The Final Solution

On 20 January 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” The Wannsee Conference was held for the specific purpose: to further coordinate a policy aimed at the physical annihilation of the European Jews.

Ben Carson started a media firestorm when, during a recent interview, he pointed out to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Hitler himself acknowledged that Jews in Nazi Germany would have been better off with firearms instead of without them. In The Federalist, Daniel Payne writes about “the perfectly defensible comments” Ben Carson made:

By the time of the Wannsee Conference, it was probably too late for anyone outside of an invading army to do anything to stop the sure march of extermination. But prior to the full implementation of the Final Solution, an armed Jewish population would almost certainly have had a positive effect on the Jewish casualty rate.

The forced-labor camps, the einsatzgruppen, some of the pogroms and ghettos, Kristallnacht—an armed Jewish population could have had a lot of success pushing back against certain elements of anti-Semitic hostility in Nazi Germany. Armed civilians might have saved a decent number of lives from the clutches of the Nazi Party. This is a fact.

But it’s a fact the Left cannot treat with: to acknowledge that Hitler disarmed the Jews in order to make them weaker opponents, and to acknowledge that the Jews, with guns, could have had moderate success fighting against the Nazis would offer legitimacy to one of the Left’s most hated boogeymen: an armed civilian populace.

If logical, well-documented historical arguments cannot persuade progressives that Carson is neither wrong nor crazy, Mr. Payne asks them to answer a simple question: “(I)f you could be transported back in time and assume the role of a Jew in late-1930s Poland, would you rather be disarmed—or would you rather have a gun?” Read more here.

Here’s the video of Carson’s interview with Blitzer. The conversation about the Nazis begins around 4:18.