The Making of a Nazi Hero: The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel 9780755623600, 9781780760773

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List of Illustrations

Albrecht Höhler, police photo, 1929. Landesarchiv, Berlin (p. 11). Funeral of Horst Wessel on 1 March 1930. Bundesarchiv, Berlin (p. 17). Facsimile page from Politika. Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Cracow (p. 18). Margarete and Dr Ludwig Wessel with their son, Horst, late 1907. From Horst Wessel by Ingeborg Wessel (Munich, 1933) (p. 21). Horst Wessel at a birthday party of his brother Werner, summer 1927. Ullstein Bild (p. 31). Horst Wessel in uniform, 1924–25 (original). Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Cracow (p. 37). Horst Wessel in uniform, 1924–25 (retouched). From Horst Wessel by Ingeborg Wessel (Munich, 1933) (p. 37). The student of law as a member of the Berlin Corps Normannia. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (p. 40). ‘Fischerzelle’ SA unit. Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Cracow (p. 42). SA propaganda tour. Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Cracow (p. 55). Horst Wessel at the 1929 Nuremberg Rally. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin © Heinrich Hoffmann (p. 61). Horst Wessel with the Viking League, presumably 1924–25. Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Cracow (p. 69). Police photos of Albrecht ‘Ali’ Höhler. Bundesarchiv, Berlin (p. 78). Police photos of Ernst Lange, January 1930. Landesarchiv, Berlin (p. 89). The ‘hero’s mother’ Margarete Wessel as Mussolini’s guest of honour, 1937. Ullstein Bild (p. 117).

Still photo from the propaganda film ‘Hans Westmar’, 1933. Heinrich-HeineInstitut, Düsseldorf (p. 121). Film poster of ‘Hans Westmar’. Heinrich-Heine-Institut, Düsseldorf (p. 122). The decorated Wessel grave in Berlin, 1933 or later. Landesarchiv, Berlin (p. 125). ‘Horst Wessel Hall’ in Vienna, 1938. Bildarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (p. 139). Nazi Party leaders dedicating the Horst Wessel memorial stone at the Nicolai Cemetery, 22 January 1933. Landesarchiv, Berlin (p. 145). Sculptor Paul Gruson with a Wessel bust, presumably 1935. AKG images (p. 150). Dedication of the Horst Wessel memorial stone in Bielefeld, 8 October 1933. Stadtarchiv und Landesgeschichtliche Bibliothek, Bielefeld (p. 153). Dedication of the Wessel statue by the sculptor Ernst Paul Hinckeldey in Bielefeld, 14 June 1939. Stadtarchiv und Landesgeschichtliche Bibliothek, Bielefeld (p. 158). Horst Wessel monument on the Süntel near Hamelin, presumably 1939. Private collection (p. 164). Rudolf Diels in 1933. Bundesarchiv, Berlin (p. 190). Richard Fiedler. Bundesarchiv, Berlin (p. 190). SA funeral procession for a Standartenführer, 1934. Landesarchiv, Berlin (p. 195). Willi Schmidt, a.k.a. ‘Pig Face’. Landesarchiv, Berlin (p. 198). Sally Epstein. Bundesarchiv, Berlin (p. 202). Hans Ziegler. Bundesarchiv, Berlin (p. 202). Peter Stoll in 1934. Landesarchiv, Berlin (p. 214). Erwin Rückert in 1930. Landesarchiv, Berlin (p. 214). Max Jambrowski. Landesarchiv, Berlin, (p. 215). Willi Jambrowski. Landesamt fur Bürger-und Ordnungsangelegenheiten, Berlin (p. 215).

To Emilia & Jan

Acknowledgements This book was first published in German in 2009. I am very pleased to see it available in English. In this particular case, you might even say the book is following its author, as I recently moved to Britain to teach as DAAD Francis L. Carsten Lecturer in Modern German History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London (UCL). This is truly a wonderful academic institution, and I would be delighted if my new colleagues were to accept this book as a kind of ‘welcome gift’. I also hope it helps students better understand some of the violent aspects of German history in the twentieth century. A number of people and institutions have made this English edition possible. I would like to thank, in particular, Pia Christ (from the literary agency Wortvollendet in Potsdam and Wiesbaden), Gesche Wendebourg (at Siedler publishing house in Munich), Joanna Godfrey (at I.B.Tauris in London), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Young Academy (Junges Kolleg) at the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the collecting society VG Wort, the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, and the Federal Foreign Office of Germany for their jointly run programme ‘Geisteswissenschaften International’, which covered the translation costs. Above all, I am extremely grateful to David Burnett, who not only took a vivid interest in the often rather gloomy topic of this book, but also provided an accurate, sensitive and consistent translation. Finally, I would like to thank Eleanor Janega, who read the final manuscript before it went into print. All remaining faults are, however, the author’s responsibility.

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Preface In the 1930s, the head of the American School in Berlin, Gregor Ziemer, travelled through Nazi Germany to learn more about education under the swastika. One night, at the Roman amphitheatre in Trier, he had a memorable encounter. Thirty young girls in uniform, members of the League of German Girls (BDM), danced in a circle and sang, their moonlit hands imploringly raised to the sky. When Ziemer approached them they explained to the supposed American tourist the meaning of their nocturnal rite: it was the birthday of Horst Wessel, a national hero. Wessel was a martyr, who had died for the Party, they said, and was canonized by the Führer. Their dance was meant to invoke the ‘Party saint’ and likewise served as a fertility ritual: the spirit of Wessel was to help them become good mothers.1 That the pastor’s son and SA-Sturmführer Horst Wessel would one day become the object of a cult and be venerated as a fertility god might certainly be deemed a vagary of history – a vagary with a remarkable impact. It was Victor Klemperer who noted that in the early days of the Third Reich Horst Wessel held a central position in the ‘popular imagination’, one that only the stars of the day – race-car drivers or boxing heroes – could hope to challenge.2 Wessel, born in Bielefeld in 1907 and raised in Berlin, was virtually unknown during his lifetime. As a student at secondary school he belonged to various right-wing extremist organizations, eventually joining the Nazis in the second half of the 1920s. He mainly specialized in propaganda work in the still insignificant Nazi stormtroopers (SA) of the capital, run by Goebbels in his ‘Battle for Berlin’. As the leader of SA-Sturm 5 in the working-class district of Friedrichshain, as a speaker, and as the author of National Socialist fight songs, his notoriety was local at best, earning him a name among his fellow partisans before he was assassinated in early 1930. One of a rapidly growing number of victims of political violence in the late Weimar Republic, the young man would scarcely have become so

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The Making of a Nazi Hero prominent had he not written the song that the Nazis would make their party anthem and later a kind of national anthem: ‘Raise the Flag!’, better known as the ‘Horst Wessel Song’.3 The official cult of Horst Wessel ended with the collapse of the Third Reich. The song is now considered a symbol of National Socialism, and can no longer be sung in public in Germany. Its author has all but fallen into oblivion. And yet various right-wing extremist groups have in recent years tried to revive the memory of Horst Wessel, using it for their own political purposes. The Young National Democrats (JN) in particular, the youth wing of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), try to inspire their members and followers with Wessel and his ‘political soldiership’. The erstwhile politicking of the nascent SA is to serve as a model for the modern-day ‘foot soldiers’ of the NPD – as one of the leading politicians of this subversive neo-Nazi party tellingly calls his adherents.4 It would be a mistake, however, to abandon Horst Wessel to right-wing propaganda. Of course, problematic political myths cannot be rendered less effective by virtue of historical education. After all, the power of myths is based on a self-contained narrative.5 Historiography is powerless against them. But it can at least divest the myth of its claim to be based on fact – in other words, force it back into the realm of the imaginary. In Wessel’s case we have to distinguish between two different levels of history, a ‘real’ and a discursive one, which began to compete with each other immediately after his death and were a source of mutual friction throughout the 1930s, the heyday of the Wessel cult. The following historical analysis will examine this tense relationship. In our endeavour to consistently historicize National Socialism, we first have to try to strip the political myth of Horst Wessel of all its propaganda trappings. After all, we want to tell a true story, not in an epistemologically unreflective manner along the lines of ‘It can only have been like this,’ but in a way that acknowledges the relativity of truth, one that takes for granted that there are indisputable facts and events but not a binding interpretation of them.6 This is especially difficult in the case of Horst Wessel, because – like it or not – biography and hagiography are often indistinguishable here. It is therefore all the more imperative to point out that the following history is, naturally, a construction of its author. It is only one version of a variety of conceivable possibilities, but is based on rigorous scholarly research and methods. The result of an intense and sometimes detective-like hunt for clues, it combines its findings and unresolved issues into a plausible and reasonable whole.7

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Preface A methodological premise like this applied to the case of Horst Wessel not only provides insight into key aspects of Nazi rule, but also illustrates how under the right sociopolitical conditions young men can turn into political extremists. The details behind Wessel’s killing have long been controversial. A key source – the investigation files of 1930, missing since 1947 – turned up in the process of researching this book. It shows how ideology and social environment, private affairs and politics coincided in an ultimately accidental way that was nonetheless characteristic of the times. The Wessel affair is more than just an exciting story of crime and punishment from the waning years of the Weimar Republic. This study begins by showing why a young man from a bourgeois ‘national-conservative’ family8 was fervently drawn to the Nazi Party. Who was this man, what drove him to live the life he lived, and how did he end up losing his life? It then explores the question of why the propagandistic glorification of Wessel into a Nazi hero, a Party saint and a ‘Christ-socialist’ was greeted so enthusiastically. Why did a state-led cult blossom around him, and why did he become the object of a quasi-religious veneration from below? On the political left, and in post-war Germany, Wessel was mainly viewed as a creature of Goebbels and his propaganda machine. Wessel the alleged pimp embodied like no other the brutality and moral turpitude of the Nazis. This brutality becomes apparent when considering the fate of those who were persecuted in the Nazi crusade of ‘retribution’ declared immediately after the attack on Wessel and made good on three years later, after seizing power. Leading SA men organized an illegal murder campaign with the cooperation and knowledge of state authorities. Moreover, prison sentences meted out in the first trial for the killing of Wessel, in September 1930, were expanded as the National Socialists saw fit with the help of the justice system, which now proclaimed unlimited protective custody of previously convicted accomplices. In 1934, the regime even enacted a second legal hearing for the killing of Wessel, one that bore all the traits of a show trial and resulted in two men being sentenced to death and executed. Instrumental in the revenge campaign were former comrades of Wessel who had worked their way up in the Third Reich as veteran party members or, in Nazi jargon, ‘Old Fighters’. Though some of them held high ranks in the SS and were at least partly involved in the genocide against European Jewry and the terror against Polish civilians in the annexed territory of the Warthegau, as well as participating in at least one political revenge murder in 1933, none of them were conclusively convicted after 1945. How these perpetrators succeeded in establishing themselves in both post-war German societies and why, like thousands of other second-tier Nazis, they were never

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The Making of a Nazi Hero prosecuted will also be shown with the help of previously unused source material. This book traces the lives of those whose fates converged with momentous historic consequences on the evening of 14 January 1930, the day of the attack on Horst Wessel. Beginning in the Weimar Republic, spanning the Third Reich and extending into the post-war period in both German states, it tells of a disastrous chapter in twentieth-century German history. Daniel Siemens London 2013 (Berlin 2009)

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1

Murder in Friedrichshain

The 9th of October 1907. Early darkness descends on the streets, brown leaves drift silently from the trees, autumn is stealing on Bielefeld. But behind the windows of the plain, middle-class building on Kaiserstrasse, a warm hope radiates through the murky dusk of a late day. A young pastor’s wife has given birth to a baby boy. The first. And when, on the Sunday after this Wednesday, the bells of St Paul’s Church call the faithful to service and prayer, a chorus of thanks thunders through the wide hall: ‘Now thank we all our God...!” Pastor Dr Ludwig Wessel, preacher at St Paul’s Church in Bielefeld, is celebrating in silent communion with his Lord the birth of his first-born son. Horst Ludwig is his name.1

Horst Wessel was already dead when the Westfälische Neueste Nachrichten newspaper eulogized the city’s ‘best son’ in religious tones in October 1933. His name was on everyone’s lips – not least of all thanks to the fight song he had written for the SA, ‘Raise the Flag!’ (Die Fahne hoch!), which the Nazis adopted as their party anthem, calling it the ‘Horst Wessel Song’. As of 1933 it was obligatory at official occasions, being sung straight after the national anthem, the ‘Song of the Germans’. Streets and squares by then bore the name of Wessel, as did later a sail-training ship, a flight squadron and an SS volunteer unit. In 1938, a ‘Horst Wessel polder’ was inaugurated in the rural district of Eiderstedt in Schleswig-Holstein.2 Its namesake was a Nazi hero, a ‘martyr of the movement’ (Blutzeuge der Bewegung), who was to serve as a role model, especially for young people. On the evening of Tuesday, 14 January 1930, at around ten o’clock, SA man Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel was shot point-blank in Friedrichshain, Berlin. Seriously wounded, he died on the morning of 23 February from the blood poisoning he contracted during treatment at Friedrichshain Hospital. The incident occurred on the third floor of Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62, the

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The Making of a Nazi Hero tenement building where Wessel lived as a subtenant with his 24-year-old girlfriend Erna Jaenichen. According to the landlady, the couple moved in on 1 November 1929.3 Wessel had recently met the former prostitute Jaenichen at Café Mexiko, not far from Alexanderplatz. This restaurant-tavern on the corner, housed in a wooden building on Prenzlauer Strasse 32, had only recently opened for business and advertised that you could watch the chef at work through a street-side window. Not all the patrons appreciated this transparency. The establishment was frequented by women of easy virtue and petty criminals, but also by workmen and their families. The crime writer Leo Heller described the environs rather sympathetically: ‘She “walks the streets”, he “cracks the safes”,’ ever and always buoyed by the hope of attaining petit-bourgeois happiness.4 As for the motives behind the attack on Wessel, Nazis and Communists offered varied accounts. The police, led by Chief Inspector Teichmann, and the courts determined that the causes were both political and private in nature. Wessel’s landlady Elisabeth Salm, a 29-year-old widowed hat-maker, was at loggerheads with her two lodgers for allegedly falling behind on their rent. The facts remained contradictory, even after the case went to trial in September 1930. Erna Jaenichen maintained that Frau Salm had granted her subtenant Wessel exclusive use of the apartment for 200 reichsmarks in the autumn of 1929. Elisabeth Salm then left Berlin for her native Hesse, claimed Jaenichen, but she returned unexpectedly just a few weeks later when she learnt that she would lose any legal claim to the flat, which was placed under sequestration, if she resided outside of Berlin. From that point on, she shared the apartment with Wessel and his girlfriend. According to Jaenichen, they took in Frau Salm out of pity and let her sleep in the kitchen. With an agreed monthly rent of 32.50 marks, the advance payment of 200 marks meant that the subtenant, who in the meantime had done some renovation work, had paid off his rent and could stay in the flat until well into 1930.5 When Elisabeth Salm, upon her return, discovered that a young woman had meanwhile moved in with Wessel, she demanded a higher rent. According to Salm, the two women had even agreed to a separate rental agreement of 16.25 marks a month for Jaenichen, a 50 per cent surcharge. Supposedly Jaenichen had paid her the amount for December 1929.6 Wessel was outraged, his former girlfriend told the court, but ultimately assented ‘for the sake of keeping the peace’. According to her, Wessel had paid the added costs himself, at least before he fell seriously ill after the death of his brother in late December 1929. One thing is for certain: this involuntary flat-share was not going well in early 1930. Frau Salm testified to the court that she constantly had to get

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Murder in Friedrichshain up at night to let in visitors: ‘Sometimes four to six people would arrive at night and hold meetings in Wessel’s room, always in a state of agitation.’ When the subtenants failed to pay the additional charge for Jaenichen in January, Frau Salm decided she’d had enough. She requested that the young woman clear out at once. ‘Pay up or pack your things,’ she said. It remains a matter of speculation whether she was bothered by the bad reputation of the female lodger Wessel had taken in without consulting her. But who could insist on tenants with spotless reputations in a time of economic crisis, especially in a neighbourhood like that? 7 Certainly not Elisabeth Salm. Born on 1 December 1900 in the town of Bensheim, in the Bergstrasse district of Hesse, she was the 14th of 17 children of shoemaker Philipp Mai and his wife. After attending primary school she worked as a maidservant. At the age of 15 she gave birth to an illegitimate son, which could be the reason she was sent to a reformatory.8 A local doctor, at any rate, who apparently examined the girl at that time, diagnosed an ‘abnormal state of mind’. In 1917, Elisabeth Mai received her first prison sentence – eight days – for insulting a substitute teacher. By 1919 she had been sentenced for theft, receiving stolen goods and fraud. Of course, convictions like these did not necessarily mean the beginning of a life of crime. The sharp spike in crime back then, during the First World War and the period of turmoil that followed the Armistice, was largely due to deteriorating living conditions, and would soon go down again.9 By the early 1920s her situation seemed to be improving. Elisabeth Mai had come of age and met her future husband, the variety artist and umbrella fixer Josef Salm, in Wiesbaden. She went to Berlin with him, where they lived for some years in common-law marriage with their illegitimate child before formally becoming man and wife in 1926. Elisabeth Salm ran an umbrellarepair workshop with her husband. But the latter died in 1929, apparently from pulmonary and intestinal tuberculosis as well as from the effects of drug abuse following a protracted illness. To supplement her meagre income, she began renting out the only room of her flat. Horst Wessel was one of her first subtenants.10 Elisabeth Salm had no quarrel with the political orientation of the young Nazi lodging with her. She described herself as apolitical. That Wessel, however, lived with a woman of questionable morals who wasn’t paying her share of the rent was too much for the landlady. The issue was clearly financial. Elisabeth Salm, at any rate, testified that Erna Jaenichen was no longer working as a prostitute since moving in with Wessel, that she apparently earned her living as a seamstress. Jaenichen was most likely one of the many young women who had come to the big city looking for work

