It's taught as a truism in America that one of Hitler's "Ways you can recognize he's a dictator" things was imposing a general disarmament on the German people early in his career as Chancellor.
However, I've lately learned that was... not really the case. In a debate I was reading, it was argued that the Third Reich actually expanded general private gun ownership (although it did formally outlaw german-jewish citizens from having weapons).
During that argument, it was also argued that Germany had been generally disarmed under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
All of which leads me to wonder, what did private firearm ownership look like between the opening of World War 1 to the fall of the Third Reich?
It's a bit more complicated than that. The NSDAP used existing, largely unenforced (maybe even unenforceable) legislation to disarm a very specific set of people while continuing to be lax with everyone else, a stance which was then formalised with the Reichswaffengesetz in 1938.
The pre-war German Empire didn't really have any restrictions on firearm ownership outside of regulating on where you were allowed to carry and discharge them.
This meant that gun ownership was prevalent at the outset of the war - you could literally go to any store and buy a gun or just order it by mail. This changed in the post-war Weimar Republic, which was forced by the Treaty of Versailles (which also banned gun clubs and the like) to surrender all military weapons in civilian and state ownership to the Entente, which was also put into German law in 1920 (with additional legislation being signed in 1922) after it became obvious that the political climate meant that widespread civilian gun ownership seriously threatened the stability of the young republic as political extremists from both left and right carried out putsch after putsch, murder and revolution.
This proved to be nigh impossible though, mostly due there being no extant registry of gun owners or sales transactions. Just short of a decade later, the ban on gun ownership was relaxed - now you could buy a gun as long you were pre-approved by being an entrant in the new registry and carry it if you were also licensed to do so, both of which required you to have a pristine legal record, the latter in addition also requiring you to prove a need to own a gun. However, unlicensed gun ownership was still ubiquitous because there still was no way to track guns (or private sales) grandfathered in from before the ban.
When the Nazis came to power, they began retracting all permits from people who were Jewish, Communist or simply deemed an enemy of the emerging NS state, as well as enforcing the ban on unlicensed gun ownership only with those specific people. In fact, they often used the gun laws to obtain warrants on people they wanted to harass, Albert Einstein's summer residence for example was famously raided in 1933, only to find that the only thing they could somewhat claim to be a weapon was a bread knife.
Those sympathetic to their cause however, were not affected - quite the opposite. NSDAP members and other people who were deemed sufficiently loyal could unofficially buy and own guns without even owning the required permits. In 1938 this was finally codified into law - long arms were deregulated, munitions were available freely, hunters, government officials and NSDAP members were exempt from all restrictions, while Jews were banned from owning any kind of weapon at all.
For the person who wasn't either a Nazi or one of their enemies, however, this meant no change. If they already had a gun and a permit, they kept both. If they already had a gun and no permit, they very likely also kept it due to either longer requiring a permit or because the ban was still unenforceable on a Germany-wide basis - Jews for example could be selectively targeted because they were already singled out.