Horst Wessel and the Propaganda of Ultra-Right Martyrdom
Recently, I posted a commentary titled “Charlie Kirk and the Propaganda of Ultra-Right Martyrdom” on the Times of Israel.
It is not hyperbole to compare the baby want-to-be fascist dictator, Donald Trump, with his mentor and role model, his daddy and actual fascist dictator, Adolf Hitler along with his high-ranking minion, Joseph Goebbels, in their use of martyrs for propaganda purposes.
As MAGA has risen Charlie Kirk, German Nazis elevated Horst Wessel to the status of martyr in the service of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party).
Horst Wessel
Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel was born on 9 October 1907 in Bielefeld, Westphalia (a region in northwestern Germany). He was the son of Wilhelm Ludwig Georg Wessel who was at that time a Lutheran minister in Bielefeld. Wessel’s mother, Bertha Luise Margarete Wessel (born Richter), also came from a family of Lutheran pastors.
Horst was raised along with his sister Ingeborg Paula Margarethe and his brother Werner Georg Erich Ludwig.
Wessel graduated from the Luisenstädtisches Gymnasium, which would later be renamed in his memory. In 1926, Wessel enrolled in Friedrich Wilhelm University to study law.
Shaped by the father’s political beliefs, the Wessel family supported the monarchist German National People’s Party (DNVP), a prominent right-wing party. At age 15, Wessel joined the DNVP’s youth group Bismarckjugend (“Bismarck Youth”) in 1922, from which he left three years later.
In his late teen years, Wessel frequented bars and hung out in flophouses. During this period, Horst organized his own youth group, the Knappschaft. His stated purpose was to “raise our boys to be real German men.”
Toward the conclusion of 1923, he joined the Wiking Liga (“Viking League”), a paramilitary group founded by Hermann Ehrhardt (a German naval officer in World War I who became an anti-republican and antisemitic German nationalist leader during the Weimar Republic. The expressed goal of Wiking Liga was to bring about “the revival of Germany on a national and ethnic basis through the spiritual education of its members” –- basically, to Make Germany Great Again.
Wessel described the Viking League having “the ultimate aim” of the “establishment of a national dictatorship.” Soon after joining, he rose as a local leader, where he often conducted street battles with members of opposing youth groups including the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD). However, the Viking League was banned in Prussia in May 1926, when officials discovered that it, along with similar groups, were planning a coup against the government. At age 19, Horst resigned from the League and became a member of the Sturmabteilung.
Wessel was placed in command of several Sturmabteilung (SA) or “Storm Division” groups (nicknamed the “Brownshirts”), which played a vital role in clearing Adolf Hitler’s path to power by intimidating and harassing political opponents such as the Communists and Social Democrats.
Wessel greatly admired Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s newly appointed Gauleiter (regional leader) of Berlin. Later, Wessel wrote:
“There was nothing [Goebbels] couldn’t handle. The party comrades clung to him with great devotion. The SA would have let itself be cut to pieces for him. Goebbels – he was like Hitler himself. Goebbels – he was ‘our’ Goebbels.”
Joseph Goebbels soon became impressed with Wessel, especially in his ability as an effective street speaker and debater. In fact, during 1929 alone, he spoke at approximately 60 NSDAP gatherings. During that year, Goebbels appointed Horst to become the Street Cell Leader of the Alexanderplatz Storm Section of the SA, and later as district leader of the SA for Friedrichshain with the rank of Sturmführer.
Wessel wrote several songs for the SA, with some in mocking imitation of the Communist paramilitary, the Red Front Fighters’ League. He wrote them as parody to bait the Communists into attaching his troops and to heighten the morale of his men. Wessel also wrote the lyrics to “Die Fahne hoch!” (“Raise the Flag!”), which would later come to be known as the “Horst Wessel Song.”
From 1930 through the end of World War II, it became the anthem of the Nazi Party, and between 1933 to 1945, the Nazis made it the co-national anthem throughout all of Germany, along with the first stanza of the “Deutschlandlied.”
Horst Wessel’s Nazi career came to a swift end when two Communists found him alone and shot him in the head on 14 January 1930. Albrecht “Ali” Höhler was arrested and charged with his murder. Though the court sentenced Höhler to a prison term of six years, members of the SA forcibly removed him from jail and killed him following the Nazis taking power in 1933.
As Wessel lay dying in hospital, Goebbels released reports accusing the attack on “degenerate communist subhumans.”
Many Nazi elites attended Horst Wessel’s funeral in 1930. Goebbels had been trying to find someone to turn into a martyr to advance the Nazi cause, and he settled on Horst Wessel.
Goebbels eulogized Wessel in his newspaper, Der Angriff, using blatantly Christian tones:
“A Christian Socialist! A man who calls out through his deeds: ‘Come to me, I shall redeem you!’….A divine element works in him, making him the man he is and causing him to act in this way and no other. One man must set an example and offer himself up as a sacrifice! Well, then, I am ready!”
Though Hitler could not attend Wessel’s funeral over safety concerns, he called Wessel a “blood witness” whose song had become “a battle hymn for millions.” Wessel sacrificing his life was “a monument more lasting than stone and bronze.” The Nazi Party declared a two-month period of mourning.
On their march to the funeral, 16,000 members of the Berlin and Brandenburg SA and SS passed the Community Party headquarters as a calculated act to provoke and ridicule them. Hitler spoke that night at a memorial service at the Berlin Sportpalast, at which the “Funeral March” from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung was played. The stage was festooned with an altar made from “laurel trees, branches, candelabra and a larger-than-lifesize portrait of Wessel”.
Hitler piled admiration on “those fanatics who are consumed by the great task of their age” – (with “fanaticism” seen as a positive virtue among the Nazis) – “who live for that task and who die for it…[they would] later be not only the martyrs of their struggle but also the seed from which the subsequent harvest [would come]”.
The Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, called Wessel “the hero of the Brown Revolution” and referred to his “sacrificial death” that “passionately inflamed millions who followed.”
In commemoration of Horst Wessel and his contributions to the Nazi Party, in 1933, they renamed the Berlin district of Friedrichshain, where Wessel died, to “Horst Wessel Stadt” and the Bülowplatz in the Mitte district was renamed “Horst-Wessel-Platz.” A German naval three-masted training ship the Nazis named the SSS Horst Wessel in 1936. Many other pieces of territory and buildings were also named after Wessel.
Following World War II, the ship was taken as a war prize by the United States, and the German districts were given their original names. People vandalized Wessel’s memorial and destroyed his remains and the remains of his brother Werner. Several Neo-Nazi groups have tried to resurrect Horst Wessel as a symbolic reminder of days of German Nazi rule.
History will be the judge over the usefulness of Charlie Kirk as the ultra-right’s martyr.