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The Making of a Nazi Hero and, as largely destitute night lodgers and subtenants, found themselves ‘vulnerable, at the mercy of their surroundings’, to use a common expression of the day. Moritz Goldstein, a well-known court reporter from the liberal Vossische Zeitung, wrote that she was ‘earnestly and publicly engaged to Wessel’ and that the two had already talked about marriage. In 1931, the criminal police also concluded that Wessel’s young woman had ‘been lifted out of these circles’.11 On 14 January 1930, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, the situation escalated at Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62. A ‘lively discussion’ took place between Erna Jaenichen and Frau Salm in which Wessel, a ‘Herr Fiedler’ (Richard Fiedler, an SA man and friend of Wessel’s) and Erna’s girlfriend Klara Rehfeld also took part, as the landlady explained to investigators the following day. ‘The discussion ended when I declared that I intended to notify the authorities that Fräulein Jaenichen would be moving out. At which point Wessel said to me: “Go on, try it!”’ Frau Salm did try it, but Erna Jaenichen refused to leave. The landlady turned to the police, but had no success there either, being told that in turbulent times like these they had better things to do than deal with such trifles. She should police her own flat, they told her at the station.12 By her own account Frau Salm then ‘had a quiet word’ with Wessel in the flat. Wessel supposedly agreed to move out with Erna by the 1st of February. He also paid his water bill of 2 marks. This could have conceivably defused the conflict. But Elisabeth Salm, later disparaged by the nationalist press as a ‘kitchen Cassandra’ and a ‘birdbrain’, was of a different mind. She wanted her two subtenants out, immediately. Just a few hours later, around seven in the evening, she left her flat and headed to Schwedter Strasse 5, the home of her mother-in-law Anna Salm. Shortly thereafter, the two women stopped at the Baer tavern on Dragonerstrasse 48. There she expected to find political friends of her late husband, a former Red Front Fighter, whom she thought might be able to help her.13 The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) did part of its work in pubs back then, reported actor Erwin Geschonneck, who grew up on Berlin’s infamous Ackerstrasse. ‘You could go to the room in the back or to a club room, order a round of beer, maybe schnapps, and didn’t need to pay any rent.’14 This was the case at the Baer tavern, where the Second Squad of the Communist stormtroopers of the Berlin district of Mitte, an illegal successor to the banned Red Front Fighters’ League (Rotfrontkämpferbund), met on a regular basis. Propagandadienst, the Red Front Fighters’ League monthly propaganda leaflet, described in its January 1929 edition how such a meeting place was supposed to look. It had to be furnished so as to make a good impression

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Murder in Friedrichshain on ‘the indifferent’, but at the same time had to convey to a worker in the plainest of terms that this was where the Red Front Fighters’ League met. This was to be achieved by hanging up pictures of Communist marches, Marx and Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht. The leaders of the organization even suggested setting up a shrine to Lenin in a corner of the club room.15 If it is true what Hermann Kupferstein, the leader of the Berlin-Mitte Communist stormtroopers, later said, Frau Salm described her situation as threatening when she came to Baer’s on the evening of 14 January 1930. Wessel and his girlfriend, who ‘always came home drunk at night’, had not paid their rent for months, she claimed. When she, the landlady, had tried to collect it, her lodger had threatened her with a gun. The police, whose help she had sought on several occasions, did nothing to protect her.16 Despite the dramatic depiction of her situation, Elisabeth Salm walked away disappointed. Those present were not particularly interested in the personal affairs of a landlady. Frau Salm, moreover, was not especially popular in Communist quarters, having rejected the standard burial rite of the Red Front Fighters’ League for her late husband, opting instead for a Christian burial.17 Only when she mentioned the name Horst Wessel, who was well known as a ‘Nazi chieftain’, at least in certain quarters around Alexanderplatz, and who had been decried in a Communist pamphlet as a ‘murderer of workers’, did the situation change.18 The members of the Communist stormtroopers agreed to give Wessel a ‘proletarian drubbing’ and remove him from the flat by force.19 Measures like this were nothing unusual for these men with a penchant for violence, who ‘were constantly involved in brawls’,20 and whom even fellow comrades referred to as ‘fighting fools’. Spontaneous thoughts of revenge might have been a motivation as well, with members of the SA having shot and critically wounded 17-year-old Communist Camillo Ross a mere two hours earlier at the corner of Linienstrasse and Joachimstrasse, a five-minute walk from the Baer tavern. A few Communists claimed to have recognized Horst Wessel among the attackers and allegedly began planning retaliatory measures.21 At around nine-thirty in the evening a sizeable group set out from Baer’s for Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62. Among them – so the court established in September 1930 – were the three Jambrowski brothers, Max, Walter and Willi, the labourer Josef Kandulski, known as ‘Piepel’, Walter Junek, a brother-in-law of Max Jambrowski, and the labourer Else Cohn, as well as an unknown number of other individuals, presumably members or sympathizers of the KPD.22 Their lives were indicative of their social milieu.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero The carpenter Max Jambrowski, born on 1 April 1896 in Steglitz, later a district of Berlin, served as the treasurer of the Communist stormtroopers of Berlin-Mitte. As a soldier on furlough in the First World War, he never returned to the front. In 1919, he fought on the side of the Communists in the so-called Spartacist Uprising during the period of revolution following the end of the war. In 1927 he joined the KPD, one year later the Red Front Fighters’ League and Red Aid.23 His older brother Willi, born on 28 January 1895 in Anklam, was a trained metalworker. By his own account, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class in the First World War, having served as an artillerist. After the war he was a member and ‘local group leader’ of the Farm Workers’ Union in Langenhagen, Pomerania. Sacked there because of a strike in 1924, he moved to Berlin, supposedly becoming a member of the KPD, Red Aid and the Revolutionary Union Opposition (RGO) in 1929. He also joined the Mitte stormtroopers, working for them as a courier at the time of the attack on Wessel. Contrary to his own assertions, the liberal press reported in 1930 that Jambrowski was a member of the nationalist ‘Stahlhelm’ League of Frontline Soldiers before joining the Communists.24 The third Jambrowski, Walter, born on 2 October 1897 in Strausberg, apparently played no special role in the KPD. He was a friend of 25-year-old Else Cohn, a member of the Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD). Finally there was Kandulski, an officer cadet in the Mitte stormtroopers and a member of the Second Squad.25 ‘Beat the Fascists wherever you find them!’ – this was the slogan announced shortly before by Heinz Neumann, editor-in-chief of the Communist daily Die Rote Fahne.26 And this is what they did. They were joined by Albrecht Höhler and Erwin Rückert, who were called in by Walter Junek as reinforcements from the neighbouring tavern of Adolf Galsk, at the corner of Mulackstrasse and Gormannstrasse. The two men, also former members of the Communist Red Front Fighters’ League, were each armed with a pistol. Caution was called for on the part of the attackers. They knew from the landlady Salm that, apart from Nazi propaganda material, Wessel kept two handguns and a rubber truncheon in his room. Together they set out for Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62, Frau Salm and Else Cohn in the lead. Frau Salm made sure that Wessel was home, then went and fetched Höhler, Rückert, Kandulski and Walter Jambrowski from the entrance downstairs. Jambrowski stayed behind outside the door of the third-storey flat. His brothers and the remaining men kept a lookout in front of the building. The group, led by Höhler, stepped into the corridor. Straight ahead was the kitchen, where Else Cohn, Elisabeth Salm, her mother-in-law, the latter’s child and possibly some other people were assembled. To the right was

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Murder in Friedrichshain the door to the room inhabited by Wessel and Erna Jaenichen. Rückert and Höhler released the safety catches on their guns. Frau Salm rang the cowbell above the kitchen door, the signal for her lodgers that visitors had arrived.27 Horst Wessel was expecting Richard Fiedler, the leader of Berlin SA Sturm 1, six months his junior, and perhaps Ewald Bartel as well, a member of Wessel’s own SA Sturm 5, whose ‘bride’, Klara Rehfeld, was already with Erna and him in his room.28 He got up and opened the door unsuspectingly. Before him stood three strangers, one of them pointing a pistol at him. Klara Rehfeld described the crucial seconds as follows: Shortly afterwards someone pressed the handle of our door. Since the door gets jammed a little, Wessel opened it to see what was going on. At the very same moment a shot was fired from outside that hit Wessel right in the face. […] A mere fraction of a second elapsed from the time the door was opened until the shot was fired. Wessel fell to the floor immediately, hitting the back of his head against the stove door.29

Höhler later maintained that he had fired out of self-defence, that Wessel, seeing a drawn weapon, had tried to pull out a gun of his own – an understandable line of argument that no one found convincing.30 Other witnesses such as Rehfeld and Erna Jaenichen said this was impossible. Wessel had no time to defend himself. In all likelihood, Höhler fired his large-calibre nine-millimetre gun the moment he recognized Wessel in the doorway. And yet if he had wanted to kill him, he wouldn’t have shot just once. Thus, Höhler insistently claimed while in custody awaiting trial that the act was by no means premeditated, that there was no intention to gun down Wessel. ‘All we want[ed was] to beat Wessel up and take away his gun.’31 The attackers forced their way into the room. Höhler kept the women at bay. ‘Not a sound or I’ll shoot!’ he cried, or: ‘Keep your mouths shut or I’ll plug you one.’ The men hastily searched the room and secured a rubber truncheon and a pistol that Josef Kandulski found in the wardrobe. He opened the latter with a key that Frau Salm had given him at Baer’s. Ali Höhler meanwhile nudged the wounded Wessel and said: ‘You know what for.’ Then the attackers fled. Once she recovered from the initial shock, Erna Jaenichen took the other pistol, which Kandulski hadn’t found. She was entitled to keep it for ‘self-protection’, the policemen who arrived on the scene soon afterwards determined.32 On the street Kandulski is said to have told the men waiting there: ‘He’s done for, let’s get out of here!’33 The men and Else Cohn returned to their

9

The Making of a Nazi Hero habitual haunts near the Volksbühne theatre, where they finished a game of billiards and a round of skat. A messenger notified the Berlin regional leadership of the Communist Party that night about the events. Some of the defendants are on record as saying during pretrial detention that Max Jambrowski delivered a little address in the back room of the Baer tavern in which he bound all of those involved to absolute silence: ‘Anyone who squeals gets a bullet in the head!’34 Wessel lay on the floor, badly wounded. Supposedly all he could do was mutter the word ‘doctor’.35 Had the bullet penetrated half a centimetre deeper, reported medical examiner Professor Strauch and public-health officer Dr Freiherr von Marenholtz in the results of their autopsy, the critically injured man would have died on the spot.36 Frau Salm looked after Wessel for the time being while either his fiancée or Klara Rehfeld phoned the NSDAP to tell them what had happened. Gau headquarters received the call at 10.15 p.m.37 There is disagreement about what happened in the ensuing minutes. Some claim that Wessel reduced his chances of survival by refusing treatment from his landlady’s Jewish general practitioner, Dr Max Selo, who lived nearby and was called in to help.38 This seems unlikely though, considering the state Wessel was in. Erna Jaenichen later explained to the court that the allegation made by the lawyers of the accused that Wessel initially refused the help of a Jewish doctor was in no way true.39 It is also possible that Wessel’s friend and fellow Sturmführer Richard Fiedler, who arrived at the scene immediately after the attack, was responsible for sending the first doctor away. He made sure, at any rate, that incriminating propaganda material, a stack of papers and a strongbox were removed from Wessel’s room. Frau Salm later said that she had managed to glance through these papers once in the weeks leading up to the attack and that they contained his personal observations about Communists and the police.40 Precious time may have been wasted thanks to Fiedler’s clean-up. It is certainly not the case that Wessel had to wait two hours before he received any medical attention, as is often claimed. According to an invoice from the Berlin emergency services, he was taken away to the hospital at about 10.30 p.m.41 The cost: 11 reichsmarks. He arrived twenty minutes later at the emergency room in Friedrichshain Hospital, where in Operation House No. 6 he underwent emergency surgery until 12.45 a.m. – ‘without anaes­ thesia, of course’, Nazi propaganda later claimed, apparently in the belief that this would make Wessel seem particularly manly.42 On 15 January 1930 the criminal police noted tersely: ‘His condition is said to be hopeless.’ That very same day, Friedrichshain Hospital reported that the patient Ludwig Wessel [sic] was ‘not fit to be questioned’.43

10

Murder in Friedrichshain

Albrecht Höhler, police photo, 1929

Dr Leonardo Conti, senior physician of the SA for the eastern districts of the city, described Wessel’s injuries in detail after conferring first with his medical colleagues: Gunshot wound in the mouth around the upper jaw, somewhat to the left. Lateral branch of the left carotid artery torn. Where the bullet is lodged unknown as yet, apparently in the cervical vertebrae and not in the brain; tongue three-quarters, uvula entirely gone, palate badly destroyed, upper front teeth (one or two!) blown away.44

Conti, born in 1900, was active in various paramilitary groups of the nationalist Right in the 1920s and joined the NSDAP in 1927. He specialized in cases like Wessel’s, having earned his PhD in 1925 with a dissertation entitled On Soft-Tissue Plastic Surgery of the Face – a burgeoning field of research at the time on account of the many, sometimes horribly mutilated, war-wounded. Later, as ‘Reich health leader’ (Reichsgesundheitsführer), Conti was a key figure in the ‘T4’ euthanasia programme responsible for the murder of about 100,000 sick and disabled people between 1939 and 1941. He was involved not only as a policy maker, but also as a medical doctor administering lethal injections.45 While Wessel was fighting for his life, there was a frenzy of activity at Karl Liebknecht House, the party headquarters of the KPD. Communist functionaries were worried that the party might be suspected of having links to the assault, which was hard to portray as an act of self-defence. Max Jambrowski later spoke of rashness. They had plunged themselves into a

11

The Making of a Nazi Hero ‘headless affair’, acting on no one’s orders – and presumably against the will of the leader of the Berlin-Mitte stormtroopers, Hermann Kupferstein.46 It was not the first time that party members had caused their leadership grave problems by taking the law into their own hands. Controlling the party base was a constant concern of the KPD in the final years of the Weimar Republic and something it obsessed over even after 1933.47 Moreover, the shooting of Wessel had broken a taboo. Despite escalating street violence, the private apartments of political adversaries had previously not been a legitimate battle zone. Though they beat each other up at public meeting places and on the sidelines of demonstrations, increasingly using knives and firearms, in private they largely let each other be. Indeed, the coexistence of these hostile political camps, whose adherents sometimes lived next door to one another, would have been untenable otherwise. ‘Individual terror’, the Communist paper Der Rote Führer tellingly wrote one year after the attack on Wessel, was not to be rejected for moral reasons but for tactical ones: ‘Anyone with some pluck and a revolver can go into a pub and gun down a Fascist. It is far more difficult, of course, to go to the masses, fight with the masses and start a revolution at the forefront of the masses.’48 The gunman, Albrecht ‘Ali’ Höhler, born in Mainz on 30 April 1898 and trained as a carpenter, was looked upon as a ‘professional crook’ and a ‘bad egg’. He was supposedly a member of the infamous Spar- und Geselligkeitsverein Immertreu, the ‘Always Faithful Savings and Social Club’, one of the most well known of the city’s 40 Ringvereine, or underworld clubs.49 These Ringvereine were a cross between the mafia, a prostitution racket, and petty-bourgeois social club, hosting lavish banquets alongside other community-building rituals. Their exact status was a matter of debate. Whereas the papers spoke of ‘criminal riff-raff’ and warned about a Chicago-like state of affairs, Berlin’s deputy chief of police, Bernhard Weiss, played down the alleged danger by claiming it was a myth. He emphasized, rather, that the Ringvereine played an important role in promoting social integration in certain marginal sectors of society; only if the associations ceased to exist was there a danger of their members turning into ‘full-time crooks’.50 Whatever the nature of these Ringvereine, in the period between the wars these unofficial but largely tolerated organizations controlled a considerable share of the capital’s organized crime, especially professional prostitution and stolen goods.51 It is worth noting too that in the so-called Scheunenviertel or ‘Barn District’ of central Berlin, the Ringvereine and KPD often supported each other. The party covered up criminal intrigues, offered legal protection and if need be even expensive lawyers, whereas the men of the underworld enjoined

