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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lunkerslayer" data-source="post: 109442" data-attributes="member: 217">Jews were 0.75% of the German population when Hitler became chancellor in 1933 (about the same share as Buddhists are in America today) and more than half fled the country before the war began in 1939. Any armed resistance in the run-up the war was met with overwhelming force and exploited by the regime to institute further persecution. Hitler’s propagandists justified Kristallnacht, the deadly anti-Jewish riots encouraged by the Nazis, as a response to the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish gunman.“Basically if you are part of a minority that is being excluded and you do use a gun, this will be presented as an example of your people’s general criminality,” Yale professor Timothy Snyder, who has meticulously chronicled Hitler’s wartime atrocities, said in an e-mail. “The thing to be stopped is the exclusion.”If Carson’s claim is that enough ordinary Germans would have joined Jews in armed uprising to stop Hitler’s march to war and genocide if they only had the guns, then he’s buying into a dangerous myth that Hitler lacked public support and only maintained power by violently imposing his will on a citizenry that yearned to overthrow him.This was not the case – Hitler’s widespread popularity among Germans after crushing initial resistance and the German public’s complicity in the Holocaust are among the most chilling aspects of World War II, one that historians have spent decades trying to unravel.Even putting aside the idea Germans could have somehow thwarted Hitler’s agenda if they were armed, the vast majority of Jews lost to the Nazi’s genocidal regime were not killed in Germany at all, but in Eastern Europe, where Hitler’s prewar gun laws were irrelevant. More than two-thirds of Jews killed in the Holocaust were citizens of Poland (where an estimated 3 million were murdered) or the Soviet Union (1.1 million).“97% of the victims of the Holocaust were Jews beyond Germany,” Snyder said.The notion that small arms resistance might have deterred Hitler from carrying out his genocidal agenda is also blatantly at odds with his decision to invade Europe knowing he would face millions of trained soldiers equipped with machine guns, planes, tanks, and artillery.As the ADL noted in its statement, there were heroic examples of armed Jewish partisans during the war, but they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the invading Nazi forces. Ultimately, it was the Soviet Red Army that delivered the fatal blow to Hitler’s forces in the East at the cost of millions of lives.“When they had weapons, Jews could symbolically resist, as they did in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and elsewhere, but they could not stop the Nazi genocide machine,” Greenblatt said. “In short, gun control did not cause the Holocaust; Nazism and anti-Semitism did."<a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ben-carson-holocaust-theory-prompts-outcry-jewish-groups" target="_blank">http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ben-carson-holocaust-theory-prompts-outcry-jewish-groups</a></blockquote>

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