Horst Wessel

German Nazi and lyricist

• Born: September 9, 1907
• Birthplace: Bielefeld, Westphalia, Germany
• Died: February 23, 1930
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

Cause of notoriety: Wessel, a member of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA, or assault section of the Nazi storm troopers), rallied morale by writing patriotic song lyrics and was glorified as a Nazi martyr in the early years of the movement.

Active: 1926-1930

Locale: Berlin, Germany

Early Life

Horst Wessel (hohrst VEHS-sehl) came from a respectable bourgeois family. His father, Dr. Ludwig Wessel, was a Lutheran minister who later served in the pastorate at St. Nikolai, Berlin’s oldest church. During World War I, he became chaplain at the headquarters of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and died while on duty. Young Wessel was raised with the ideal of sacrificing for “the Fatherland.”

Wessel became an ardent nationalist and was active in the Bismarck Bund, the German youth section of the German Nationalist People’s Party, as well as in the Free Corps Viking youth organization. After taking a degree at a humanistic gymnasium (a school preparatory to the university), he started to study law in 1926 at the University of Berlin. He joined a fraternity that was a training ground for the professional elite but found its aristocratic aspirations and political passivity irrelevant to Germany’s troubled political scene. He also came in contact with Marxism at the university, and he found it as reprehensible as bourgeois hypocrisy. He found his political awakening when he joined the Nazi Party in 1926.

Nazi Career

While smart and politically astute, Wessel was also restless and violent. After Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels sent him to Vienna in 1928 to organize the Nazi youth movement there, Wessel returned to Berlin, where he transformed a small pack of intimidated, riffraff Brownshirts (members of the SA, so called because of their brown uniforms) into a reckless fighting force called Storm Section 5. This group worked mostly in the East Berlin section of Friedrichshain, a largely communist area of dangerous streets, newly arrived immigrants, and thugs. Under Wessel’s command, the Nazis successfully challenged the communists on their home ground by using terrorism and counterterrorism. The communist leadership of the district was angry that the Berlin Nazis were campaigning in a once solidly communist district and had even managed to convert many former communists and supporters to the Nazi cause. The Red Front Fighters League counterattacked by launching brutal assaults on Nazis in the streets and in the pubs they frequented.

Wessel understood the power of music to rally people in political battle. It was customary for the Brownshirts to sing as they marched through the streets of Berlin, both to raise their own morale and to spread propaganda. Wessel’s creation of a wind instrument band won considerable renown as a propaganda ploy in the neighborhoods. In 1929, he wrote his own lyrics titled “Die Fahne hoch” (“The Flag on High”) to the tune of an old German patriotic song called “Wacht am Rhein” (“The Watch on the Rhine”).

Martyrdom

Wessel died the way he had lived, violently. In mid-1929, after falling in love with a prostitute named Erna Jaenicke, he moved out of his mother’s house and into a sublet room in Friedrichshain, not far from the streets that he roamed with his thugs. This move caused his work for the Nazi Party to deteriorate. Although Goebbels sent someone to talk to him, Wessel considered it a show of disdain for his beloved Erna, his future bride. He continued to exist on the fringes of poverty, supporting Erna and himself on his wages as a construction worker. Also in 1929, his brother, Werner, was killed in a skiing accident with several of his friends. Wessel’s physical and psychological health began to decline, while the communists circulated flyers in the neighborhood calling for his murder.

The facts of Wessel’s death were never clear because they were quickly distorted by both the Nazis and the communists. What is clear is that on January 14, 1930, he had an argument with his landlady, Frau Salm. They argued over the rent and the presence of Erna, as well as the frequent disturbances from the gatherings of Wessel’s Brownshirts in his apartment. Unable to handle the situation alone, Frau Salm went to a local tavern and asked for help from the Red Front Fighters League, whose members were eager to avenge themselves on Wessel. Two men, Ali Hohler, who had underworld contacts, and Erwin Ruckert, an active party member, went to Wessel’s apartment, where Hohler shot him several times in front of Erna. Wessel died a few weeks later from his injuries.

Impact

Horst Wessel’s death fit perfectly into Goebbels’s propaganda machine, and he turned it into a unifying symbol of the Nazi Party. Wessel was glorified as a martyr to the Nazi cause. He was celebrated in myth and song, biography and film. Units in the German and Italian armed forces were named after him, as were public streets and squares. “The Flag on High” became known as the “Horst Wessel Lied” (Horst Wessel song) and was an anthem of the Nazi Party. It was considered a paean to bravery and to self-sacrifice for the führer and the Fatherland. Wessel’s grave was a Nazi shrine until 1945, the year the song was banned in Germany.

Bibliography

Baird, Jay W. “Goebbels, Horst Wessel, and the Myth of Resurrection and Return.” In To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Details the way in which Goebbels elevated Wessel as a Nazi martyr.

Bytwerk, Randall L. Bending Spines: The Propaganda of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004. This book provides an analysis of the material of the German Propaganda Archive.

Delarue, Jacques. The Gestapo: A History of Horror. Translated by Mervyn Savill. New York: William Morrow, 1964. An overview of the German secret police during the Nazi regime.