetto, and the 50,000 surviving captives were quickly deported to concentration camps.
.. {followup}: Longerich noted in his biography of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, “Under the impact of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, from April 1943 onwards the SS accelerated the bloody liquidation of those ghettos that still existed.”
good read:Gun Control and the Holocaust http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/119543/gun-control-and-the-holocaust
How many Jews were murdered in each country and what percentage of the pre-war Jewish population did they constitute? (Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust) Poland 3,000,000 - 90.9% France 77,320 - 22.1% Italy 7,680 -- 17.3% Germany 141,500 - 25.0% Soviet Union 1,100,000 - 36.4% Hungary 569,000 - 69.0% http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394663#30
= new reply since forum marked as read