Horst Wessel (1907–1930)
Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel was a young leader of the Nazi Party in the working-class neighborhood of Friedrichshain. Wessel was the SA [SA is the abbreviation of ‘Sturmabteilung’, literally ‘Storm Detachment’, the Nazis’ paramilitary wing, known as ‘Brownshirts’] leader from Berlin. Hitler said that Horst Wessel would be remembered for hundreds of years. Today, most people have never heard of him. Two myths have since competed about Wessel’s murder: the Nazis said he was assassinated by a red hit squad; the communists said he was a pimp and was killed in a dispute with another pimp. Both these myths are completely false.
Horst Wessel was something of a brand, a Nazi brand, and the party was very careful to ensure that this person and the cult always had supremacy, so to speak, and it also had almost a sacred significance. essel is a heroic figure of the so-called Kampfzeit (fighting period), the period before 1933, associated with street fighting and physical confrontations.
Similar to other "fallen" supporters of the Nazi movement, he was stylized by Nazi propaganda as a "martyr of the movement." The series of this special hero worship began with Albert Leo Schlageter in June 1923, continued with the sixteen Hitler followers killed in the Hitler Putsch on the morning of November 9, 1923, in front of the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, and ended with the almost bizarre mystification of the "Hitler Youth Quex" (in real life, Herbert Norkus, who was fatally wounded in early 1932 at the age of just 16 by "young communists" barely older than him).
Horst Wessel embodied the Nazi Party in Berlin like no other. Horst Wessel's stature as an icon of the Third Reich achieved such heights that the legend of his life and death crosses into the territory of founding Mythology for National Socialist Germany. Horst Wessel served as an example to the youth of a defeated and desperate nation, a shining illustration of the value of courage and devotion, and proof that noble deeds often far outlive one's own life and even the original circumstances in which they were made.
Joseph Goebbels, as Gauleiter, or regional party leader, had been tasked with leading the fight for power in Berlin. Arriving on 07 November 1926, Goebbels turned Berlin into a violent laboratory for the future dictatorship, availing himself of the services of the uniformed Sturmabteilung. The SA combined soldierly romanticism, the hatred of younger people for the older elites, and the rage of Berlin's working-class in the eastern part of the city against its wealthier western districts.
Goebbels wanted Hitler's party to show its colors in Berlin. Berlin's new Nazi leader decided to combat the left's superiority in numbers with frontal attacks. The brownshirts -- who included the unemployed, the underemployed, apprentices and high-school students -- were "political soldiers." In Goebbel's view, their task was the "conquest of the street." He justified his strategy of provocation by saying that the Nazis could be accused of many things, but certainly not of being dull. Street battles and brawls at political meetings forged a sense of unity and camaraderie among party members in Berlin. Goebbels established the newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack) in July 1927.
The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was headed in Berlin by Walter Ulbricht, who would go on to become the leader of post-war East Germany. The activist party had a powerful street-fighting paramilitary organization in the Roter Frontkämpferbund (Alliance of Red Front-Fighters). The Communists initially hoped to fight off the Nazis with fists, brass knuckles and revolvers (their motto was: "Beat the fascists wherever you encounter them!").
Horst Wessel was one of the Nazi propagandists who knew how to gain the support of workers. Born in 1907, he had graduated from a high school that emphasized the classics but dropped out of university before earning a degree. Wessel saw himself as a socialist who had been shaken by the "great social impoverishment and servitude of the working classes in all professions."
Wessel, the son of a Protestant pastor, was 19 when he joined the Nazi Party in 1926. By 1929, he had advanced to become head of an SA squad in Friedrichshain. Within a few weeks, Wessel's rhetorical skills had helped him recruit dozens of new members. Together, they would become the legendary "SA-Sturm 5." The son of a German nationalist pastor had led SA Storm No. 5 in the distinctly proletarian, pro-communist district of Friedrichshain since the spring. Wessel led his men in Berlin, where the Communist paramilitary Red Front Fighters' League did their best to disrupt the activities of the new German Nationalists. In response to his capable leadership, which threatened the Communist stranglehold on much of the city, the Red Front put out a hit on the young SA-Man.
Nazi Party Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels, annoyed, wrote in his diary that Wessel regretted "the lack of activism in the SA." Hitler's man in the Reich capital confessed: "I'm caught in a dilemma. If we become activists in Berlin, our people will smash everything to pieces." Goebbels simply couldn't get Wessel under control. He was a "good boy who spoke with fabulous idealism." But the Gauleiter feared that the charismatic young man could be a threat to him.
As the new Reichstag election of September 14, 1930 approached the rift between his gau’s officers and the impoverished and disgruntled fist-fighters of the Berlin S.A. came to a head. They saw no signs that Hitler intended to allow them any real reward for their bravery. The result would be the first full-scale S.A. mutiny during the heat of the summer in Berlin. But Hitler intended to attain power strictly legally.
The Trump administration portrayed Kirk as a political martyr, the American counterpart of the German Nazi Horst Wessel. After his violent death in February 1930, the Nazis eulogized Wessel as an exemplar of Germany’s patriotic youth. A hymn to honor Wessel’s memory, the notorious “Horst Wessel Song,” became the anthem of the Nazi Party.
George Conway, a former Trump associate and now vocal critic, doubled down on comparisons to Charlie Kirk's killing with what happened in Nazi Germany — the assassination of Horst Wessel. "They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then, and what Trump and MAGA are doing today, are striking, chilling—and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook," Conway posted on X.
On February 27th, 1933, a fire broke out in multiple locations at the German parliament, the Reichstag. An unemployed former communist Dutch bricklayer, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested on the scene with incendiary materials. He allegedly confessed to starting the fire. The next day, Hindenburg signed the “Decree for the Protection of People and State”, suspending freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and allowing detention without trial. This became the legal foundation for Nazi one-party rule.
Trump’s martyrization of Charlie Kirk and his goal of using it as a new Reichstag Fire has been heard loud and clear across MAGA and the wider radicalized right. White supremacist Matt Forney made perhaps the clearest argument for a new Reichstag Fire, even before Trump gave his speech: “Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.”
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
