Horst Wessel leads his Sturm in Nurnberg, 1929
Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann.
Horst Wessel provided National Socialism with its greatest martyr. “One of the neighborhood leaders of the S.A. in Berlin, he was the son of a Protestant chaplain, who had forsaken his family and his studies and gone to live in a slum with a former prostitute and devote his life to fighting for Nazism. He was murdered by Communists in February 1930 and would have passed into oblivion along with hundreds of other victims of both sides in the street wars had it not been for the fact that he left behind a song whose words and tune he had composed. The Horst Wessel song soon became the official song of the Nazi party and later the second official anthem (after “Deutschland liber Alles”) of the Third Reich. Horst Wessel himself, thanks to Dr. Goebbels’ skillful propaganda, became one of the great hero legends of the movement, hailed as a pure idealist who had given his life for the cause.”