12

Murder in Friedrichshain people of the neighbourhood to vote for the right party and carried out special, sometimes criminal, tasks.52 Albrecht Höhler was a proven comrade in this double sense. He had joined the KPD as early as 1924. In May 1929, with the banning of the Red Front Fighters’ League, he became a member of the illegal Communist stormtroopers in Berlin-Mitte.53 Originally operating under the name Kulturverein Zentrum (Centre Cultural Association), it was organized into four stand-by units, each of them 60 strong.54 Höhler belonged to the Third Squad under the command of Erwin Rückert, a collection of ‘for the most part […] antisocial elements’ – as East German functionaries later put it – which is why there was talk of disbanding the entire platoon. The men of this unit met on an almost daily basis at the Galsk tavern in the Scheunenviertel, the real ‘heart of Berlin’ according to Leo Heller. Berlin police commissioner Ernst Engelbrecht, who successfully exploited his professional experiences in his sensationalist book In the Footsteps of Criminality, published in 1931, wrote that ‘already in the early morning all kinds of rabble’ passed through the neighbourhood’s beer joints. The main clientele of such ‘crime dens’, the commissioner assured his bourgeois readers, obviously proud of his inside knowledge, consisted of ‘whores with their male entourage, all manner of professional crooks’ and ‘work-shy lads and lasses, the greenhorns of the criminal world’. Most of these people had their habitual haunts where they stopped by almost daily and had ‘indeed found a piece of home’.55 The Communist stormtroopers of Berlin-Mitte, disbanded for real after Wessel’s murder, had four stomping grounds. The entire force was strictly supervised by the KPD. According to Kupferstein, the party leadership carried out daily inspections at these locales. The stormtroopers provided security for meetings or discussed operations against enemy groups. We can presume that most of their members were armed in some form or another. Höhler, for example, carried a Luger P08 for ‘self-defence’. He apparently purchased this large-calibre army pistol with money from the stormtroopers. He also claimed to have a machine gun that fired blanks, whereas his companion Rückert had a Mauser pistol.56 The incident on 14 January 1930 created quite a commotion in Berlin. The Communist Die Rote Fahne carried the headline ‘SA Leader Gunned Down Out of Jealousy’ immediately after the attack. The paper described Wessel as a pimp killed in his own milieu during an altercation, and denied that the party had any connection to the shooting. The National Socialist Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung, on the other hand, talked about ‘Red murder’ and a ‘Wild West assault’ which made clear that National Socialists were now essentially ‘fair game’. For Der Angriff it was a Communist assassination attempt

13

The Making of a Nazi Hero on Berlin’s ‘most active Sturmführer’. The paper threatened that ‘one of these days’ it would ‘eradicate root and branch the poisonous brood at Karl Liebknecht House like one exterminates rats or bugs’.57 The judicial inquiry instituted just a few days later against Angriff publisher Joseph Goebbels, who also served as NSDAP Gauleiter for Berlin-Brandenburg, and editor Dagobert Dürr was stopped by the Berlin State Prosecutor’s Office in early February 1930, with the consent of the Prussian Ministry of Justice. The reasoning of State Prosecutor Sethe, effectively granting the NSDAP carte blanche to persecute dissenters, went as follows: To my mind, these statements contain neither a call to commit punishable offences nor the threat to commit a crime, but merely the avowal that the NSDAP, should it ever come to power, would use its instruments of power to take radical action against the KPD. I therefore intend to refrain from criminal proceedings.58

By 17 January 1930 the police had already announced the manhunt for their prime suspect Höhler. A ‘wanted’ poster bearing his picture promised a reward of up to 500 reichsmarks for information leading to his arrest or that of his accomplices. They were quick to find the gunman, as Wessel’s girlfriend had identified Albrecht Höhler. How the two knew each other never became entirely clear. A democratically minded newspaper wrote in January 1933 that Wessel had used his girlfriend to spy on Communists ‘with whom she once had relations’.59 The nature of these relations, whether political or professional, remained unclear. The Communists, for their part, claimed they knew for sure that Höhler was Erna’s pimp before Wessel stole her from him. This made a crime of passion seem plausible: an act of jealousy committed in Berlin’s underworld. The court ultimately believed the witness Jaenichen, who testified that she only knew Höhler in passing, as an acquaintance from the streets. Höhler said he did not know Wessel at all, and his girlfriend only by her first name, as the prostitute Erna. Höhler testified before the court that Communists had urged him ‘never to portray the incident as political’. He should testify instead that Wessel’s girlfriend used to be his fiancée until Wessel took her away from him: ‘It’s supposed to come across as a drama of jealousy.’60 Wessel’s landlady Elisabeth Salm, when summoned to Karl Liebknecht House by the KPD on 15 January 1930, likewise resolutely declared that Wessel had nothing to do with pimping or procuring.61 Indeed, the events of the evening would seem to suggest that it was not a crime of passion. Would a jealous Höhler have waited for Frau Salm to drive him into the arms of his rival? And

14

Murder in Friedrichshain would he have involved a bevy of accomplices to carry out his amateurish act of revenge, any of whom could have given him away? Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels, the future Reich minister of ‘public enlightenment and propaganda’, who had first met Wessel in 1927, paid several visits to the critically injured man in the hospital. The first, on 19 January 1930, lasted probably no more than a minute, according to Goebbels. He did not address a single word to Wessel, but afterwards commented coldly: ‘Like in a Dostoyevsky novel: the idiot, the workers, the whore, the bourgeois family, eternal pangs of conscience, eternal torment. That’s the life of this 22-year-old idealist dreamer.’62 Wessel’s state of health deteriorated rapidly from mid-February 1930 on. According to an article published later in the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter, the shooting victim was still talking about politics just days before his decline and was quite literally in a fever of anticipation for future National Socialist victories. Given the severity of his wounds, however, it seems unlikely that Wessel would have been able to talk at all. Even Nazi propaganda admitted that its hero, though recovering somewhat, still seemed to be seriously ill.63 Wessel was being drip-fed at this point and his strength continued to dwindle. Blood poisoning then set in. The terminally ill patient – ‘nothing but skin and bones’, according to the autopsy report – received his last visitors, but was certainly no longer able to speak. He lost consciousness on the afternoon of Saturday 22 February, and died the next day at around six-thirty in the morning. The sober conclusion of the doctors left no room for speculation on the causes of his death: ‘1. The man died of general blood poisoning. 2. The blood poisoning developed from a gunshot wound to the head, which led to severe ulceration in the throat and upper cervical spine region.’64 Wessel had barely passed away when Goebbels began a targeted effort to build him up as a role model for young people and a future National Socialist Germany. ‘A new martyr for the Third Reich’, he wrote in his diary on 23 February 1930.65 The funeral one week later, on the afternoon of 1 March 1930, was turned into a major propaganda event by the NSDAP. The Prussian police had prohibited public gatherings and displaying the swastika flag on this day, but the small funeral procession, limited by the authorities to just a few vehicles, was eagerly watched from the sidelines by supporters and adversaries alike. It began at Jüdenstrasse 51/52 – where the Wessel family had resided since 1913 – passed through Hoher Steinweg, on to Neuer Markt, down Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse to Bülowplatz, and finally headed to Prenzlauer Tor via Pankestrasse and Linienstrasse. The wearing of party uniforms was only permitted in the cemetery. Supposedly Wessel’s

15

The Making of a Nazi Hero sister had tried to get an audience with Reich President Paul von Hindenburg before the funeral. Her hope of lifting the injunction against a demonstration came to naught, however, despite the former contacts between Hindenburg and her deceased father.66 Vigorous protests ensued once the procession reached Bülowplatz. The Internationale could be heard from Communist Party headquarters and police officers had to intervene to protect the funeral marchers. They could not prevent abusive shouts and the occasional flying rock, but no major clashes occurred. The Nazis, for their part, claimed that protestors tried to pull the coffin from the hearse. The restrictions on the funeral procession, imposed by Berlin’s deputy chief of police, Bernhard Weiss – the target of smear campaigns by the radical Right even before 1933 – were a welcome opportunity for the party newspaper Westdeutscher Beobachter to unleash its anti-Semitic invective. The regulations, it claimed, were the product of the ‘perverse brain of a Jewish deputy chief of police’.67 Goebbels and SA commander Franz Pfeffer von Salomon gave lofty speeches at the cemetery. Hermann Göring and Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, called ‘Auwi’ or the ‘Nazi Prince’, were also present.68 On 24 February Hitler, Goebbels, Göring and August Wilhelm had allegedly met in Munich to discuss the funeral ceremony and the possibility of Hitler’s attending. No decision was reached, it seems, because in a diary entry of 1 March 1930, a mildly offended Goebbels wrote: ‘Hitler isn’t coming. Had the situation explained to him over the telephone and he actually declined. Oh well!’69 The NSDAP filmed the event.70 The cemetery wall, Goebbels noted, was smeared with white graffiti reading ‘To Wessel the Pimp a final Heil Hitler!’ About 20 SA men were supposedly busy removing slanderous slogans all around the cemetery before the funeral procession arrived.71 Goebbels was livid but determined to win this propaganda battle in the guise of a funeral ceremony: ‘Outside, the hoi polloi are raging. They rage, we win. Piles of wreaths. National community [Volksgemeinschaft]! The still wholesome worker turns with disgust from this cynical crudity.’ Wessel’s funeral proved to be a valuable experience when a year later the party established guidelines for the ‘uniform honouring’ of fallen SA men. ‘Within the bounds of good taste’, it said, a cult should be developed around fallen SA men so as ‘almost to make it seem desirable to die for the movement. […] Even in his death the dead SA man must continue serving the movement.’72 The Nazi cult of remembrance made every effort to idealize Wessel’s funeral, turning it into a quasi-religious moment in the struggle against the Weimar Republic. Despite the surrounding hostilities, the procession was described as a ‘triumphal march of National Socialist will’. While the

16

Murder in Friedrichshain

Funeral of Horst Wessel on 1 March 1930. Contrary to Nazi claims, there were no attacks on the funeral procession.

‘mob’ – ‘dehumanized humans’ – was gathering outside the cemetery walls, the mourners at Wessel’s grave were the symbol of the true national community.73 The glorification of Wessel’s death and burial reached almost blasphemous proportions. In 1934, the versatile Wilfrid Bade, a councillor in the Propaganda Ministry, described the funeral ceremony just the way the Nazis wanted it: Thousands sang along [to the ‘Horst Wessel Song’] at the cemetery and then, when the song was over, something odd and unreal happened as Dr Goebbels began to speak and held his funeral oration, uttering the words: ‘And you shall be resurrected…!’ […] A shudder went through the crowd. As if God had made a decision and sent His holy breath upon the open grave and the flags, blessing the dead man and all who belong to him.74

The 14th of January, the 23rd of February and the 1st of March 1930 soon became seminal dates in the still quite youthful history of the NSDAP.

17

Facsimile page from Politika, a short ‘political autobiography’ written by Wessel at the age of 21 or 22

2

Father and Son

Who was this Horst Wessel, a mere 22 years old at the time of his death and glorified by Goebbels as a Nazi martyr? An idealistic, resentment-laden dreamer who rioted away his days, first in radical youth groups and then in a radical right-wing party? A political activist with clear objectives, a ‘bard and warrior of the Third Reich’ who paid for his convictions with his life? Or a pimp, the victim of a quarrel in the red-light district? We do know that a 21-year-old Wessel, having barely reached maturity, considered himself an important person. In the summer months of 1929 he wrote a political credo, an unfinished autobiography of 70 pages that he gave the title Politika and illustrated with over 80 private photos. This work shows Wessel to be a bourgeois writer with a revolutionary bent and keen powers of observation. Kept by the family after Wessel’s death, it was acquired by the Prussian State Library in 1938, along with his travelogue Von Land und Leuten. Meine Fahrten und Reisen (The Country and Its People. My Travels and Journeys), which he presumably wrote for his personal use in 1928. Both manuscripts were regarded as precious cultural assets in the Third Reich and, along with about 300,000 other works at the library, were evacuated to Lower Silesia during the Second World War. A total of 505 crates, among them the original handwritten Wessel manuscripts, were taken to the former Cistercian monastery and Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Grüssau (today Krzeszów, Poland). There they were found by Polish scholars in 1945 and brought to Cracow as part of the Berlinka collection in the manuscript department of the Jagiellonian Library, where they remain today. The manuscript department of the State Library in Berlin has a facsimile of Politika for research purposes that is not listed in the regular catalogue.1 The two manuscripts have received little attention from serious historians.2 And yet they’re an important source for reconstructing Wessel’s

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The Making of a Nazi Hero development from his days in the Bismarck and Viking leagues to his self-fashioning into a young National Socialist in the NSDAP and SA. More broadly, they also shed light on the increasing radicalization of the ‘war youth generation’ – those born between 1900 and 1910, who were therefore too young to fight in the First World War.3 That every autobiography is partly fiction need not be an impediment to their historical evaluation, provided we always bear in mind the underlying act of narrative construction.4 Wessel’s Politika is construed in at least two ways. First, by largely omitting private experiences he fashioned himself into the prototype and – ultimately exchangeable – representative of the young and committed National Socialist. Second, the overall narrative of his (unfinished) text is basically a story of salvation through National Socialism. We can only speculate as to what might have prompted him to pen these autobiographical works. Was Politika an attempt – influenced by the autobiographical fashion of the day – to create his own legend? 5 Was he perhaps – at the behest of Goebbels – working on a Nazi version of the highly popular memoirs of Communist revolutionary Max Hoelz, published in early 1929?6 The author, at any rate, seems not to have excluded the possibility that the NSDAP might later make use of his work, at least judging by the style and the structure of the text. His manuscript is wholly indebted to the Nazi conception of history, one characteristic of which is that the present – for Wessel the ‘time of struggle’ (Kampfzeit) of the late 1920s, when the Nazis were a still insignificant political force struggling to gain power – is ‘literally perceived retrospectively from an anticipated future’.7 In terms of content, we notice first of all that Wessel attached little importance to his family, a trait not untypical of young Protestant males in the post-war era. The focus of his life, in which the author is portrayed as its autonomous agent and subject, is his chosen community and not his accidental blood relatives. His distinct political self-image and his need even as an adolescent to perform a ‘man’s work’ mark him as a child of his time. ‘There is so much talk nowadays about the emerging young generation,’ concluded the periodical Die Kommenden, one of whose editors was the writer Ernst Jünger. A single article by Karl Paetel published there in early 1930 and providing an overview of the varied party youth organizations, leagues and combat units of the nationalist Right spanned more than five densely printed pages, even though the journal freely admitted that Socialist and Communist youth leagues were a ‘far more serviceable body of men’.8

20

Father and Son

Margarete and Dr Ludwig Wessel with their first-born son, Horst, late 1907. The photo was published by Wessel’s sister Ingeborg in 1933 in a kind of souvenir book about her brother.

Even if Horst Wessel mentions his father only once in his Politika, and this in a rather dutiful way as a participant in the Great War, the Berlin pastor nonetheless had a formative influence on the political views of his adolescent son.9 This is unusual for Wessel’s generation, but can be explained by his family situation, especially his father’s untimely death in 1922. Looking back at his childhood, Horst Wessel wrote at the age of 18 that he was attached

21

The Making of a Nazi Hero ‘in particular to his father’.10 It was from this man that he adopted some of his basic political convictions. Without the völkisch or racial pan-Germanism of his father, it is hard to comprehend the militant posture later adopted by Horst. The writer Klaus Mann, son of Thomas, who already during the Third Reich critically examined Horst Wessel and his posthumous glorification, came to the conclusion in 1939 that ‘men of the Dr Wessel type helped pave the way’, intellectually and spiritually, for Nazi dictatorship.11 Dr Wilhelm Ludwig Georg Wessel, born on 15 July 1879 in Hessisch Oldendorf in the Schaumburg district of the Prussian province of HesseNassau, was, like the majority of his fellow clergymen in those days, deeply convinced of the cultural importance of the Protestant Church for state and society.12 His eldest son Horst was exposed from early childhood on to his fundamental nationalist convictions and völkisch slogans.13 The son of the proprietor of a railway-station restaurant, Ludwig was an ambitious and impressive but not particularly subtle preacher. Having studied in Erlangen, Berlin, and Bonn, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1904 from Erlangen, in those days a stronghold of conservative Lutheranism.14 The young pastor felt much more at home there than in liberal Berlin, which he left after only one semester. His trial sermon from 1903, on the concluding verse of the ‘Good Shepherd’ chapter (John 10:27–30), is notably bombastic and emotional, a style characteristic of his later sermons, but here still very much pervaded by his personal faith. The clerical examiner was little impressed, faulting it for its ‘lack of depth’, and gave it a mere ‘satisfactory’. But mediocre exam results were no obstacle to his career advancement. Ludwig Wessel was ordained in Dortmund-Brechten on 16 July 1905, and served as district synodal vicar and preacher in Bielefeld from 1 February 1906 until 1 April 1908. He then held the pastorate of the Altstadt parish in Mülheim an der Ruhr, where he remained until 9 October 1913, after which he went to the Nicolai Church in Berlin. He made a name for himself in the First World War with his fiery speeches as a military chaplain. The private life of this social climber proceeded in an orderly fashion as well. On 1 May 1906 he married a 24-year-old clergyman’s daughter, Bertha Luise Margarete Richter, in her hometown of Aerzen near Hamelin. The couple had three children in rapid succession: their son Horst was followed on 19 May 1909 by a daughter, Ingeborg Paula Margarethe, and on 22 August 1910 by a second son, Werner Georg Erich Ludwig, both of whom were born in Mülheim an der Ruhr.15 The Horst Wessel cult of the early 1930s revived the memory of his father too. In 1932 the Mülheimer Generalanzeiger called Ludwig Wessel a ‘splendid pulpit orator’ whose folksiness was widely lauded. A characteristic theme

