Horst Wessel - A Martyr for Germany

Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel (born October 9, 1907 in Bielefeld; † February 23, 1930 in Berlin) was a Sturmführer of the SA, the paramilitary fighting organization of the NSDAP, in Berlin. After Wessel was killed by KPD members, NSDAP propaganda stylized him as a "martyr of the movement".

Wessel was the author of the Horst Wessel song, which became the party anthem of the NSDAP shortly after his death. From 1933 to 1945 it formed the second part of the German national anthem following the Deutschlandlied.

Horst Wessel grew up in a parsonage as the son of the Protestant pastor Wilhelm Ludwig Georg Wessel (1879-1922) and his wife Margarete Wessel (1881 or 1882-1970). His father worked from 1906 to 1908 at the Bielefeld Pauluskirche and from 1913 at the historically important Berlin Nikolaikirche. Even after the November Revolution of 1918, Wessel's parents always remained imperial. The marriage later had two more children: the daughter Ingeborg Wessel (1909–1993) and the son Werner Wessel (1910–1929).

Wessel attended four different high schools in Berlin: from 1914 to 1922 the Kölln High School (up to Untersekunda), then for a short time the Königstädtische Gymnasium and the Protestant High School for the Grauen Kloster. He spent the last two and a half years of school at the Luisenstädtisches Gymnasium. There he passed the Abitur in the spring of 1926.

From 1922 to 1925 he was a member of the Bismarck Youth, the youth organization of the right-wing conservative DNVP. Already here Wessel belonged to a group that hunted communist and social democratic youths as "Rollkommando Friedrichshain". In the spring of 1924 he took part in a several-week training course run by the Black Reichswehr and since then - until these were banned in May 1926 - he was a member of two paramilitary organizations: the Wikingbund and the "sports club" Olympia.

From 1926 he studied law for four semesters and in 1928 became a member of the Corps Normannia Berlin and Alemannia Vienna. In the same year he gave up his studies and worked, among other things, as a taxi driver and shipper in the subway construction.

Wessel joined the NSDAP (membership number 48.434) and the SA in 1926 and rose to a leading figure in the Berlin SA until 1928. He acted for some time in SA-Sturm 2 (Prenzlauer Berg) and in the spring of 1929 took over Sturm 5 in the working-class district of Friedrichshain, a distinct stronghold of the KPD.

Wessel attracted attention here several times because he was wearing SA uniform - accompanied by SA men in civilian clothes - cycling down the main streets. Provocative "marches" of his storm were accompanied by police officers.

In 1929 Wessel first published his poem “Die Fahne hoch, die Linien sich!” (Later changed to: die Reihen fest geschlossen) in the National Socialist magazine Der Angriff.

Wessel became well-known among the Communists when – on orders from Goebbels – he led a number of SA incursions into the Fischerkiez, an extremely poor Berlin district where Communists mingled with underworld figures. Several of these agitations were only minor altercations, but one took place outside the tavern which the local Communist Party (KPD) used as its headquarters. As a result of that melee five Communists were injured, four of them seriously. The National Socialist newspaper claimed that Wessel had been trying to give a speech when shadowy figures emerged and started the fight. Wessel was marked for death by the KPD, with his face and address featured on street posters. The slogan of the KPD and the Red Front Fighters' League became "Strike the fascists wherever you find them."

In September 1929 Wessel met Erna Jänicke, a 23-year-old ex-prostitute, in a tavern not far from Alexanderplatz. On 1 November, she moved into his room on the third floor of 62 Große Frankfurter Straße (today Karl-Marx-Allee), which he sublet from 29-year old Elisabeth Salm, whose late husband had been an active Communist Red Front Fighter, although she described herself as apolitical. After a few months, there was a dispute between Salm and Wessel over unpaid rent in which Salm claimed that Wessel threatened her. The landlady – who may have feared that she could lose them if Jänicke, who she assumed was a working prostitute, was found to be living there – wanted Jänicke to leave but the latter refused to, so on the evening of 14 January 1930 Salm appealed to Communist friends of her late husband for help. At first the Communists were not interested in helping Salm, as she was not well-liked by them because she had given her husband a church funeral instead of allowing the KPD to give him the standard burial rite used for members of the Red Front Fighters' League, but 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. Knowing they needed a tough guy, they sent word to a nearby tavern that they needed Albrecht "Ali" Höhler, an armed pimp, perjurer and petty criminal. Höhler, a heavily tattooed cabinetmaker who had just recently been released from prison, was a Communist and a member of the Red Front Fighters' League.

Horst Wessel was visited on January 14, 1930 by Albrecht Höhler, an active member of the KPD, and other members of a substitute organization of the then banned Red Front Fighters League in his apartment at Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62, Albrecht Höhler shot Horst Wessel in the head when the door was opened.

At 10:15 p.m., about 15 minutes after the attack, one of the witnesses called the NSDAP district headquarters. At 10:30 p.m., an ambulance alerted there arrived and took Wessel to the municipal hospital in Friedrichshain, where an emergency operation that lasted from 10:50 p.m. to 0:45 a.m. saved his life. Wessel died there on February 23 of blood poisoning.

The joint grave of Horst and Werner Wessels and their father was in the St. Marien and St. Nikolai Cemetery I in Berlin in the Prenzlauer Berg district. Soldiers of the Red Army leveled it in 1945 on the orders of the Soviet occupying forces, but left the part of the stone with the inscription for the father standing.

In 2000, on the 70th anniversary of Horst Wessel's death, National Socialists wanted to hold a demonstration including a wreath-laying ceremony with 500 participants at the cemetery; the police forbade this. In 2002 a group called "Autonomous Gravedigger" dug up the supposed skull of Horst Wessel and threw it into the Spree. According to the police, digging was only superficial at the time; it seems doubtful that a skull was actually excavated. In September 2003, strangers rioted at the grave and knocked over gravestones. In June 2013, the cemetery management had the remains of the tombstone removed.