Horst Wessel - Death
Wessel’s No.5 Sturm angered the communist high command by recruiting freely from their ranks. More recently, he had fallen in with bad company. He dropped out of his law studies and was working as a laborer. Against his mother’s will he had moved into a sleazy attic room at No.62 Grosse Frankfurter Strasse with his 24-year-old girlfriend Erna Janichen, whom he had rescued from the streets.
It was supposed to be just a "proletarian thrashing" remove him from the flat by force on the evening of January 14, 1930. It ended fatally and marked the beginning of National Socialist sainthood for the 22-year-old victim. For two months, law student and SA man Horst Wessel had been subletting from the widow Elisabeth Salm on Große Frankfurter Straße in Berlin (today Karl-Marx-Allee). Wessel had been letting a girl, who was of Jewish origin, live with him for some time without paying more rent, as the widow demanded. The widow the widow Salm shared the apartment with Wessel and his girlfriend. One thing is for certain: this involuntary flat-share was not going well in early 1930.
Wessel, however, lived with "a woman of questionable morals" who wasn’t paying her share of the rent was too much for the landlady. After disputes over the rent arose, the situation escalated. Salm visited the "von Baer" pub, frequented by communists and Red Front fighters, hoping to find support from her deceased husband's political associates. The "Second Readiness" unit of the communist Red Front Fighters' League was meeting there, including 22-year-old Else Cohn. More than ten communists made their way to Große Frankfurter Straße 62. Two of them, Albrecht Höhler and Erwin Rückert, cocked their pistols in front of the room door. When Wessel, inside with Erna and another girl, opened the door, Höhler shot him in the face. As he left the apartment, Höhler nudged the seriously injured Wessel, saying, "You know what for."
A dispute over Wessel's girlfriend, the former prostitute Erna Jänichen, appeared to have been another factor. Albrecht "Ali" Höhler, pimp, communist, and Red Front League fighter, was considered a "tough guy" in the parlance of his time. After killing Wessel, Höhler was wanted. He had been clearly identified as the perpetrator by Erna Jaenichen; the former prostitute had recognized the pimp. To support the theory that it was a jealous act, the communist press claimed that Wessel had stolen his former "cat" from Höhler. As a convicted criminal and pimp with multiple convictions, Höhler did not conform to the ideal image of the heroic proletarian.
The director of the hospital who personally operated on Horst Wessel noted he " had the impression of a seriously ill man, who bravely, almost stubbornly, rebelled against his miserable state." From February 15 onward the condition worsened, and his strength receded in the presence of blood poisoning. He became rather lively when visitors came to see him. He received numerous visits from Dr. Goebbels and a few comrades from the SA, and it is even told that Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia - the "Nazi Prince" - paid a short visit to him.
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Wessel died — "just skin and bones" — of complications from the attack on 23 February. According to a medical report, this was probably because he had lost too much blood in the first few hours after his injury. A doctor who arrived shortly after the shooting was denied access by Wessel's SA comrades with the words: "A Jew is not to touch our Wessel." He could still have been alive if his SA comrades hadn't denied access to a Jewish doctor.
With only five dead by the end of 1929 Berlin had as yet few Nazi martyrs. But the war in the streets was intensifying. Capitalizing on these martyrs, Goebbels organised ever larger funerals. No murder really fired the imagination of the Party so much as that, when his time came, of young Horst Wessel himself.
Wessel's funeral illustrated how just out-of-control Berlin had become. Communists attacked the funeral procession and tried to seize the coffin. The burial becomes a demonstration of the SA troops' presence and a documentation of the failure of the police as the true representative of the executive branch. Horst Wessel's funeral symbolizes the end of the Weimar Republic. For the Nazi Gauleiter of the Reich capital, Joseph Goebbels, the attack on his charismatic rival was a gift. Communist newspapers at the time wrote that the pimp Horst Wessel had been shot during a dispute within the milieu, while the National Socialists, on the other hand, claimed that Wessel, as the most active SA man in Berlin, had been systematically murdered by the Communists.
As the coffin sank into the ground a thousand throats defiantly roared the anthem that bore its murdered composer’s name. In ten years, Goebbels prophesied to the SA men parading within the cemetery walls, in one of the finest speeches he ever delivered, that anthem would be sung by every schoolchild, by every factory worker, and by every marching soldier in Germany.
Goebbels said of Wessel that “sein Geist stieg in uns auf, um mit uns allen weiterzuleben … er marschiert in unseren Reihen mit!” (“his spirit rose up among us, to continue living with all of us … he marches in our ranks with us!”) thus transforming the mortal human Wessel into something transcendent and symbolic. In Goebbels’ obituary or tribute, he said : “Er hat den Kelch der Schmerzen bis zur Neige ausgetrunken … Deutschland hat gekämpft und gelitten, geduldet und darbt … über die Gräber vorwärts!” (“He has drunk the cup of pain to the dregs … Germany has fought and suffered, endured and starves … forward over the graves!”). This heavily sacrificial, religiously inspired imagery is characteristic of how Goebbels mythologized Wessel.
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