22

Father and Son of his sermons, it said, was ‘the master-manhood [Herrenmenschentum] in the power of God’.16 Wording like this reflected the radicalization of National Protestantism and its increasing reliance on racist-biological principles since the 1890s, a development that evidently made a deep impression on Ludwig Wessel and that he passed on to his children.17 Among his favourite writers, his daughter Ingeborg later noted, was the Protestant pastor Gustav Frenssen, a best-selling author of the day. With his novel Holyland (Hilligenlei) published in 1905, Frenssen, who like the anti-Semitic scholars Paul de Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain had a considerable influence on völkisch-religious circles in Imperial Germany, sought to reconcile the Christian religion with ‘our strong, full-blooded German human nature’. Here as in his other works, all marked by a socio-politically committed and theologically contentious tone, Frenssen subscribed to a heredity-based community ideology that, by way of völkisch nationalism and with his roots in cultural Protestantism, ultimately drove the ageing writer into the arms of the Nazis.18 Frenssen had long since called for a ‘Germanization of Christianity’, an idea still closely linked with the name of pastor and author Arthur Bonus. For Bonus and other writers of the National Protestant German Christian camp, this entailed the image of Christ as a fighter and an Aryan. As one Bremen clergyman wrote in 1920: ‘Suffering never played a central role for Jesus. […] For him it is all about battle readiness and having the will to win [Kampfbereitschaft und Siegeswille].’19 The pastor Ludwig Wessel understood his office from the very beginning as a political one and was convinced by the start of the First World War that a ‘Christianity of action’ and the ‘national mission of Germany’ were inseparable. Military force and the Word of God were no contradiction to him. Like many clergymen, he idealized war as a religious duty of the nation, and imagined the latter as a ‘greater community’ (Grossgemeinde). God’s will would be revealed in the certain and impending German victory. Thus, in Ludwig Wessel’s eyes, even the bloody slaughter of war was a God-given test of a nation’s strength and its capacity for suffering. This idea must have had a formative influence on his sons, both of whom were active in the SA in the late 1920s and felt they were on a divine mission to save the fatherland.20 Even in times of peace, the pastor had evinced his military sympathies. One of his former confirmation candidates later wrote in the Nazi National-Zeitung that Wessel greeted the pupils of his religion classes ‘with military dash’. According to these reminiscences, he was fond of a tone of command, of discipline and choral music, especially the snappy kind. The former pupil viewed his instructor in retrospect as a ‘singular personality’

23

The Making of a Nazi Hero who was destined for greater things.21 That Wessel the father behaved any differently at home than at school is unlikely. We have no way of knowing how he acted on a day-to-day basis – if he beat his children, for example, at the time an accepted child-rearing practice in many middle-class families. His son’s silence on this matter leaves room for speculation. At any rate, only in exceptional cases did Horst Wessel use his middle name Ludwig. Though an unchallenged ruler at home, Ludwig Wessel’s self-righteous behaviour was a constant source of friction in the outside world. Conflicts with his congregation in Mülheim were conveniently overlooked later. In 1908–9, Ludwig Wessel had tried to secure a lucrative contract for an architect friend from his days in Bielefeld to remodel the interior of St Peter’s Church in Mülheim. The congregation caught wind of this arrangement and Wessel found himself pressed for an explanation. The architect insisted that binding preliminary agreements had been made, but Wessel denounced these claims as slanderous and took his case to the authorities.22 On 7 July 1913 Ludwig Wessel was elected second deacon by the Nicolai congregation in Berlin. The five-member family moved to the capital that November.23 His new position was well paid, with a basic annual salary of 7,000 reichsmarks, and was accompanied by a considerable boost in prestige. Wessel was now preaching from the same pulpit used by famed pastor, theologian and hymn-writer Paul Gerhardt from 1657 to 1667. His wife, who had not learnt a trade, took care of the children and the household with the help of a maidservant.24 The family moved into a spacious, rent-free rectory on Berlin’s Jüdenstrasse, so named after the adjoining Grosser Jüdenhof, a gated residential courtyard for the Jews of Berlin most likely dating from the late thirteenth century. This area, not far from the Nicolai Church and the Fischerkiez neighbourhood, was populated in the early twentieth century by working-class families with many children, immigrants from Eastern Europe as well as the eastern parts of Germany, and a host of shady characters. Vibrant Alexanderplatz, the Berlin City Palace built by the Hohenzollerns, and the proletarian tenements with their grey inner courtyards – all of this was within walking distance. The new pastor, notable above all for his ‘marked sense of self-assurance’, was seldom seen by his congregation.25 On 18 August 1914, barely a few weeks into the First World War, this family man deemed ‘unfit for military service’ and permanently exempted from duty volunteered as an army-hospital and garrison clergyman in the Belgian city of Namur, the first Protestant army chaplain to offer his services in such a role.26 He was called up at the end of the year. To the ‘farewell cheers’ of his children, who were loyal to the Kaiser and ‘now, for the sake of their father, doubly fond of the military’,

24

Father and Son as a proud Ludwig Wessel wrote, he boarded a train in Berlin and headed west. As a military pastor in occupied Belgium, the 35-year-old Wessel spent over a year holding religious services and war vigils, making hospital visits and burying the dead.27 Then he preached in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, at the confluence of the Memel and the Neris. There, in 1916, he met Paul von Hindenburg, who together with Erich Ludendorff formed the German Supreme Command. Hindenburg, who by this point was largely bereft of his military influence, was nonetheless a shrewd self-promoter who knew how to use the mass media to play himself up as a grand strategist. A photo of the future Reich President with a handwritten dedication – ‘In grateful remembrance of 1915–16, von Hindenburg’ – could be found on Ludwig Wessel’s desk in Judenstrasse after the war.28 The energetic pastor published a number of his ‘Protestant sermons in the field’ in book form under the title Kriegsnot und Gottesnähe (The Hardship of War and the Presence of God). An excerpt should suffice to give an idea of its style and message. On the anniversary of the German occupation of Kaunas (17 August 1915), Wessel preached about the Bible verse ‘Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life’ (Revelation 2:10). He summed up the course of the war to date, recalling the national frenzy in the summer of 1914: Once again we exulted through the days of August to the entrancing sound of triumphant German battle songs. […] Germanic heroic legends of yore became the New German present. These heroes, having brought these legends into the light of reality, have breached abatis and barricade with a song and cheer on their lips, even if Death, from a hundred mouths, bares its teeth at them.29

Ludwig Wessel’s war book Von der Maas an die Memel (From the Maas to the Memel), published in 1918, is also rife with such passages. The continuing euphoria of war, experienced as a fateful hour for the German nation, further unmoored his Christian theological schooling.30 His impressions of the contested German–French border area close to Metz, the site of heavy casualties in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, were recorded as follows: ‘Once again, observing and deeply moved, I stood on this battleground resanctified for us by the victorious assaults of German heroism. Patriotic past and present reach out to each other here, extended hands bearing bloodied laurel.’ The ‘desert of insanity’, described by even a bellicist writer the likes of Ernst Junger, is nowhere to be found in the writings of Ludwig Wessel. The ‘blood pump’ of trench warfare on the Western Front, with millions of dead on both

25

The Making of a Nazi Hero sides, was to him a necessary sacrifice in the struggle of nations ultimately ordained by God. 31 The exploitation of Belgian and French civilians to feed the war machine and the forced labour by tens of thousands of allegedly ‘work-shy and morally inferior people’ were portrayed by Wessel as necessary disciplinary measures: ‘The obligation to work applies in principle to all inhabitants. We cannot let healthy manpower lie fallow in enemy territory when back at home every muscle is flexing and straining in the service of this trying hour. Idleness is the Devil’s workshop.’32 The pastor’s worldview was one of ‘racially grounded, aggressive panGermanism’, as historian Manfred Gailus aptly put it. The memoirs of Ludwig Wessel, published in a second edition in 1918, are teeming with romanticized descriptions. The military hospitals behind the front are ‘cosy’, ‘scrupulously clean’ and supplied with the finest rations. Forced education in the language of the occupiers is depicted by Wessel as welcome ‘future-work for Germany’ (deutsche Zukunftsarbeit). And on the front, in his opinion, there was never a lack of valiant fighting spirit: ‘Primal joy is, on the battlefield of all places, a never-failing impetus.’33 Yet the pastor was not only aggressive with words; there is evidence, too, of physical aggression. During his Kaunas period he was investigated for assault and battery. On the evening of 21 July 1916, while on holiday with his children at a spa in Bad Nenndorf, an altercation arose. A boy approximately 14 years old was supposedly bothering the younger Wessel children while playing in the spa gardens. The pastor was incensed, and demanded to see the boy’s parents. When the boy refused, the indignant paterfamilias struck him. Wessel later defended himself by saying that he merely ‘pulled the boy’s arm’ and lashed him ‘around the buttocks’ with his walking stick. But that was not the end of it. Wessel was taken to task by the boy’s father, a Jewish horse-dealer from Berlin named Carl Blumenberg, shortly after the incident and gave the latter three ‘slaps in the face’. Blumenberg’s wife pressed charges against him.34 On 19 May 1917, Ludwig Wessel was found guilty of ‘light, wilful bodily harm’ before the garrison court of Kaunus, and given a fine of 50 marks. The sentence had no further consequences for his work with the church, but he did retire just a few months later from ‘employment in military service’.35 In the period that followed, Ludwig Wessel – who was often granted special leave by the church leadership – preached ‘with exceptional effectiveness’ for the War Press Office in front of thousands of listeners. He became a patriotic agitator, even attracting the attention of the Army Supreme Command: ‘Don’t just be persistent, be persistently victorious! Because our only way home is to march!’ His son Horst spoke in similar terms with reference to

26

Father and Son the home front: ‘To be sure, the times were not what one would call rosy. Food shortages were severe, but one has to be persistent.’36 During the November Revolution of 1918, which marked the end of imperial rule and resulted in the establishment of the Weimar Republic, Ludwig Wessel tried hard to advance his career, and was not averse to cooperating with the political enemy. Utterly devoid of political experience, the pastor had himself appointed ‘government representative for Protestant Church authorities’ on 5 December, a position with far-reaching powers. The appointment was made by Konrad Haenisch, the new Prussian minister of culture and member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and Adolf Hoffmann, a delegate for the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), who briefly served as Prussian minister of science, art and education in the winter months of 1918–19. Moreover, on 5 January 1919, the state commissioner Wessel, since promoted to the rank of privy chief consistorial councillor, was also elected chairman of the National Citizens’ Council (Reichsbürgerrat), a collective anti-revolutionary movement.37 The Spartacist Uprising began the same day, a protest originally directed against the dismissal of Berlin’s chief of police Emil Eichhorn and which quickly developed into an armed insurrection against the Republic before being put down by government troops after only a few days.38 The fighting could be heard all the way to the rectory on Jüdenstrasse. The National Citizens’ Council spread scathing anti-Bolshevist propaganda in the coming months, but scarcely had any political influence. Its chairman, with his leanings towards the royalist German National People’s Party (DNVP) and who had to give up his office of state commissioner as early as 13 January 1919 under pressure from the regional church, was conspicuous for his excessive use of car travel, his lavish breakfasts and personal expenses. A high-placed official in the Prussian Ministry of Culture wondered how ‘this, to say the least, rather compromised and dubious figure could have worked his way up to the executive level of the National Citizens’ Council’.39 Ludwig Wessel, who even briefly tried his hand as an editor of Die Grosse Berliner Illustrierte in 1921, died following an operation on 9 May 1922. He was only 42 years old.40 His former editorial colleagues wrote in an unctuous but remarkably vague obituary that Wessel had ‘put his vast knowledge and great talent entirely in the service of the cause’ and carried out ‘his duties with a rare devotion, in tireless work marked by dogged will-power’. The Protestant Church had lost in the person of Wessel one of its most prominent representatives and ‘best pulpit orators’.41 The rumour later clung tenaciously that even Hindenburg had attended the funeral, which took place on Saturday 13 May 1922 at the Nicolai Church. The Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger,

27

The Making of a Nazi Hero the newspaper of choice for middle-class Protestants in Berlin, would surely have reported such an event to its readers, but merely wrote that Wessel was laid to rest at St Mary’s Cemetery in an emotional ceremony. Among the attendees were representatives of the city and the Citizens’ Council as well as numerous clergymen. Students in fraternity dress stood honour guard at the grave. There was no talk of Hindenburg, whom the Wessel children knew from their father’s stories as a mythically inflated heroic figure.42 But even without this living legend, the ceremony made a big impression on the then 14-year-old Horst. The burial of his father was a social event, a meeting place of bourgeois church circles and national-political right-wingers. It could have been here that the new male head of the family felt his calling as the torch-bearer of national rebirth. His religious energies at any rate – and this was typical of his generation – would no longer be spent on the church but flowed into the field of politics. Horst Wessel would follow in the footsteps of his deceased father in the years to come. He, too, became a kind of preacher: of Nazi ideology.43 Margarete Wessel and her three children henceforth lived off the widow’s pension provided by the Church as well as the state-funded war widow’s and orphans’ pension of her late husband – 2,880 reichsmarks a year. She claimed to receive ‘allowances from her family’ as well. The Wessels were permitted to remain in the rent-free flat on Jüdenstrasse for the time being, as the vacant second deacon’s office was not immediately filled.44 The death of his father, the family’s supposed material hardship, and his upbringing in the spirit of political revanchism all contributed to Horst’s being drawn to political radicalism and the nationalist Right.45 He eventually found himself in an environment that historian Ulrich Herbert aptly termed a ‘permanent and feverish state of rallies and secret meetings’ with rapidly changing moods and leaders, united only by their contempt for the Republic and a strong national pathos.46 In Germany’s influential middle class, ‘especially the Protestant bourgeoisie’, Klaus Mann concluded bitterly, nationalism was ‘the only way of thinking, indeed the only purpose in life, even in the first years after the war. We know that this nationalism poisoned the Republic from the very beginning.’ Indirectly confirming these views, Ingeborg Wessel wrote that ‘the war, collapse and revolution had a decisive influence on the character formation’ of her brother.47 With the end of the German Empire some of the certainties of childhood could no longer be taken for granted – at least for patriotic-minded boys from the middle classes of Berlin, whom home-front propaganda, victory assemblies at school and juvenile books that glorified war had indoctrinated with a belief in the importance of the

28

Father and Son national collective. The words of one Berlin boy in a letter to his father at the front were typical: ‘Dear Father, be so kind as to send me a Russian cap. Paul plays soldier every day. Ten boys are sappers, Red Cross and a tent. The boys have to dig communication trenches. On Sunday we go to Tempelhof Field to do manoeuvres.’48 From their perspective on the ‘home front’, these children were deeply impressed by the mysterious glamour of war, without understanding the horrors it entailed. The war seemed like a great adventure, and anyone privileged enough to take part in it was automatically elevated above the ordinary. At the same time it was the perfect projection screen for childhood fantasies of omnipotence. That the Germans might be defeated was unthinkable for most of them. The journalist and writer Sebastian Haffner, born in 1907 like Wessel, recalled his despondency upon hearing about the end of the war and the ensuing revolution: ‘I don’t think that Germany’s defeat could have jolted anyone more deeply than this eleven-year-old boy straying through alien, November-wet streets, without even noticing where he was going and without even realizing that the fine drizzle was gradually soaking him to the core.’ Horst Wessel probably had similar feelings but came to entirely different conclusions. Whereas Haffner later spoke of a ‘fantasy world’ that had collapsed inside him,49 Wessel, in 1929, still believed in the myth of a cowardly ‘stab in the back’ (Dolchstosslegende) which had allegedly forced an unvanquished German army to its knees. He deduced from this that the struggle must go on, first and foremost against the enemy at home: the democrats betraying the national cause. Even after the war, wrote Ingeborg Wessel in her party-sanctioned biography of her brother, Horst’s father remained a role model for him, the one he looked to for guidance. Ludwig Wessel, she continued, had virtually ‘pounded into’ Horst – perhaps an oblique reference to the fact that the Wessel children were beaten by their father? – that no German would have ‘inner freedom’ any more if the country did not start to think ‘of itself’. According to the recollections of Willi Stiewe, a former friend of the Wessel family, the pastor adhered unflinchingly to his militant worldview after Germany’s defeat in the war: ‘God will not hand us a new Germany on a plate. To fight and to fight – that is the whole secret to achieving success – in your own life and in the life of the fatherland,’ the pastor ranted in his usual tone.50 He brooked no dissent from his children. The son, of course, was shorn of any opportunity to rebel against his stern father given the latter’s untimely death. The youthful calls for ‘patricide’ (Vatermord) – the paradigmatic title of an expressionist drama from 1920 by Arnolt Bronnen – no longer applied to a fatherless Horst. Instead,

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The Making of a Nazi Hero the eldest son took his father’s views one step further, attempting to fulfil the latter’s ‘legacy’. The family friend Stiewe later wrote that only ‘under the intellectual and spiritual influence of his father’ did Horst become a ‘freedom fighter’.51 The young man dreamt of a national rebirth of Germany, wiping out the Republic that he, like so many on the Right, considered responsible for Germany’s defeat in the war and the ‘shameful peace’ of Versailles. Like many of Horst Wessel’s generation, the idea of a ‘German national revival’ was always on his mind. His education at the Köllnisches Gymnasium, the secondary school at Wallstrasse 42 that he attended from 1914 to 1922, may have played a part in this. Here he received not only the basics of a classical humanist education, but also had drummed into him the idealized view that the First World War was the ultimate test of self-sacrifice and patriotic commitment.52 Even after the fighting had stopped, the war remained ever-present to these pupils. Thus, the headmaster had a memorial window installed in the assembly hall, commemorating the pupils who had perished in the war. ‘Anyone who saw this slender, lanky young man with the fiery eyes as we older teachers did can only imagine the deep impression the names of these many dead must have left on his alert and agile mind,’ a former teacher speculated during a ceremonial speech in Wessel’s honour in 1933. This characteristically Nazi address alludes to yet another formative event in Wessel’s youth. Beginning in 1917, the old-style Köllnisches Gymnasium was gradually transformed into a school for the gifted and talented from underprivileged families. Until 1922, when the process was completed, the old and the new coexisted side by side. Thus Wessel, the son of a pastor, raised and socialized in a middle-class environment, came into direct contact with working-class children while still a schoolboy. His former teacher therefore argued that the social question had inevitably forced itself upon him, guiding him in his further development.53 When the school’s transformation was complete, Wessel briefly switched to the Königstädtisches Gymnasium. For a short time he attended the illustrious Evangelisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster (Protestant Grey Cloister Gymnasium). The last two years of his schooling he spent at the Luisenstädtisches Gymnasium.54 The reasons for these many changes of school are unknown. It was in the late summer of 1922, during this probably rather turbulent period in Wessel’s life, that some of his fellow pupils took him to a meeting of the Bismarck German Youth League, which soon merged into the Bismarck Youth – the youth organization of the conservative DNVP. As with the Protestant-dominated parent party, one of the primary aims of the ‘Bismarckers’, led by Hermann Otto Sieveking, was the re-establishment

