44 Facts About Horst Wessel

Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel was a member of the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, who became a propaganda symbol in Nazi Germany following his murder in 1930 by two members of the Communist Party of Germany.

Horst Wessel rose to command several SA squads and districts.

Horst Wessel's funeral was given wide attention in Berlin, with many of the Nazi elite in attendance.

Horst Wessel attended four different secondary schools in Berlin: firstly the Kollnische Gymnasium from 1914 to 1922, then briefly the Konigstadtisches Gymnasium and the Evangelisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster.

On 19 April 1926, Horst Wessel enrolled in Friedrich Wilhelm University to study law.

The Horst Wessel family, influenced by the politics of the father, avidly supported the monarchist German National People's Party, and when he was 15, Horst Wessel joined the DNVP's youth group Bismarckjugend, from which he resigned in 1925.

Horst Wessel soon began to frequent bars and hang out in flophouses, and founded his own youth group, the Knappschaft, the purpose of which was to "raise our boys to be real German men".

Horst Wessel himself described the Viking League as having "the ultimate aim" of the "establishment of a national dictatorship".

Horst Wessel soon became a local leader, engaging in street battles with youth members of their adversarial groups, such as the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party.

Later, Horst Wessel joined groups with a more sinister reputation, including the "Olympia German Association for Physical Training", a powerful paramilitary group which was the successor of the disbanded Reinhard Regiment.

Horst Wessel later commented that over two-thirds of his colleagues from the Viking League had already joined the SA and the Nazi Party.

Part of the attraction of the NSDAP to Horst Wessel was Joseph Goebbels, the Party's newly appointed Gauleiter of Berlin, about whom he would later say:.

At university, Horst Wessel joined a dueling society dedicated to "steeling and testing physical and moral fitness" through personal combat, while with the SA, which was always interested in a good street fight, he was immersed in the antisemitic attitudes typical of the extreme right-wing paramilitary culture of the time.

Horst Wessel soon impressed Goebbels; and in January 1928, a period in which the Berlin city authorities had banned the SA in an effort to curb political street violence, Horst Wessel was sent to Vienna to study the National Socialist Youth Group, as well as the organizational and tactical methods of the Nazi Party there.

Horst Wessel returned to Berlin in July 1928 to recruit local youths, and was involved in helping to implement a reorganization of the NSDAP in the city into a cell-structure similar to that used by the German Communist Party.

Horst Wessel did this despite SA rules forbidding its members from working for the Party.

In 1929, Horst Wessel became the Street Cell Leader of the Alexanderplatz Storm Section of the SA.

In October 1929, Horst Wessel dropped out of university to devote himself full-time to the Nazi movement.

Horst Wessel was recognized by Goebbels and the Berlin Nazi hierarchy as an effective street speaker; in the first 11 months of 1929, for instance, he spoke at 56 separate NSDAP events.

Horst Wessel made Adolf Hitler's principle his own: terror can be destroyed only by counterterror.

Goebbels' violent approach was appreciated by Horst Wessel, who preferred it to the official restraint he experienced as a member of the Bismarck Youth and the Viking League.

Horst Wessel kept two journals, one specifically about his political life.

Horst Wessel had broken one arm several times while horseback riding as a schoolboy which deformed it, and had been given a permanent exemption from physical education.

The Communist newspaper accused the police of letting the Nazis get away but arresting the injured Communists, while the Nazi newspaper claimed that Horst Wessel had been trying to give a speech when shadowy figures emerged and started the fight.

Horst Wessel was marked for death by the KPD, with his face and address featured on street posters.

In September 1929 Horst Wessel met Erna Janicke, a 23-year-old ex-prostitute, in a tavern not far from Alexanderplatz.

Later sources claim Horst Wessel earned money as Janicke's procurer, however this has never been substantiated.

Nevertheless, when they realized that Horst Wessel was involved in the dispute, they agreed to beat him up and get him out of Salm's flat by force.

When Horst Wessel, who was expecting a visit from the leader of another SA Sturm group, opened the door, he was almost immediately shot at point-blank range.

The Communists, in turn, claimed that Hohler had been Janicke's pimp until Horst Wessel stole her from him, and that this was the motive behind the shooting.

Goebbels saw in Horst Wessel's shooting the possibility of a propaganda bonanza.

Horst Wessel eulogized Wessel in his newspaper, Der Angriff, in overtly Christian tones:.

Horst Wessel was elevated by Goebbels' propaganda apparatus to the status of a leading martyr of the Nazi movement.

Many of Goebbels's most effective propaganda speeches were made at gravesides, but Horst Wessel received unusual attention among the many unremembered storm troopers.

Horst Wessel's coffin was paraded through large parts of the center of Berlin in a procession lasting many hours.

Horst Wessel said that Wessel's sacrifice of his life was "a monument more lasting than stone and bronze".

Horst Wessel felt that the Communists had "a loss of prestige that could never again be made good", as they were relegated to fuming on the side streets.

The death of Wessel and the proliferation of the "Horst Wessel Song" was an extension of the Nazi cult of martyrs, which included Freikorps member Leo Schlageter and the 15 Nazis and one bystander killed in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, who were reburied in Munich with great fanfare on 8 November 1935.

Horst Wessel's name was frequently invoked by the Nazis to bolster the core tenets of National Socialist ideology during the remaining existence of Nazi Germany.

Horst Wessel played the schalmei, a brass instrument which featured in groups called Schalmeienkapellen, and which is still used in folk celebrations.

Horst Wessel founded an "SA Schalmeienkapelle" band, which provided music during SA events.

In early 1929, Horst Wessel wrote the lyrics for a new Nazi fight song Kampflied, which was first published in Goebbels's newspaper Der Angriff in September, under the title Der Unbekannte SA-Mann.

The song was played in some Protestant places of worship, as elements of the Protestant Church in Germany had accepted and promulgated the Horst Wessel cult, built as it was by Goebbels on the model of past Christian martyrs.

Since 1989, two petitions have been filed asking that Horst Wessel's gravestone be rebuilt and restored to the St Nicholas Cemetery.