Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel (9 October 1907 – 23 February 1930) was a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, who became a propaganda symbol in Nazi Germany following his murder in 1930 by two members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). After his death, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels elevated him into a martyr for the Nazi Party.
Wessel first joined a number of youth groups and extreme right-wing paramilitary groups, but later resigned from them and joined the SA, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. He rose to command several SA squads and districts. On 14 January 1930, he was shot in the head by two Communists after pub owner Elisabeth Salm attempted to evict Wessel from a subleased room as Wessel refused to move out despite overdue rent payments. Albrecht "Ali" Höhler was arrested and charged with his murder. Höhler was initially sentenced to six years in prison but was forcibly removed from jail and killed by the SA in September 1933, nine months after the Nazis came to power.
Wessel's funeral was given wide attention in Berlin, with many of the Nazi elite in attendance. After his death, he became a propaganda symbol in Nazi Germany. A march for which he had written the lyrics was renamed the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" ("Horst Wessel Song"), and became the official anthem of the Nazi Party. After Adolf Hitler came to national power in 1933, the song became the co-national anthem of Germany, along with the first verse of the previous "Deutschlandlied", or "Deutschland Deutschland über alles"; nowadays the third verse "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit" is used.
Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel was born on 9 October 1907 in Bielefeld, Westphalia, the son of Wilhelm Ludwig Georg Wessel (born 15 July 1879), a Lutheran minister in Bielefeld, and later in Mülheim an der Ruhr, then at the Nikolai Church, one of Berlin's oldest churches. Wessel's mother, Bertha Luise Margarete Wessel (née Richter), also came from a family of Lutheran pastors. Wessel's parents were married on 1 May 1906. He grew up alongside his sister Ingeborg Paula Margarethe, born 19 May 1909, and his brother Werner Georg Erich Ludwig, born 22 August 1910. When they moved from Mülheim to Berlin, the family lived in the Jüdenstraße.
Wessel attended four different schools in Berlin: firstly the Köllnische Gymnasium from 1914 to 1922, then briefly the Königstädtisches Gymnasium and the Evangelisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster ("Protestant Grey Cloister Gymnasium"). For his final two years of schooling, he attended the Luisenstädtisches Gymnasium, where he passed his Abitur examination and which would later be renamed in his memory. On 19 April 1926, Wessel enrolled in Friedrich Wilhelm University to study law.
The Wessel family, influenced by the politics of the father, avidly supported the monarchist German National People's Party (DNVP). In 1922, aged 15, Wessel joined the DNVP's youth group Bismarckjugend ("Bismarck Youth"), from which he resigned in 1925. At the time, the DNVP was the most influential right-wing party.}
Wessel soon began to frequent bars and hang out in flophouses. He founded his own youth group, the Knappschaft, the purpose of which was to "raise our boys to be real German men". Near the end of 1923, he joined the Viking League (Bund Wiking), a paramilitary group founded by Hermann Ehrhardt – the stated goal of which was to effect "the revival of Germany on a national and ethnic basis through the spiritual education of its members". Wessel described the Viking League as having "the ultimate aim" of the "establishment of a national dictatorship". He soon became a local leader, engaging in street battles with youth members of their adversarial groups, such as the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD). Later, Wessel joined groups with a more sinister reputation, including the "Olympia German Association for Physical Training", a powerful paramilitary group which was the successor of the disbanded Reinhard Regiment.
On 22 December 1929, Wessel's brother Werner and three other members of the Sturmabteilung and Nazi Party froze to death on a skiing trip.
In May 1926, the Viking League and the Olympia Association were banned in Prussia, when it was discovered they were planning a coup against the government. Realizing the League would not achieve its self-defined mission and was moving in the direction of tolerating the parliamentary political system, Wessel resigned from it on 23 November 1926, at age 19. On 7 December, he joined the paramilitary Sturmabteilung ("Storm Detachment" or SA) of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party). He later commented that over two-thirds of his colleagues from the Viking League had already joined the SA and the Nazi Party.
Part of the attraction of the NSDAP to Wessel was Joseph Goebbels, the Party's newly appointed Gauleiter (regional leader) of Berlin, about whom he would later say:
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.
Writing in his diaries – he kept two, one for his political life and one for other matters – Wessel described the differences between the groups he had been a part of, and the appeal of being involved in the Nazi Party:
Bismarck League, that was pleasure and enjoyment, the Viking League was adventure, the atmosphere of the coup, playing at soldiers, albeit against a background that was not without its dangers. But the NSDAP was a political awakening. ... The movement's centrifugal force was tremendous. ... One meeting followed hard on the heels of the last one. ... Street demonstrations, recruiting drives in the press, propaganda trips into the provinces creating an atmosphere of activism and high political tension that could only help the movement.
It was Goebbels who had created this atmosphere, which prompted right-wing youth to leave organizations they felt had let them down for the excitement of the Nazi Party's highly visible activism.
For a few years Wessel lived a double life, as a middle-class university law student and as a member of the primarily working-class SA, but in some ways the two worlds were converging in ideology. At university, Wessel joined a dueling society dedicated to "steeling and testing physical and moral fitness" through personal combat. With the SA, which was always interested in a good street fight, he was immersed in the antisemitic attitudes typical of the extreme right-wing paramilitary culture of the time.
His study of jurisprudence at school was seen through the filter of his belief that the application of the law was primarily an instrument of power; and his personal beliefs, already geared toward anti-Jewish attitudes, were further hardened by the novel From Double Eagle to Red Flag by White emigre General Pyotr Krasnov, which is set between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Red Guards' victory at the end of the Russian Civil War, and which was first published in the Weimar Republic in 1922. According to Wessel's sister, General Krasnov's novel was enormously influential upon her brother.
In August 1927, Wessel traveled in a group of fifty SA men to the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, which he described as "Flags, enthusiasm, Hitler, all of Nuremberg a brown army camp. It made an enormous impression." Wessel was with other Berlin-based Nazis making up a group of 400, led by Goebbels. At that time the SA was banned in Berlin. When they returned, they were arrested.
Wessel soon impressed Goebbels. In January 1928, a period in which the Berlin city authorities had banned the SA in an effort to curb political street violence, Wessel was sent to Vienna to study the National Socialist Youth Group, and the organizational and tactical methods of the Nazi Party there. In July 1928, he returned to Berlin to recruit local youths, and was involved in helping to implement a reorganization of the NSDAP in Berlin into a cell-structure, similar to that used by the German Communist Party (KPD). Wessel did this despite SA rules forbidding its members from working for the Party.