30

Father and Son

Horst Wessel (second f. t. r.) at a birthday party of his brother Werner (fourth f. t. r.) at the parsonage on Jüdenstrasse, summer 1927

of the monarchy. In their day-to-day activities, the Bismarck Youth adopted elements of the back-to-nature ‘Wandervogel’ movement as well as the ‘Pfadfinder’ (German Boy Scout) movement: a moderate self-organized group of young people with a generally increasing emphasis on physical training and discipline during the 1920s.55 Interested young people were invited to a patriotic ‘folklore evening’ (Heimatabend) or to the cinema, but also to join excursions to the countryside and paramilitary exercises. This was not a new development in the increasingly politicized Weimar Republic. Already during the First World War pre-military training for young people was an integral part of bourgeois recreational culture in Germany. What was new in the 1920s were the widening political and ideological differences reflected in competing youth movements and their affiliations to political parties. Violent clashes between Communist, democratic, national-conservative and völkisch youth organizations were already an occasional feature of this period.56 Wessel, in his political autobiography, described his impressions of a Bismarck Youth meeting he attended once as a guest. It took place in a tavern on Greifswalder Strasse in the district of Prenzlauer Berg:

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The Making of a Nazi Hero I sat down at a table, and the first thing I did was inspect my surroundings a little more closely. The table was arranged in horseshoe fashion. At the head the chairmen, to the left the girls, to the right the young men. The meeting was presided over by a student named L., whom they told me straightaway was a blockhead, but unfortunately he was all they had. I have forgotten now what they were discussing so much. I was mainly interested in the girls. But all of the German maidens had either left their first youth behind them or failed to claim my attention as far as beauty went. Then they played a round of Saalpost [a party game], but I left before they finished. Now and then someone tinkled on the piano – the Ehrhardt Song, which had just become popular. This first evening did not exactly impress me, but I soon became a member anyway. Probably, I imagine, because I lacked comparisons.’57

There are no other sources to indicate if Wessel was really such a male chauvinist at the tender age of 14. His self-styling into the prototypical ‘tough guy’ of a new generation seven years later was purely functional at any rate, reflecting the discourse within the SA about manliness and sexuality, which honoured an idealized, desexualized woman of the altruistic ‘nurse’ type, while regarding women in the flesh predominantly as sexual objects.58 But his self-styled image also reflected the limited attractiveness of Rightist bourgeois groups like the Bismarck League. The latter, according to the Wessel of 1929, had lost the élan of its founding days and no longer ‘claimed his attention’. Though the Berlin section of the Bismarck League had more than 6,000 members by 1922 and in subsequent years developed more and more into a party-affiliated paramilitary organization, in Wessel’s opinion it lacked a consistent political and ideological mission, the kind he thought he found in the Nazis a few years later. The leaders of the league, he felt, were lacking a concept that would help them reach larger segments of the population. Thus, the revolutionary mindset that was certainly there in the beginning soon turned to ‘sinister reaction, which only endorsed the past and refused to learn from the many undeniable events of the day, while blithely ignoring the labour question [of how to integrate the working classes into the Volksgemeinschaft]. A veritable cult was made of the Hohenzollerns.’ Wessel is reaching these conclusions from the perspective of a young Nazi functionary in 1929 who condemns both the allegedly apolitical military games and the longing for a return to a representative but decidedly unmodern monarchy: ‘Thus, […] a movement in which an enormous political explosiveness lay dormant was falsified into a feeble social club.’59

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Father and Son Wessel later distanced himself from this type of superficial fellowship, but in the early 1920s it was exactly what appealed to him. The Bismarck League offered this young high-school student – who had nothing but male classmates – the opportunity to finally interact with girls, who at the time were much more interesting to him than political debates. The field exercises, too, were a welcome diversion from the tedium of study and a continuation of the wartime adventure stories his generation grew up with. His enthusiasm soon abated, however, as he later wrote. Granted, we have no way of knowing if this was really the case or if he merely fancied it in retrospect. But there are indeed some compelling reasons why an ambitious Wessel would have been turned off by the Bismarck League. As a youth-welfare organization predominantly directed by adults, the league offered young aspiring individuals few opportunities to work their way into the upper echelons of the organization.60 Wessel also complained about a lack of seriousness: Not a single exercise really went smoothly. They were chiefly night exercises and were usually done by about 10 a.m. Then we all went together to a prearranged outdoor restaurant where the girls had coffee waiting for us. The well-rested shirkers [Drückeberger] showed up with the girls. In fancy shoes, with clean collars and wearing their Sunday best, they looked odd enough next to the exhausted, filthy somnambulists. The whole thing ended in a giant shindig, combined with an irrepressible booze-up. The flirting reached ever new heights.61

Apparently the 15- or 16-year-old Wessel was not much of a heartbreaker – unlike the ‘shirkers’, presumably a few years older than him, who tended to view the preceding war games as the means to an end. Wessel, in his autobiography, turned this experience into a critique of the culture of bourgeois recreational youth organizations, which he accused of being insufficiently politicized. The National Socialists, he argued, were a refreshing exception to this rule. With this he was in agreement with leading figures in the Nazi youth movement, who claimed that only the Hitler Youth, growing steadily since 1928, was called ‘to be the iron tip on the spearhead of the German youth movement, standing at the helm’.62 The leader of the National Socialist German Students’ League, Baldur von Schirach, who was promoted to the rank of ‘Reich youth leader’ (Reichsjugendführer) in the NSDAP in 1931, still spoke in 1934 of a ‘National Socialist youth movement’ that in its self-perception was ‘not scoutish [bündisch] but heroic’.63 The conservative youth-movement periodical Die

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Kommenden self-assuredly mocked the arrogance of such statements – an arrogance Wessel apparently shared – calling it the ‘cramping of the best forces in a smug sense of leadership’ (Verkrampfen bester Kräfte in selbstgefälligem Führerbewusstsein). The rhetoric of Hitler Youth leaders was in fact disproportionate to the actual balance of power in the late phase of the Weimar Republic. In 1930 there were 50,000 young people, frequently of bourgeois extraction, organized in various Rightist youth leagues. The Hitler Youth, by contrast, had a mere 18,000 members, mostly recruited from working-class backgrounds.64 Wessel’s remarks about his period in the Bismarck League have to be viewed in this context. They were not merely a reminiscence of his recent experiences as an adolescent, but were also intended to underpin the claim to leadership of the National Socialists as a political ‘youth movement’. Wessel resigned his membership of the Bismarck League on 12 February 1925, his sympathies for völkisch groups within the league having led to complaints in the 47th and 21st local groups, to which he had belonged successively. Ingeborg Wessel later wrote that only in the Bismarck League did her brother have close contact with proletarian youths, thus contradicting Wessel’s teacher. Such children made up about 80 per cent of the 21st local group. Another contemporary source cites this – for the Bismarck Youth unusually high – figure for the organization in Berlin as a whole. Even back then, Ingeborg Wessel claimed, her brother understood that the workers could only be won over for the national cause by a new ‘activism’ markedly different from the old-style patriotic celebrations.65 For the 21st local group this ‘national activism’ initially took the form of hunting down Communist youth and young members of the Social Democratic Reichsbanner organization in the Bötzow neighbourhood. The 14- to 18-year-olds referred to themselves vaingloriously as the ‘Friedrichshain Raiding Squad’ (Rollkommando Friedrichshain).66 In the final months of his stint in the Bismarck League, Horst Wessel not only belonged to a local group but was also in charge of a youth group he called the ‘Knappschaft’ (with reference to the mediaeval organization of miners as well as their social insurance). The aim of this youth group, as declared by a not yet 18-year-old Wessel, was to ‘raise our boys into real German men’. His sister later found documents in one of his exercise books, shedding some light on the nature of this group and its leader. On top were the ‘General Guidelines’ of the Knappschaft. Here Wessel laid out which songs should be sung, what clothing the boys should wear and what they should read. Of particular merit in his opinion were Hermann Löns, the poet of the Lüneburg Heath with his völkisch tendencies, and Walter Flex, whose

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Father and Son novel of the Great War Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten (The Wanderer Between Two Worlds) was a source of guidance to a whole generation of young people between the wars.67 The Knappschaft, comprised of young males up to the age of 16, held singing evenings at the Wessels’ rectory flat or organized scouting games in the Grunewald forest. Night exercises were also part of the programme during the group’s brief existence.68 At Easter 1926 Wessel passed his school-leaving examination at the Luisenstädtisches Gymnasium: ‘His conduct was excellent, his diligence satisfactory.’ The secondary school, which apart from a classical department also had modern-language and scientific ones, was comparatively modern in its approach. Thus, as of 1925 there was a ‘Free Study Group for Our Time’ dedicated to ‘questions of art and ideology of our day’ and which discussed left-leaning writers such as Franz Werfel, Fritz von Unruh, Klabund, and Ernst Toller.69 Wessel did not take part in this. Comments later made by his sister would seem to suggest that he had had some fierce quarrels with the liberal headmaster Paul Hildebrandt. Hildebrandt, who often voiced his opinions in the liberal Vossische Zeitung, was early in pointing out the susceptibility of his pupils to slogans from the far Right and urged the school authorities to no longer tolerate right-wing youth leagues. It was ‘a matter of life and death, of the very state itself !’ he claimed. In 1933, a hate-filled Ingeborg Wessel refused so much as to mention the name of the headmaster, whom the new Prussian minister of culture, Bernhard Rust, had removed from office once the Nazis took power. She gloated: ‘His name has been blotted out.’70 Horst Wessel referred neither directly nor indirectly to his headmaster in Politika. In his last years of school he was active not only in the ‘Bismarckers’ but also in the Viking League, a secret right-wing extremist paramilitary organization. The Viking League was the successor organization of the Organisation Consul (OC), which, disguised as the Bavarian Wood Products Company, was responsible for the assassinations of Centre Party politician Matthias Erzberger, Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau and other democratic politicians in 1921–22. According to the articles of association of the OC, the organization assembled ‘determined, nationalistminded men’ for the purpose of preventing the ‘complete revolutionizing of Germany’. They perceived their enemies in Jewry, Social Democracy and Communism; all ‘anti-nationalists and internationalists’ were to be opposed.71 German youth were to be instructed in how to use weapons. To this end the Viking League maintained a number of youth groups that trained young adolescent men like Wessel in the use of arms as well as

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The Making of a Nazi Hero indoctrinating them in anti-democratic ideals and introducing them to political street fighting. Historian James M. Diehl rightly speaks of a ‘negative school of politics’. A primary objective of these Viking League activities was to ‘maintain military fitness’, something that to many on the political Right seemed threatened by the Treaty of Versailles, which reduced the Reichswehr to a mere 100,000 troops. On the proclaimed heroic fight of völkisch youth, the articles of association tellingly said: ‘The German ingenuity of our youth must be mobilized. It must be something irresistible, like the remote triggering of explosives.’ Children, it seems, were to be misused for bomb attacks.72 Wessel liked in particular the soldierly and aggressive attitude of the Viking League as well as its willingness to use violence, although he readily admitted that the tone there took some getting used to: ‘More than anything, you had to learn to keep your mouth shut. They yelled at you at every opportunity, and not a little. But for all the gruffness, you had the feeling it was not really meant that way.’73 Acceptance in the Viking League was also a rite of passage. He now belonged to the world of grown-ups. Many men in the league who were five to ten years older than Wessel had already served in the Ehrhardt Freikorps Brigade, notorious for its use of violence and officially disbanded after the failed Kapp Putsch of 1920. The brigade was also instrumental in the German–Polish battles in Upper Silesia and in putting down the Munich Soviet Republic in 1918–19. Its members were quite conscious of being an elite. They perceived themselves as a ‘select troop’, always on the front lines in the fight against the Left, and believed they were serving their nation in doing so.74 No wonder, then, that Wessel, having grown up surrounded by nationalist slogans, was soon an enthusiastic supporter of the Viking League and helped it recruit new members – especially from the Bismarck League, which he now referred to as an ‘inexhaustible reservoir’, as a ‘proper recruiting depot’.75 Wessel also swore an oath to uphold the secret by-laws of the league and was therefore subject to Vehmic-style law and justice, a kind of illegal vigilantism aimed against renegades in their own ranks. Though not openly, the men of the Viking League looked with disdain upon other paramilitary formations like the Stahlhelm, with whom they shared much ideologically. They did, however, take advantage of the latter’s logistic capabilities by organizing joint marches together and joining forces to initiate violent clashes with political opponents.76 Supposedly, Wessel would not leave the house without his Walther pistol on him:

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Father and Son

Horst Wessel in uniform, 1924–25. On the left, the original image, which Wessel included in his Politika. On the right, a retouched version used by Nazi propaganda in 1933. Whereas the original shows a young man posing in a garden with a female figure (probably a family member) and a dog in the background, the modified version suggests the ‘fighter’ and ‘soldier’ Wessel.

Almost everyone had a weapon like that, that’s what made them OC men. Besides, you could buy a brand-new pistol, 7.65 calibre, for a ridiculously low price back then. We were expecting a putsch any day now. The air was heavy with rumours of the sort. You always had the bare necessities packed and ready at home.

As a ‘non-com’ Wessel took part in a range of so-called special courses including ballistics and paramilitary physical training.77 In the spring of 1924 he joined other secondary-school and university students in a six- to eight-week training course of the illegal ‘Black Reichswehr’. The latter, in a broad sense, was a collective term for the paramilitary units and secret organizations of the nationalist Right; in a stricter sense it referred to the labour battalion of the Reichswehr’s Military District III, stationed in Küstrin. In essence it comprised a secret army, ostensibly for national defence but whose real mission was to abolish democratic forms of government and set up a military dictatorship. Tolerated by higher political authorities and supported by the Reichswehr, it did, in fact, attempt an amateur putsch in October 1923.78 The leagues and paramilitary groups Wessel belonged to scarcely engaged in party politics. Only in the run-up to elections did the ‘Bismarckers’ and

37

The Making of a Nazi Hero ‘Vikings’ canvass for parties on the far right. The main reason they did so was because it offered them an opportunity to act. Paramilitary exercises in gyms and the open country of Brandenburg gave Wessel and his comrades their surrogate front-line experience. In an autumn 1925 supplement to the ‘Practical Leadership Training’ of the Viking League it tellingly said: ‘What could be more natural for us Vikings, with the tasks that lie in store for us, than to study close combat, the finest of all forms of fighting! We must train men to have a mastery of hand-to-hand combat, to be able to perform infantry duties, in other words.’79 That the future clashes referred to here were not with Germany’s wartime enemies, France and Russia, but with antagonistic political groups at home was of little concern to anyone here. The ‘spirit of Langemarck’ was alive in Berlin-Schöneberg, at least symbolically. Wessel wrote in 1929: We drove all across Berlin in a lorry, having frequent skirmishes and hostile encounters with political adversaries. These encounters now seem harmless compared to the ones I would later witness. We also attended enemy meetings, with the sole purpose of scattering them to pieces. Of course we went to these events in fabulous uniforms, ‘German oak raiding gear’ [Rollkluft deutsche Eiche] was the official term. We broke up a meeting of the Reichsbanner in Wilmersdorf with the help of live hand grenades. Veritable raids were conducted throughout Schöneberg City Park in the evening.80

The language Wessel used to describe this period is pervaded by military jargon. This shows how strong the ‘cultural continuity of war’ still was, even in the mid-1920s, in the stabilization phase of the Weimar Republic, at least for a young man like Wessel.81 He supposedly belonged to the ‘Olympia German Association for Physical Training’ as well, a successor organization of the disbanded Reinhard Regiment. The club was the most powerful paramilitary organization on the extreme right in mid-1920s Berlin. Many of its members later joined the Stahlhelm or the SA, among them Sturmführer Hans Eberhard Maikowski of SA-Sturm 33 in Berlin-Charlottenburg. In his autobiography Wessel was rather critical of these rival ‘patriotic associations’ in direct competition with the National Socialists and which he felt were snatching away ‘the best people’.82 Though initially enthusiastic, Wessel soon found the Viking League, too, to be lacking in a political radicalism that was willing to go to extremes. In 1924 he complained to his superiors that his unit’s evenings on duty were ‘more like kindergarten than an Ehrhardt company’. Discipline had slackened, he

38

Father and Son claimed, and the recent meetings were not unlike a shop committee: ‘We sank, slowly but surely, in the hierarchy of paramilitary formations; the military side of things was suppressed whenever possible. […] For all our history of opposition, our leaders had a constant eye on securing police and government jobs.’83 Wessel’s criticism was an expression of a widespread helplessness in the right-wing camp, which in Berlin as well as in the rest of the empire was critically weakened in the mid-1920s, being split into a multitude of competing organizations. Young activists like him reacted by disassociating themselves from conservative right-wing bourgeois forces like the DNVP and working more than ever towards a violent overthrow. Though nationalist paramilitary groups were, in fact, devising new plans for a putsch against the Republic, the discovery of which resulted in the banning of the Viking League and Olympia in Prussia on 12 May 1926, Wessel realized that these groups would never achieve their self-defined objectives anyway. In May 1925 the Berlin chapter of the Viking League, for instance, comprised 500 members at the most, predominantly pupils and students.84 Like many of his generation and background, Wessel defected to the National Socialists in the second half of the 1920s. Following the resignation of corvette captain and Freikorps commander Hermann Ehrhardt, who publicly appealed for the restoration of the monarchy in March 1926 and supported the Stahlhelm watchword ‘Into the State!’ (Hinein in den Staat!), the 19-year-old law student Wessel wrote his own letter of resignation to his superiors in the Viking League on 23 November 1926. Wessel was of the opinion that the new declarations of loyalty to the democratic constitution would hardly be helpful in the ‘conquest of Red Berlin’. Only the National Socialists, he felt, were pointing in the right direction: There is no need for us to wonder these days why people, especially the activist ones, are running away to the NSDAP. Of the 16 men I had, 6 have already gone over to the SA. […] Making the 19 million people who nowadays say they have no fatherland by the name of Germany, making these people see that the word ‘national’ is nothing to be afraid of, this to me is the most urgent task of our day. And wherever I see real progress being made, I am one of the first to be there.85

These 19 million people he speaks of were about a third of the German Empire’s overall population. This figure roughly corresponded to the projected combined number of votes carried by the SPD and KPD in the most recent parliamentary elections of December 1924.86 It would appear that

39

The Making of a Nazi Hero Wessel really was concerned about winning over to the ‘national cause’ the supposedly misled working classes. To his mind, the party pursuing this aim most consistently was a right-wing extremist splinter party headquartered in far-off Munich and of no significance in the German capital. Newly founded by Adolf Hitler in February 1925, after his release from fortress detention, this party was the NSDAP.

