5. The Horst Wessel Lied becomes a Nazi anthem
In January 1930, two gunmen from the German Communist Party (KPD) shot Horst Wessel in the face at point blank range, severely and painfully wounding him. Wessel was an officer of the Nazi SA and a veteran of several street battles with the communists and other anti-Nazi groups. He was also the writer of a song sung by Nazis as they demonstrated in the streets, which he called “Raise the Flag’. Wessel was essentially a street thug who worked for Goebbels, inciting violence during demonstrations, which Goebbels then blamed on the communists and others in his propaganda newspapers and pamphlets. Shot in his apartment, which he shared with a prostitute, Wessel lingered for more than a month before succumbing to blood poisoning.
As Wessel lay in the hospital, Goebbels wrote articles and speeches delivered by other Nazi leaders which sanctified him, referring to his killers as “degenerate communist subhumans”. The murderer was discovered to have been an acquaintance of the prostitute with whom Wessel shared living spaces, but the Nazis denied any further link between the two. Eventually, more than eleven people were charged with being complicit in Wessel’s murder, which the Nazi propaganda machine quickly turned into martyrdom. Goebbels eulogized him as a “Christian socialist” thereby distancing him and the Nazis further from the godless communists. Three years after the murder Hitler delivered a speech at Wessel’s grave, accompanied by the singing of the song Wessel had written, then known as the Horst Wessel Lied, an anthem which signified Nazi courage and sacrifice for greater Germany.