Kopel on Jewish resistance
A group of Jewish partisans in the Rudniki forest, near Vilna, between 1942 and 1944.
I’ve spoken with noted Second Amendment attorney David Kopel numerous times over the past several years about his cases. He is truly a 2A luminary and serves as an adjunct professor in Denver University’s Sturm College of Law and is the Research Director of the Independence Institute. You can read some of his papers here.
Kopel last month wrote a very detailed and extremely interesting peice at the WaPost’s Volokh Conspiracy debunking Holocaust historian Alan E. Steinweis’s contentions that guns would not have helped Jews during the Holocaust. No matter which side of that argument you take, its interesting reading.
An excerpt:
Professor Steinweis says that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising “saved few Jewish lives, and had little to no impact on the course of either World War II or the Holocaust.” Well, the point of the Uprising wasn’t to save the lives of the participants; they knew that they were almost certain to die to no matter what. They tied down Nazi forces for over fourth months — whereas the French and Polish armies had been unable to resist the Nazi invaders for even two months.
In a world war, it is not easy to show that any partisan unit had a major impact on the outcome. But the nature of war is that small unit actions, while not decisive in themselves, may play an important role in weakening the enemy. The largest Jewish partisan unit in Eastern Europe, led by the Bielski Brothers, between the fall of 1943 and the summer of 1944 carried out 38 combat missions — destroying two locomotives, 23 train cars, 32 telegraph poles, and four bridges. Over the course of the war, the Bielski unit killed 381 enemy fighters and collaborators. That is a good record for a unit which had 149 armed combatants, and which sheltered and saved a thousand non-combatant Jews.