The student of law at Friedrich Wilhelm University as a member of the Berlin Corps Normannia

40

3

The Young National Socialist

Wessel was drawn to the National Socialists just when the confrontation between hostile political camps was coming to a head in the Weimar Republic. On 7 December 1926, only a few weeks after Hitler appointed Joseph Goebbels the new Gauleiter, or territorial leader, of the NSDAP in Berlin and Brandenburg, Wessel became a member of the party and its Sturmabteilung, or stormtroopers. The Berlin SA units had no more than 450 men back then.1 Not long before, the Reich commissioner for the supervision of public order had observed an unsettling tendency: It has become apparent that the main reason for the recurrent politically motivated brawls and riots is the fighting mood systematically fuelled among the juvenile members of the units. A heroicism-of-the-streets is thus being bred whose adherents seek out street fights as an opportunity to distinguish themselves. Particularly regrettable are the ruthlessness and brutality with which firearms are deployed in such clashes.2

The young man from a middle-class home had a hard time of it at first with the Nazis despite the climate of mental belligerence he was raised in, an upbringing he shared with many of his generation. ‘As a guest, no less, I was not exactly handled with kid gloves,’ Wessel wrote in retrospect. ‘There were some things I could not understand at first, but […] unlike before, I was starting to think politically. The Bismarck League – that was fun and games. The Vikings adventure, a putsch-atmosphere and playing soldier, though not without an underlying risk. NSDAP, this was political awakening.’ Only six months earlier, on 19 April 1926, Horst Wessel had enrolled to study law at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin.3 Soon thereafter he joined the Corps Normannia Berlin, a member of the venerable Kösener S.C. fraternity association. The Normans belonged to the

41

The Making of a Nazi Hero

‘Fischerzelle’ SA unit (Wessel standing on the right, in uniform, his friend Richard Fiedler fourth f. t. r.)

Allgemeiner Deutscher Waffenring der schlagenden Verbindungen (roughly the ‘German Arms Ring of Student Duelling Societies’), founded in Jena in 1919, which propagated the educational ideal of the ‘fighting man’ and viewed student duelling as a means of ‘steeling and testing physical and moral fitness’.4 In the second half of the 1920s, Wessel was moving in two different, albeit ideologically converging, worlds. He kept company with the SA, predominantly made up of workers and the unemployed and whose members were generally regarded as ‘narrow-minded sectarians’, as well as with right-wing nationalist-minded bourgeois academics.5 This is worth noting, because he only gave one side of the story in Politika, styling himself as the prototype of the fearless and committed young National Socialist whose life story culminated in his political activity for the SA. His travelogue, on the other hand, shows him – at least until the summer of 1927 – to be a young man greatly influenced by the bündisch youth movement and who undertook annual outings with his friends on Whitsuntide. With guitar and song he took to the trails, for example to the Lüneburg Heath in 1925. Before starting university in 1926, he spent the summer holiday in Austria, where he went on an excursion to the panoramic ‘Franz-Josefs-Höhe’ on Grossglockner, Austria’s highest mountain.6

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The Young National Socialist His chosen subject at university, jurisprudence, was likewise typically bourgeois. In her biography of 1933, Ingeborg Wessel wrote that her brother began his studies convinced ‘that the law is of tremendous importance as a cornerstone of every ordered state’; he did not want to leave this ‘weighty field to his adversaries’. According to her, Horst Wessel perceived the administration of justice primarily as an instrument of political power. Commenting on the famous fraud trial that followed the so-called Barmat scandal, he supposedly said: ‘For months and years on end they take the trouble to prove that these East Jewish criminals Kutisker and Barmat have cheated the state out of countless millions. I do not need to study the science of law to determine if these characters are swindlers or not.’7 The affair surrounding the Jewish merchants Julius Barmat and Iwan Kutisker – whose business collapsed in 1924 after receiving insufficiently secured loans from the Prussian State Bank and the Reich Post Office with the backing of various politicians, in particular from the SPD and the Catholic Centre Party – was exploited by the radical Right to strike a blow at the allegedly ‘corrupt system’ of the Weimar Republic.8 This quote from Wessel was characteristic of anti-Semitism in the SA. According to historian Sven Reichardt, this had a ‘primarily anti-materialist thrust’. Jews were repeatedly portrayed as parasites (Schmarotzer) who had amassed their wealth undeservedly at the expense of a people in hardship, having abandoned the national cause and core values of the nationalist worldview such as heroism, soldierly spirit, and self-sacrifice for the sake of a liberalist social order based on the principle of self-interest.9 Such notions were largely a continuation of the late nineteenth-century anti-Semitism of Adolf Stoecker, court chaplain in Berlin and founder of the Christian Social Party. Judging by a number of passages from his Politika, Wessel shared many of these prejudices. In the decade following the Great War, this underlying anti-Semitic attitude was the most important link in the right-wing extremist paramilitary subculture Wessel had moved in ever since childhood. Wessel, in other words, already harboured such views before he turned to the Nazis, who demanded with hitherto unheard-of severity the elimination of Jewish life in Germany and whose anti-Semitic acts of violence were a bedrock of their political practice.10 A crucial literary experience for him, his sister related in her old age, was the novel From Double Eagle to Red Flag by the Russian Cossack general and writer Pyotr Nikolayevich Krasnov, published in German in 1922.11 In this three-volume work teeming with anti-Semitic passages, Krasnov claims that a Jewish world conspiracy was responsible for the downfall of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Adopting the accusations made in The Protocols of the Elders of

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Zion, a fraudulent document circulating in Russia from the early twentieth century on, Krasnov wrote that ‘international Jewry’ was the gravest danger to all national movements.12 Such fantasies of conspiracy bolstered the National Socialists’ belief that the races of the world were locked in a struggle for life and death. For them there was no alternative between a ‘racially pure national community’ and ‘Jewish world domination’, whose harbinger was thought to be the ‘liberalist Weimar system’.13 Wessel, who at the latest since his contact with Goebbels was moving in an environment utterly saturated in anti-Semitism, was most likely influenced by the biologistic–racial as well as the religious–völkisch variety of anti-Semitism. Even during the summer holidays – at least according to a photograph in his autobiography – Wessel and his siblings read the Nazi propaganda paper Der Angriff (The Attack), the weekly platform of the Berlin Gauleiter for publishing his anti-Jewish screeds and caricatures. There are no indications that Wessel was as good a student as Nazi propaganda would later claim. Politics – or what he took for politics – were his first priority. His studies, aborted in the spring of 1929, took second place, at best. This is also the impression we get from the letters he wrote during his semester abroad in Vienna. From 16 January to 29 June 1928 he rented a small room on Gentzgasse 6 in the 18th District, but wasn’t enrolled in the local university, at least not under his real name.14 Wessel had other things in mind besides books: ‘I’ve dedicated all of my free time here to the Hitler Youth,’ the twenty-year-old wrote on 21 February 1928 in a letter to an SA friend in Berlin.15 If Wessel’s 1929 autobiography can be trusted, the move to Vienna was not a snap decision. Goebbels, he claims, sent him to the Austrian capital so he could inspect the ‘organization and working methods’ of Viennese youth groups. In today’s parlance, Wessel was doing a kind of internship. The young SA man, in his own words, gained ‘good and extensive insight’ into the work of National Socialists in Vienna. He also claimed to have taken part in meetings with district and regional party leaders, something that would have been difficult without an introduction from Berlin. After only a few weeks, he attested that his hosts’ youth work was ‘magnificently and meticulously organized’: ‘It would take a considerable effort to bring the Gau of Berlin up to this level.’16 This friendly judgement held only for young recruits, however. The party and SA, according to Wessel, were marked by a serious ‘lack of leadership’.17 As the Austrian Nazis would themselves admit just a few years later, between 1926 and 1929 only several hundred people belonged to the ‘fanatic but small and therefore powerless band of steadfast Hitler pioneers’ in Vienna.

44

The Young National Socialist In June 1928 the party numbered no more than 900; in the parliamentary elections the year before they garnered a mere 0.62 per cent of the vote.18 Accordingly, Wessel found the Danube National Socialists lacking in ‘triumphant vitality’: ‘In general, the man of Vienna is not as activist in the daily political struggle as, say, a North German.’ Infighting, too, thwarted greater political success of the völkisch Right in Austria, Horst Wessel noted critically in his Politika.19 In the second half of the 1920s there was a fierce struggle there over the direction the movement should take. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party of Greater Germany, the so-called Hitler movement, with less than 5,000 members in 1928, and the somewhat stronger NSDAP of Austria, commonly known as the ‘Schulz Group’ (after its leader Karl Schulz), with its 6,300 members, were mutually antagonistic since the division of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP) in 1926. Whereas the Schulz Group wanted to help establish a specifically Austrian brand of National Socialism and advocated the independence of a future Nazi Austria, the NSDAP of Greater Germany viewed itself as an Austrian branch of the overall Hitler movement. The schism even extended down to the youth organization level. The ‘left wing’ of the party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Youth (NSDAJ), with its union sympathies, existed alongside the Hitler Youth, which, closely aligned to Nazi youth work in Germany and the ‘Führer principle’, was founded in May 1926. As of December 1927 it bore the additional title Association of National Socialist Young Workers and engaged in targeted propaganda activities in the Viennese working-class districts of Meidling and Favoriten, both of which were ‘Marxist strongholds’ from the standpoint of the National Socialists.20 Wessel’s stay in Vienna came during a time of infighting as well as programmatic reorientation. He took a stand in this situation by temporarily assuming the responsibilities of ‘local group leader’ (Ortsgruppenführer) in the Hitler Youth in the Vienna district of Favoriten.21 The Nazi youths in this district, most of them armed with pistols and hunting knives, used to meet every Thursday evening at the ‘Deutsches Heim’ on Raaberbahngasse 10. Wessel spoke there on topics such as the ‘Battle for Berlin’.22 There are no reliable records, though, on the young man’s political activities. He left no noticeable traces as a writer or public speaker in Vienna. By March 1930 even the Hitler Youth in his district had only vague recollections of this party comrade from Berlin who had stayed with them for a few months and whom they mistakenly referred to as Kurt Wessel.23 Though Wessel was fast to assimilate with the Vienna National Socialists, even taking on leadership tasks, he remained an outsider, a foreigner in their midst. He attributed this to an ideological conflict:

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Vienna – that means first and foremost cultural-national interests, being a fervent anti-Semite but not so much of a Nazi bent. Berlin – that means, first and last, being an unwavering socialist, and a national one at that. Cultural questions play a role for us in the grand scheme of things; in Vienna they are paramount. The political standpoint I brought from Berlin oftentimes caused a shaking of heads on account of its radical socialist slant […]. They could not comprehend it. Vienna, after all, is not an industrial city in our sense of the word. Thus, even some party comrades here took me for a halfCommunist.24

Indeed, Austrian anti-Semitism in those days was marked by anti-capitalism as much as it was by the deep-seated religious prejudices in some segments of society. The anti-Semites in the Austrian capital were extremely aggressive in their agitation work. This can be seen, for example, in posters for a propaganda tour confiscated beforehand by the police. In 1928 they were emblazoned with the following slogans: ‘Death to the Jews’, ‘Down with the Rathenau race’, and ‘Down with the ritual murderers’.25 At a party meeting, the Jews were maligned as sex offenders ‘intent on the moral dissolution of the native Austrian and German people’. The Austrian National Socialists did not shrink from racially motivated murder either. One of their victims was the Jewish writer and journalist Hugo Bettauer, gunned down on 10 March 1925.26 As early as 1930 the Nazi district leader of Vienna, Walter Rentmeister, demanded that Jewish Austrians be deprived wholesale of their civil rights: ‘We, as a host people, will make use of our domiciliary rights and demand the expulsion of Jews and Jew-descendents [Judenstämmlinge] from Austria. We demand, furthermore, that the Jews shall not be permitted to exercise indigenous rights nor to serve in administrative positions in the state.’27 Horst Wessel noted in 1929 that one reason for the problems faced by völkisch-nationalist groups in Austria was that all the important positions of power were firmly in the hands of Social Democrats.28 His perspective, though, failed to take into account how fragile their political dominance really was. The Austrian National Socialists, previously associated with the partly fascist ‘Heimwehr’ militia, met with a barely concealed benevolence from some corners of the judiciary and administration. In the eyes of the authorities, Communists and Socialists – especially the Austrian Red Front Fighters’ League founded in January 1928 – were the greater danger, not least of all following the bloody riots of 15 and 16 July 1927, which cost the lives of nearly 100 people.29

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The Young National Socialist Two examples from 1928 demonstrate the latitude enjoyed by the völkisch Right. On 21 January 1928 the German Student Union was able to invite völkisch-nationalist clubs, delegations from the army and the Front Fighters’ Association, as well as about 1,000 students to a gathering in the auditorium of Vienna University. The meeting went undisturbed. Speakers advocated the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich, and the meeting ended with everyone singing the German national anthem, the ‘Song of the Germans’. On 10 November 1928, the tenth anniversary of the First Republic,30 völkischnationalist students succeeded in forcefully expelling various socialist student groups from the university without police interference.31 We do not know if Wessel took part in these activities. We do know that he was true to his social and political mores, joining the Corps Alemannia, an ‘armed student association’ founded on 17 November 1862.32 Walter Reinhart, a ‘corps brother’, wrote in his 1938 memoirs that Wessel’s methods of taking the floor and causing a commotion at Communist meetings met with little understanding among fellow völkisch-nationalists in Vienna. This confirmed Wessel’s own observation. Only later, Reinhart wrote (in conspicuous agreement with the rhetoric attributed to Wessel by Nazi propaganda), did he understand that the ‘hate-indoctrinated men of the Red commune’ could only be impressed by personal displays of courage and not by ‘so-called intellectual weapons’. According to Reinhart, Wessel was hardly a good fighter, despite having trained intensely with his mentor. He had serious reservations about his protégé’s first Mensur, or ritual duel, on account of his ‘poor on-guard position’. But Wessel – as befits a hero and the legend around him – mastered it with flying colours after all, he claimed. By Reinhart’s account, Wessel spoke of the Vienna period as the ‘best time of his life’.33 And yet there is a palpable sense of homesickness in a letter of Wessel’s from the Austrian capital: ‘I really can’t wait to be back in our magnificent movement in Berlin, rejoining the others at the forefront of the battle…’34 Unlike its Viennese counterpart, the NSDAP in Berlin in those days was dominated by the left wing of the party, which tried to combine aggressive nationalism with elements of socialism. As Wessel repeatedly noted, he, too, felt drawn to this faction propagated by the Strasser brothers, Gregor and Otto, publishers of the Nazi Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung since 1926, as well as by Goebbels and now and then by Hitler as well. Typical of this unctuous and pugnacious but thematically somewhat vague strain of National Socialism were the remarks of Hitler in a speech delivered on 2 March 1928:

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The Making of a Nazi Hero The old fronts with their old parties must be smashed, as they block the nation’s path to the future. We do this by extracting the two terms nationalism and socialism and combining them in a new objective, an objective we work towards optimistically, because supreme socialism is a burning devotion to the people.35

From 1925 to 1930, the leaders of the North German wing of the NSDAP were strident in their demands for a ‘total revolution of the economic order’, but ultimately failed against Hitler’s opposition.36 Wessel, too, fashioned himself into a friend of the working man with the social problems of Berlin in mind: I tried to understand every political orientation, and in doing so discovered that there were just as many, perhaps even more, fanatical, self-sacrificing idealists in the Red camp as on the other side. Added to this was the utterly distressing realization of the great social pauperization and bondage of the working classes in all professions. I had become a socialist, in other words. Not a socialist out of emotion, like so many from the bourgeois camp, but a socialist, above all, out of reason.37

