Martyr of the Nazi Party, born in Bielefeld, NWC Germany. He joined the Nazis in 1926 and became a member of the Storm Troopers. As a student, he wrote the words to a music-hall song popular at the German front in 1914. He was killed in his home in a fight, possibly by communists. Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists renamed the song the Horst Wessel Lied, had it adopted as their anthem, and made a martyr of him.
Horst Ludwig Wessel (September 9, 1907 – February 23, 1930), German Nazi activist, was made a posthumous hero of the Nazi movement following his violent death in 1930. He was the author of the lyrics to the song "Die Fahne hoch" ("The Flag on High"), usually known as "the Horst Wessel Song," which became the Nazi Party anthem and Germany's official co-national anthem.
Early life
Wessel was born in Bielefeld in Westphalia, the son of a Lutheran pastor, Dr Ludwig Wessel, who from 1913 until his death in 1923 was the minister at the Nikolaikirche, one of Berlin's oldest churches.
Although he was later portrayed by hostile sources as an illiterate thug, Wessel had a good education and was of at least average intelligence. In April 1926 he enrolled in the law faculty of Friedrich-Wilhelm University (now Humboldt University) in Unter den Linden, and appears to have been a satisfactory student until he decided to devote all his time to the Nazi movement.
Wessel was politically active from an early age. His father was a supporter of the conservative German National People's Party (DNVP), and when he was 15 Wessel joined the DNVP youth grup, the Bismarckjugend.
Nazi activist
By 1926, however, Wessel had grown too radical for the DNVP, and in December of that year he joined the Nazi Party and its paramilitary organisation, the SA. Wessel was one of the wave of new young recruits Goebbels brought into the party.
Wessel soon impressed Goebbels and in January 1928, during the period when the Berlin city authorities had banned the SA in an effort to curb political street violence, he was sent on a study trip to Vienna, to study organizational and tactical methods of the Nazi movement there. In May 1929 Wessel was appointed leader of SA-Troop 34, based in the Friedrichshain district where he was now living.
In addition to his political activities, Wessel had some musical talents. In early 1929 Wessel wrote the lyrics for a new Nazi "fighting song" (Kampflied), which was published for the first time in Goebbels's newspaper Der Angriff in September, under the title "Der Unbekannte SA-Mann" (the Unknown SA-Man). This was the song later known as "Die Fahne hoch" from its opening line, or as the "Horst Wessel Song."
The Alexanderplatz, the centre of Berlin's nightlife at this time, was part of the territory of Wessels's SA troop, and in September 1929 he met an 18-year-old prostitute, Erna Jänicke, in an Alexanderplatz bar. Frau Salm seems to have developed an active dislike for Wessel.
On the evening of 14 January 1930 Wessel answered a knock on his door, and was shot in the face by an assailant who then fled the scene. The KPD denied any knowledge of the attack and said it resulted from a dispute over money between Wessel and his landlady. It is also possible that the shooting was revenge by local Communists for Wessel's alleged role in the murder by local Nazis of a 17-year-old Communist, Camillo Ross, earlier in the day.
Posthumous fame
Wessel was buried on 1 March in the graveyard of the Nickolaikirche, his father's old church.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, an elaborate memorial was erected over the grave, and it became the site of annual pilgrimages by the Nazis, at which the Horst Wessel Song was sung and speeches made. With the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, the memorial was destroyed and Wessel's remains were apparently disinterred and also destroyed.
Wessel was elevated by Goebbels's propaganda apparatus to the status of leading martyr of the Nazi movement. Die Brünnen, the SA journal, declared, "How high Horst Wessel towers over that Jesus of Nazareth - that Jesus who pleaded that the bitter cup be taken from him. How unattainably high all Horst Wessels stand above Jesus!" Wessel was commemorated in memorials, books and films.
The Berlin district of Friedrichshain, where Wessel died, was renamed Horst Wessel, and the main square in the area, Bülowplatz, was renamed Horst-Wessel-Platz, as was the U-bahn station nearby.
In 1936, the German Navy commissioned a three-masted training ship and named it the Horst Wessel.
The "martyrdom" of Horst Wessel led directly to the promotion of his song "Die Fahne Hoch" as the official Song of Consecration (Weihelied) for the Nazi Party. The song was banned along with all other Nazi symbols in 1945 and both the lyrics and tune remain illegal in Germany to this day.
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