Self-positioning of this sort was not uncommon for young nationalists who grew up in a bündisch environment and who despised nothing more than the, as they saw it, satiated and opportunistic middle classes. In the 1920s, socialist ideas in the broadest sense held a great attraction for young people across the social spectrum, not just for those from a working-class background. Everyone agreed that the ‘bourgeois world’ was doomed. The only point of contention was which concrete political form this new and, according to sociologist Helmuth Plessner, ‘flexible morality of the community’ should take.38 The social-revolutionary pathos and radical anti-capitalist rhetoric of the political Left also had their effect on Wessel. His ‘German socialism’ was a national, domestic socialism, however, rejecting all internationalism and replacing class struggle with the notion of the Volksgemeinschaft or ‘national community’.39 In this he was not alone in the camp of the nationalist Right. In 1932, the ‘young-conservative’ Ernst Günther Gründel wrote the following in his programmatic and declamatory book Die Sendung der jungen Generation (The Mission of the Young Generation), which he himself understood as a ‘sweeping revolutionary interpretation’ of the present: ‘German socialism is the most noble idea and task of our coming revolution.’ Gründel made a flaming appeal to young people that easily could have been penned by Wessel:

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The Young National Socialist The younger ones among us who have not yet had that social experience of community [soziale Gemeinschaftserlebnis] of our generation, let them make up for it; let them stand at the machine next to the worker, dig coal next to the miner, and watch as their fellow worker becomes their fellow German; let them go out with the others into Germany, not shunning the hostels and hayricks […]; let them sit next to the tramping jobless man on the wayside and hear him recount his fate: a German post-war fate. Any socialism that is truly honest must begin with a personal stance!40

Or so the theory went. The high-flying plans to enlist the help of a new generation in overcoming a present experienced as a state of crisis were not merely the product of an idealistic cast of mind, however, but were essentially rooted in a sense of discrimination that was felt by many young men in the educated middle classes. They complained about their lack of professional prospects and the poor chances of moving up in society, especially compared to the generation of their fathers and grandfathers. Historian Detlev Peukert spoke pointedly of a ‘superfluous younger generation’.41 This diffuse sense of resentment may have played a role in the mind of the university dropout Wessel. Right-wing intellectual Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann diagnosed the situation as follows in 1931: ‘The young generation of the so-called bourgeoisie can no longer “look down its nose” socially, emerging as it is, in an increasingly conscious way, as a new kind of class alongside the proletariat.’42 Wessel supposedly kept his distance from the typical amusements of students, the drinking orgies of the fraternity brothers, for instance. His SA friend Richard Fiedler later wrote: He hated the beer-bench philistines who threw their weight around in the cushy corner of their favourite pub, offering suggestions on how Germany might recover, but when they themselves were expected to act took charge from the shelter of their smoking room. Thus, finding a ‘decent pub’ never meant much to him as a student, something his fellow students thought absolutely essential and proper.43

Descriptions like this are less a recollection of Wessel’s actual student life than an idealized portrait of the National Socialist student, who was expected to refrain from excessive alcohol intake. At meetings of the Hitler Youth in Vienna, the party insisted that there was no explicit ‘pressure to drink’ – most likely providing an indication of actual practices among its members.44 Hitler, too, in 1927 had spoken out against established forms of

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The Making of a Nazi Hero traditional student life. The times did not call for ‘honest-as-beer dependability’ (bierehrliche Stichfestigkeit), but for ‘political clout’ (politische Schlagkraft). The future could not be won with the ‘student of yore, the old boys and moss-heads’.45 Contradicting Fiedler, Reinhart said that Wessel had greatly enjoyed participating in bibulous student evenings of song. His sister expressed similar views: Horst ‘did not have an ascetic bone in his body’.46 Klaus Mann wrote that Wessel had an ‘intimate dalliance’ with a female student in Vienna, having gone on an outing with her to Wachau, where they spent several days and ‘had a marvellous time’. Presumably he culled this episode straight from Hanns Heinz Ewers’s 1932 propaganda novel Horst Wessel.47 Even as an old woman, Wessel’s sister was still telling people that he and his Austrian girlfriend had set a date for their engagement party.48 This might have been wishful thinking, of course, his sister consoling herself with her own version of her brother’s relationship to a working-class girl his family rejected. Meeting with like-minded people in bars, despite the contradictory reports, was of interest to the young man primarily as a platform for political agitation. Discipline, order and steadfastness were, by his own admission, the values he prized. He demanded them of himself as well as of others. According to Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann, Wessel was not alone in this. In faintly esoteric language influenced by the ‘life reform’ movement, Eschmann wrote: ‘The young generation has learned that sources of personal and social strength are to be found in authority and command, in allegiance and devotion, all of which has nothing to do with the historical form of Prussian militarism and the famed sacrificio dell’intelletto.’49 Marching in rank and file was felt by many young people to be an ‘expression of their most intense awareness of being alive’, another observer marvelled in 1932. The almost libidinous tension of a hierarchy based on command and obedience may indeed help explain why Wessel immersed himself ever more fanatically in the world of paramilitary organizations and men’s clubs the moment he drifted away from his family environment. The allure of this world, according to Klaus Theweleit, was its ‘utopia of justice’, which, unlike family ties with their rigid and unchanging hierarchies, was imagined as a just and – by dint of personal achievement – changeable arrangement of individuals in a whole made up of potential equals.50 Wessel, at any rate, was in his element when he could command others from a position of leadership and make an impression on people around him. This was true of his time in youth groups and continued in the SA. Wessel’s career in the SA began in 1928 in the Alexanderplatz Stammsektion

50

The Young National Socialist (cadre division), later to become Sturm 1, under the command of Hans Breuer, the leader of Standarte IV.51 By Wessel’s own account, as a so-called ‘street-cell leader’ (Strassenzellenleiter), he was responsible for all manner of organizational tasks. He planned propaganda and recruiting tours to the small towns around Berlin, mostly conducted in hired and barely serviceable lorries plastered from top to bottom with posters. They lined up in formation at central locations, sang songs and marched through the streets with the aim of impressing curious sympathizers as well as provoking political adversaries. Occasional violent clashes were a welcome diversion for SA men who came along for the sake of brawling. These tours, intended not least to strengthen their sense of manly camaraderie, were the highlight of Wessel’s SA activities. The majority of local inhabitants perceived them as a nuisance.52 From 19 to 21 August 1927, Wessel took part in the Nuremberg Rally. The NSDAP was prohibited in Prussia at this time, and so, in Wessel’s account, about 1,000 supporters from the Gau of Berlin-Brandenburg travelled to Franconia under the slogan ‘Banned but not dead!’ (Trotz Verbot – nicht tot!).53 ‘It is clear to every true Nazi that, whatever the cost, he must take part in this event,’ Wessel wrote in his travelogue, which portrayed in detail his journey of several days from Berlin to Nuremberg.54 He himself did not yet seem well integrated in the party with its 75,000 national members back then, for he travelled alone on his bicycle and noticeably kept his distance from fellow Nazis he met along the way.55 His description of this ‘grand tour through Germany’, which he presumably wrote a year later based on his diary entries, is illuminating in that it reveals certain sides of Wessel that clearly deviate from the propagandistic picture drawn of him later. It depicts a young bourgeois man on the road who sleeps not only on a bed of straw but also at bed-and-breakfasts, who can always afford a warm meal, and who clearly feels superior when mocking his travel acquaintances. When his bicycle tyre is punctured, he is unable to patch it up himself. He considered a skill of this sort inessential – a strange attitude indeed on such a long journey and given the likelihood of a flat tyre in those days. The future Sturmführer gives the impression of being a rather helpless lad with traits typically found in Germany’s educated middle classes (Bildungsbürgertum): Around 10 o’clock I arrive in Lauchstedt [today Bad Lauchstädt], known for the Lauchstedt spring. A friendly little spic-and-span town with a delightful little theatre that once saw better days. A great gala performance took place this year. In an entirely overgrown vine arbour I drink my milk and write my first lines home.56

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Only once in his travel account does Wessel, later held up as an ‘apostle of the working class’, show an interest in social grievances. The impressions he gains while passing through an industrial city in Saxony show little in the way of a deeper understanding, let alone any kind of personal commitment: Horrendously ugly and filthy workers’ settlements can be seen along the way. […] A pity that these workers have no real sense of a neat and tidy home. […] Children splash in a gutter torrent discharging from a broken hydrant. The people here all look mildly oppressed. No one greets, no one calls out. The never-ending treadmill of factory and mine work wears on body and soul. […] An existence devoid of pleasure. Do these poorest of the poor even know what a verdant forest is?57

Though perhaps genuine in feeling, Wessel’s commiseration was limited to a mixture of cheap sympathy and a faintly romantic hostility towards big cities. He seemed not to take an interest in the political and economic forces behind this misery. The problem for Wessel the middle-class boy was aesthetic as much as it was social. The people looked ‘oppressed’, children were wallowing in filth, and what the workers were lacking in his opinion was mainly the ‘sense of a neat and tidy home’. It is the landscapes, and not the people, that stand out in Wessel’s travelogue. The young man seems not to have had many conversations during his trip, or at least he thought them not worthy of mention. He gives the impression of being rather priggish, turned out as he was in his casual sportswear, snow goggles perched on top of his head to protect him against the sun – an alien cycling through predominantly rural surroundings. But there are also some echoes of the Wandervogel movement in Wessel’s descriptions, and naturally of German Romanticism too: ‘So breathtakingly beautiful is the vast countryside stretched out in the warm sun that I get off and continue on foot so as to let the beauty of the landscape and the summer day work their magic on me.’ The future Nazi icon, a good-for-nothing like in Eichendorff’s novella? His notes at least suggest that his self-styling as a champion of the National Socialist cause, always ready for action, did not always square with reality: Off the beaten track, the shady park of a large manor beckons. Too tempting with this heat. And so I lie for a while in the cool grass. All is quiet around me. I lie on my back, watch the white clouds drift by, and do what I like to do best: dream.58

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The Young National Socialist Wessel’s travelogue ends abruptly when he gets to Nuremberg. We do not have his immediate impressions of a party congress that at that time was still largely improvised. Many of the meetings were cancelled due to a lack of participants and, according to police reports, no more than 9,000 SA and SS men as well as members of the Hitler Youth took part in the Sunday parade, the main event. After days of taking in the scenery, Wessel was suddenly confronted with the raw reality of Nazi propaganda. The economist and politician Gottfried Feder held forth on ‘political and economic corruption in the November democracy’ and Alfred Rosenberg, editor-in-chief of the Völkischer Beobachter, declared the political aim of ‘abolishing the idea of the international Jewish parasite state [Schmarotzerstaat] and the political elimination [Ausscheidung] of the Jews’.59 There can be no doubt that talks like these fell on fertile ground in the case of Wessel, given the resentment against the Jews and the Weimar Republic he had been exposed to since childhood. After years in various nationalist and right-wing extremist groups, Wessel finally felt he had found the party for him. In retrospect he idealized the meeting of 1927: Flags, fervour, Hitler, all of Nuremberg a brown army camp. That was the biggest impression. The other was to experience the concerted will of North and South, East and West. The experience of German fellowship. […] The many, little experiences have fallen into obscurity in the excitement of the festival. All that remains is the overall impression. And this is lasting and deep.60

This was the young politician speaking, who had taken his experiences and impressions from two or three years before, jotted down in his travelogue, and refashioned them into a more general, sanitized version, suitable for consumption by any National Socialist. The Nuremberg Rally seems to have been instrumental in Wessel’s dedication to ‘propaganda work’ upon his return to Berlin. His commitment to the National Socialists not only served his political aims; just as important was the social experience of belonging to a community of like-minded individuals, one that also brought him in touch with male authorities, ‘leadership figures’ who would serve as his guide. His party comrades were a surrogate family and friends in one. Around the time he took his schoolleaving examination, in 1926, he wrote that ‘to this day I have yet to find a real friend’.61 The physical robustness of most SA men, their sense of male camaraderie and their unconventional tone may have attracted him as well. It is striking in Politika, at any rate, how warmly Wessel recalls those who were politically close to him, whereas no mention is made of his family in

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The Making of a Nazi Hero any of his writings that have been preserved. Given the assiduousness of his sister and mother in exploiting the memory of their brother and son, it is unlikely he wrote them affectionate letters that the women decided not to publish. Wessel’s writings indicate that he was especially impressed by the political radicalism of the Hitler party. The risk of being wounded or dying in a clash with the political enemy was no damper on his enthusiasm. On the contrary, it finally gave him the opportunity to prove himself as a man, his ‘front experience’ so to speak. Wessel noted: The young movement’s momentum was tremendous. […] Street parades, advertising campaigns in the press and propaganda tours in the provinces created an atmosphere of activism and high tension that could only serve the movement well. There were countless run-ins. Wounded, even dead men were left behind on the squares.62

The unfeeling portrayal of such ‘incidents’ takes up much of Wessel’s autobiography. On an excursion to the environs of Berlin in the summer of 1928 he wrote: After beating six constables to a pulp in Cottbus, shooting down one in Pasewalk and wounding a handful more, the police were mobilized against us. […] Some were arrested for no reason and held at headquarters for 24 hours. I went through this test of a National Socialist for the first time myself after the Pasewalk skirmish. With enormous impudence, mind you, and plenty of humour. Later it happened more frequently.63

The trip to Pasewalk earned Wessel his first police record entry. Investigations into concerted breach of the public peace were dropped, however, on 14 July 1928. In 1929 he was once again interrogated for ‘political assault’ along with a Communist named Esser. The files were soon closed in this case too.64 Wessel is not on record in the capital for any other punishable offences, even though he commanded his SA-Sturm 5 while raiding two taverns in Kreuzberg in the late summer of 1929.65 The Berlin police, apparently not aware of his arrest in the hinterland, took him for a fellow traveller who may have incited others to violence but was not directly involved himself. It is peculiar that nowhere in his Politika does Wessel describe in concrete terms what he himself experienced in street fights. Whenever he mentions acts of violence committed by the SA it is always ‘we’ and never ‘I’. Striking

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The Young National Socialist

SA propaganda tour (Wessel on the lorry, standing on the far left). The banner reads ‘You, too, should become a stormtrooper of the National Socialist Revolution’.

down an opponent, the taste of blood on his tongue, or having his wounds treated by the SA doctor – these certainly would have been experiences and ‘honours’ there was no need to hide in Politika. Presumably his weak constitution prevented him from laying hands on himself, a handicap he tried to compensate for with his radical rhetoric. In his schooldays Wessel broke his arm four times, mostly during the holidays while horseback riding – a skill he only ‘mastered somewhat’, according to an otherwise glorifying text. In a curriculum vitae drawn up in 1925, Wessel wrote that the repeated fractures had caused him to ‘suffer to this day from a debilitation and deformation of the arm’. He was permanently exempted from physical education at school,66 but took part in boxing and martial-arts practice with the Viking League while still a pupil. Wessel even claims to have taught ju-jitsu and – so he writes in Politika, casually boasting – ‘completed a course with German judo master Erich Rahn’.67 Rahn, who had been popularizing the Japanese combat sport in Germany since the early part of the century, ran a ju-jitsu school in Berlin-Schöneberg. Wessel’s interest in modern martial arts is, of course, no proof of his actual combativeness, as ju-jitsu is primarily an art of self-defence. For someone who packed a limited punch, it was understandably the method of choice

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The Making of a Nazi Hero for holding his own in inevitable physical encounters, not to mention the fact that practising a form of martial arts reputed to be extremely dangerous would have boosted his prestige. Perhaps Berlin SA-Gruppenführer Karl Ernst was thinking of Horst Wessel when he recalled among the first SA troops not only the ‘broad-chested figures of workers’ but also the ‘little fellows’ with ‘pale and prematurely hardened facial features, but radiant eyes’.68 We find nothing of this in Wessel’s descriptions of himself. True to Nazi rhetoric, he fancied himself an unyielding, ever-active warrior who was basically ready for anything: ‘I served the party with vigour and tremendous zeal. No sacrifice of time or money, no danger, arrest or affray could scare me. […] Everything for the movement!’69 As of late summer 1928, Wessel lived for a time in the little Thuringian town of Elgersburg near Ilmenau. He was there ‘temporarily on business’, he wrote in Politika in 1929. What exactly this business was, of this he made no mention. The closest local branch of the party met in Ilmenau, just a few kilometres away. His sparse notes imply that he was bored in Elgersburg, an ‘utterly Red hamlet’. The KPD had considerable electoral success in the town, the virtual collapse of the region’s thriving thermometer industry after the First World War having led to a sharp spike in unemployment. The reason for Wessel’s stay in Thuringia was actually rather banal. Wessel, according to a local Ilmenau paper from 1934, worked for several weeks as the leader of a ‘Berlin youth squad’ (Jugendschar) at a youth club belonging to the ‘German Public Recreation Homes Society’ (Deutsche Volkserholungsheime e.V.), housed in the former Dr Preiss Sanatorium and complete with tennis courts and an athletic field.70 Photos in the souvenir book published by his sister in 1933 show Wessel hiking through the Thuringian Forest with what look to be 10- to 14-year-old boys, as well as reading to them. Perhaps he glossed over the summer job in his autobiography, thinking it did not befit the social status of an aspiring young politician. Nazi propaganda in Thuringia would later return to this episode in Wessel’s life. For the time being, however, no sooner had the young man left than the people of Elgersburg forgot about him, a local teacher, Otto Gimm, admitted in 1934. Various newspaper reports claiming that Wessel conducted ‘the first SA training course’ in Elgersburg belong to the realm of legend.71 If Wessel really had come to Thuringia as a young political functionary of the NSDAP, he surely would have written about it in Politika. His propaganda work in Elgersburg was at any rate modest to say the least, amounting to little more than his secretly hanging up copies of Der Angriff and Illustrierter Beobachter in a public reading room.72

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The Young National Socialist By October 1928 Wessel was back in Berlin. Here the now 21-year-old, having reached his majority, exhibited a remarkable commitment to the NSDAP during the ensuing 15 months. In 1929 he allegedly spoke at 56 meetings, making him one of the most frequent party orators in the Gau of Greater Berlin, second only to Joseph Goebbels.73 One look at the Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung shows that the junior politician Wessel really did have a packed schedule some weeks. From 6 to 12 May 1929 he was slated to talk no less than four times: Monday evening at the Moabit branch, Wednesday night at the Kleist branch on Lützowstrasse, Thursday at the Wannsee base, and Friday in Tempelhof. Added to this was the SA recruitment evening at the ‘Heinrich’ pub in Friedrichshain, which Wessel presumably took part in as well.74 The focal point of Wessel’s own Sturm 5 evenings was usually a ‘political talk’ held by him, preceded and followed by the collective singing of a number of fight songs. Comparable in nature were the ‘platoon meetings’ of the Red Front Fighters’ League, which probably served as a model for Wessel’s SA evenings and ideally looked like this: ‘The meeting opens with a fight song. This is followed by a talk, half an hour at the most. After the talk, a good discussion.’ Then came the closing remarks by the meeting’s chairman, general announcements and finally another collectively sung fight song.75 For the pastor’s son Wessel, the liturgy of a Protestant service might have served as a model as well. Whatever the case, the effect of the SA evenings under Wessel’s leadership were described by his biographer Erwin Reitmann, himself a former member of Sturm 5, in a conspicuously religious tone. Wessel, he wrote, preached with great success as an ‘enthusiastic disciple of Adolf Hitler’.76 The talents of the minister’s son were primarily rhetorical, strategic and musical in nature. A real coup in National Socialist circles was Wessel’s creation of a shawm band – the first Berlin Sturmführer to do so – which accompanied propaganda marches as of 1929. His sister Ingeborg wrote: ‘Truly it sounds ridiculous, but for the KPD it was a devilishly earnest affair. A slap in the face for Communist propaganda. Now there was nothing left for Communism to claim as its own!’ On 22 December 1927, the NSDAP had explicitly forbade its ‘Defence Division’ (Schutzabteilung) to use such instruments, linked as they were to the Red Front Fighters’ League and whose ‘peculiar timbre is well suited to proletarian parades’, as the future General Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED and former Young Spartacist, Erich Honecker, reminisced.77 Wessel’s strategy of beating the Communists at their own game in the musical sphere was a success, and was later adopted by other SA groups. Of

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The Making of a Nazi Hero course, it may have been more practical considerations that prompted him to do so, as the required instruments were easy to play and inexpensive to boot. Though the ‘Shawm Band of the Horst Wessel Sturm’ did outlive its namesake, and even went on tour in Schleswig-Holstein at Easter 1932, these ensembles in the service of the SA – ‘provocation turned into music’, so to speak – were in end effect a footnote of history. 78 Wessel, initially ridiculed by his political opponents but increasingly viewed as a source of irritation, considered himself by the late 1920s a kind of budding career politician. Nowadays he would perhaps be considered an extremely ambitious political activist with a talent for organization, though it must be added that politics back then were conducted on the streets much more than they are today. In those days it was all about symbolic victories, about gaining ground. For the Nazis any means were legitimate for making a public show of their power. The streets should be won ‘with terror’, said Goebbels. Provoking the political adversary and displaying one’s strength were both political acts and adventures.79 Wessel’s choice of words exemplifies this conception of politics, one that was typical for young Nazi activists. When Wessel was on the road for the party, he wrote that he was on business. By his own account he did not accept just any position, and claimed that he rejected command of SA-Trupp 17, as well as that of Sturm 1, which was active in the heart of the capital, before becoming the leader of SA-Trupp 34 in Friedrichshain on 1 May 1929 – which three days later became Trupp 5, and on 19 May, thanks to Wessel’s extremely successful recruiting activities, was transformed into Sturm 5, the future ‘Horst Wessel’ division.80 A career like this is open to interpretation. It is conceivable that the young firebrand of bourgeois extraction was rejected by these units for being too much of a ‘foreign body’ and that he failed to find the support he needed. The small squad in Friedrichshain, poorly organized and apparently without a leader before him, was maybe more of a last resort than Wessel’s real calling. Most likely, though, his taking over an SA unit in this working-class district was the logical continuation of Wessel’s agitation work begun a year before in the Viennese district of Favoriten. In both cases he wanted to strike a blow to the political enemy by means of publicity stunts while at the same time enlisting the unconditional support of his men in service to the cause. Wessel’s upbringing in a Lutheran minister’s household may still have been exerting an influence too, transforming him into a representative of ‘Christian National Socialism’.81 Not by a long shot was Wessel the only man of a bourgeois Christian background to be drawn to the city’s

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The Young National Socialist eastern neighbourhoods. The ‘Berlin-East Social Working Group’ (Soziale Arbeitsgemeinschaft Berlin-Ost), part of the so-called ‘settlement movement’ spearheaded by pastors and students, had been active in Friedrichshain since the 1910s in the framework of their Inner Mission, documenting the often miserable living conditions of the working-class population and providing social-welfare services.82 Catholic clergyman Carl Sonnenschein, too, a charismatic ‘big-city apostle’ admired and disdained in equal measure in post-First World War Berlin, was passionately committed since his student days to ‘establishing a close connection between academics and the labour movement’, as a former university classmate of his, Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, later recalled.83 Wessel, of course, was no missionary in this sense. The primary focus for him was not charitable work but political-military issues and hence, ultimately, the question of power. He seemed to have recognized, or at least instinctively grasped, that a political mass movement in 1920s Berlin could only work if the bridging of class antagonisms – the slogan Volksgemeinschaft – was written on its banner.84 We might therefore call him a Jungbürger (young bourgeois), to borrow a term from a 1928 essay by Richard Haage. This term was meant to designate the new type of young middle-class citizen who considered his self-imposed task of ‘achieving a national community’ unsolvable without the proletariat. A Jungbürger, however, neither acts out of a vague ‘social feeling’ of compassion, which often enough conceals a patronizing attitude, nor does he deny his social origins. The superiority of middle-class values is beyond debate for such a man. Precisely because he feels ‘united by a common fate with the working man’, Haage argued, does the Jungbürger endeavour ‘to show the working man the values of the middle-class character, confronting him time and again with the higher, more vigorous order of the nation [Ordnung des Volkstums] than the mechanical, purpose-bound one of class’.85 Horst Wessel – and this we might call his personal tragedy – was a vulgar manifestation of this character type, whose intentions, however honourable in certain respects, were morally discredited by virtue of his actions. Wessel performed a double function in the party. On the one hand he was a simple SA man, on the other an up-and-coming political functionary who maintained a direct line to Goebbels. The latter entrusted him – or so claimed Wessel – with special tasks on multiple occasions. Goebbels was banking on a strategy developed before him by the Communists. As early as 1919, the future publisher Willi Münzenberg, at the time chairman of the Communist Youth International, realized that young agitators, preferably enlisted from the party’s fledgling members, are the best at recruiting new

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The Making of a Nazi Hero followers from their own age group.86 Wessel reciprocated the confidence placed in him by offering absolute loyalty in return. He glorified his Gauleiter, Goebbels, exalting him as a great leadership figure: The oratory skills and organizational talent of this man were extraordinary. There was no task too great for him. […] Feared and hated by his enemies for the singular audacity and boldness he showed in criticizing and denouncing the state of affairs without being held accountable for it. Never did he hold back, but always allowed the entirety of his accumulated energy to discharge explosively. The SA was indebted to him for this, in particular. He sincerely cared for the wounded – in short, he was a leader of stature, a true leader.87

That Goebbels sacrificed the health and even life of his men without compunction in order to consolidate his own position of power, that he exploited the death of individuals for propaganda purposes and for the sake of the party was apparently not a problem for Wessel. He was actually rather grateful to Goebbels that the Berlin SA – in contrast to his experiences in the Bismarck and Viking leagues – was largely unrestrained in its use of physical force, even dressing it up in religious garb. Thus, Gauleiter Goebbels announced to his men on the back cover of the first shellac record of the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ in 1930: ‘A quiet, heroic bleeding has entered our ranks. And yet our eyes have never shone with such joy and warmth. […] Where blood flows, envy and strife find closed doors. […] We have become a community of action.’88 The pastor’s son Wessel not only wanted to belong to this ‘community of action’, he wanted to preach to it as well. ‘One must get to know the soldier better, attempt to fathom his soul, then train him in boundless devotion to the Emperor,’ Wessel had read in Krasnov.89 He applied these principles of military leadership, discussed by Krasnov over a hundred pages, in his approach to his SA men. Wessel concluded that he had to try to understand the psychic and social make-up of these men in order to get them to pledge their ‘boundless devotion’ to Adolf Hitler. He held firmly to the social hierarchy of leaders and followers. Control through feigned sympathy we might call this tactic the Nazis used so successfully, though Wessel was in fact increasingly involved in the day-to-day affairs of this milieu. A photograph taken from Politika by Wessel’s sister and published in her well-illustrated commemorative volume Horst Wessel. Sein Lebensweg (Horst Wessel. His Life’s Journey) in 1933 shows Wessel at the Nuremberg Rally: a smiling young man in a brown stormtrooper’s uniform, marching through the city at the head

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The Young National Socialist

Horst Wessel (front left) at the 1929 Nuremberg Rally. Party propagandists loved this picture, as it seemed to confirm the heroic image of a radiant young National Socialist marching at the forefront.

of his unit, on Sunday 4 August 1929.90 This time 25,000 men took part in the march – three times as many as two years earlier. When not parading in a disciplined fashion, the SA men provoked violent clashes with anyone of a different political persuasion. A police report spoke of ‘intense political agitation’ and ‘civil-war-like conditions’.91 Most likely the song was sung in Nuremberg that later bore the name of its author, and which ultimately earned him his notorious reputation: Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen dicht geschlossen! SA marschiert, mit ruhig festem Schritt. Kameraden, die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen, Marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit.92 Raise the flag! The ranks closed tight! SA marches with firm steady tread. Comrades shot dead by Red Front and Reaction, March in spirit within our ranks.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero This first stanza was repeated at the end, forming the fourth and last stanza. When exactly Wessel composed the lyrics is unknown, but supposedly the song was first sung in the streets of Berlin on 26 May 1929 by members of SA-Standarte IV.93 Wessel probably wrote them shortly before this. According to Ingeborg Wessel, however, the song was written much earlier, in 1927 or 1928, or so she claimed in two radio broadcasts, on 23 and 29 July 1933.94 Wessel did not write the tune himself, but rather combined melodies from a variety of well-known folk songs. His song was essentially functional art, ‘poetry in action’ that was easy to sing.95 Its minimal artistic value was immaterial to its propagandistic effectiveness. Drawing on existing melodies and song texts and adapting them to political expediency increased the chances of a new song catching on and becoming popular. This was important for two reasons. For one thing, singing political fight songs out loud reinforced the singers’ sense of identification with the cause, familiarizing them, in brief and accessible fashion, with the basics of the respective political ideology. For another, it was an outward demonstration of the ability to mobilize support and of confidence in victory. Disputing the songs of a political arch-enemy by replacing a few words or lines with others reflecting one’s own worldview was a particularly effective weapon. What a song generally needed was a militant attitude, a catchy tune and a rhythm suitable for marching. Perhaps most important of all was its peppiness, according to many contemporary discussions: ‘The liberating power of song always comes from the rhythm. Rhythm is the decisive factor; it is what electrifies.’96 It was after the attack on Wessel that ‘Raise the Flag!’ really gained currency in National Socialist circles. The mass rally of the Berlin NSDAP at the Sportpalast on 7 February 1930, when Göring reviled the KPD as an ‘organized gang of bandits’, concluded with its singing by the 12,000 to 15,000 party followers in attendance. By April 1930 the police were already referring to the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, which was now regularly sung at the end of Nazi rallies in Berlin.97 It was first printed on 23 September 1929 in a supplement to Der Angriff and bore the title ‘The Unknown SA Man’ (Der unbekannte SA-Mann). A ‘common language of the marching masses’, it quickly caught on among Nazis outside of Berlin as well. An order issued on 22 July 1929 by Curt von Ulrich, a retired lieutenant colonel serving at the time as ‘deputy supreme SA leader in western Germany’, indicates as much. Later he even used two verses of the song at the conclusion of an order to the Standartenführer of Gausturm Rhein.98 The flag referred to in the lyrics occupied a prominent position in the arsenal of Nazi symbols. The flag march and the consecration of the flag were liturgical highlights of Nazi gatherings. Since time immemorial, the

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The Young National Socialist flag as a symbol of honour was to be defended at all costs in battle, as it held out the promise of guidance and protection. At the same time the fluttering flag was an expression of victory, or at least the promise of victory. The Nazis took conventional notions like these and fashioned the waving flag into a symbol of their impending triumph over the Weimar Republic. For Nazi followers, the mystification of the party flag fulfilled leadership and disciplinary functions alike. The swastika banner showed the way and appealed to the emotions of the individual Nazi, who was duty-bound to protect it – if need be with his life.99 Few party members had been killed in street fighting at this point, but still the memory of ‘blood sacrifices’ occupied an important place in the selfimage of National Socialists ever since Hitler’s aborted Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 in Munich.100 It is a conspicuous feature of both the Wessel song and the propaganda of the Kampfzeit or ‘time of struggle’ that mortal danger, death in the party’s own ranks, was generally thrust into the foreground. Violent clashes, an almost daily occurrence in Berlin of the late 1920s and early 1930s, were a highly welcome testing ground in the minds of National Socialists, bearing witness to their radicalism and seriousness of purpose. The danger of death was thus wholly accepted as part of an emphatically affirmative understanding of war as the ‘father of all things’. As of 1 December 1929 there was even a National Socialist death-benefit fund that actively solicited contributions from party comrades.101 The seemingly paradoxical linking of youthful vitality with the proximity of death was not the means to an end but the very aim of National Socialist policy. Death, or so party strategists announced time and again, could be a necessary sacrifice for the nation. An SA marching song written by Alfred Juhre ends with the lines: ‘SA marches and swiftly dies, this should not make you sad. We die, what of it? One thing remains: through our blood Germany shall be free and happily rise again!’102 In the Wessel song, political promises are brought to bear only in the second stanza: Die Strasse frei den braunen Bataillonen! Die Strasse frei dem Sturmabteilungsmann! Es schauen aufs Hakenkreuz voll Hoffnung schon Millionen. Der Tag für Freiheit und für Brot bricht an. Clear the streets for the Brown battalions! Clear the streets for the stormtrooper! Millions, full of hope, look upon the swastika. The day of freedom and bread is dawning.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero The ‘freedom’ Wessel was referring to was revision of the Treaty of Versailles, a ‘shameful peace’ for many of his contemporaries on both the political right and the left. While German foreign minister and Nobel Peace Prizewinner Gustav Stresemann achieved Germany’s inclusion in the League of Nations in 1926 and was working to reduce reparation payments on the basis of international negotiations, the National Socialists were intent on accomplishing their aims through street violence. They did not trust the ‘fulfilment politician’ Streseman to attain national liberation, but pinned their hopes on the stormtrooper. The latter, according to the Wessel song, would even raise the standard of living. The considerable achievements of Weimar social policy were denigrated in one breath. What kind of a state could not put bread on the table for all? The third stanza prophesied impending victory and promised deliverance. After the final struggle – the idea of ‘ultimate victory’ touted by subsequent propaganda comes to mind here – the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft is accomplished: Zum letzten Mal wird Sturmalarm geblasen! Zum Kampfe steh’n wir alle schon bereit. Bald flattern Hitlerfahnen über allen Strassen, die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit! For the last time the attack alarm is sounded! All of us are ready to fight. Hitler flags soon wave on every street, our servitude is nearly over!

In the language of the extreme Right, society was increasingly degenerating into a ‘battlefield with clearly drawn fronts’.103 The author of these martial lines was a young man in his early twenties, a National Socialist agitator and offender by conviction who had internalized the war rhetoric of his father and adapted it to a new era. The Confirmation motto selected by pastor Ludwig Wessel for his 14-year-old son in early February 1922 – from Chapter 15 of the Gospel According to John – was of a piece with the Nazi view of things: ‘I am the vine, ye are the branches.’104

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4

The SA’s Battle of the Streets

The generation born between 1900 and 1910, which later comprised a large number of Nazi functional elites, was deeply marked by the experiences of the Great War. Leading Nazis such as Franz Alfred Six, Werner Best, Adolf Eichmann, Wernher von Braun and Martin Bormann all belonged to this generation, as did Horst Wessel. In colloquial speech people referred to them as ‘prewar goods’, and poet Peter Huchel later spoke of the ‘nineteen-hundred-and-sad generation’ (Generation neunzehnhunderttraurig).1 The men of this generation were united by a sense of having missed out on the purportedly positive ‘war experience of their fathers’ and of being cheated out of their future by a crisis-ridden Republic. A latent feeling of having come too late and of lost oppor­ tunities informed the young people on the extreme right. Die Tat – the programmatic title of a highbrow right-wing magazine published by Hans Zehrer starting in 1929 and translating as ‘The Deed’ – was therefore a value in its own right. Wessel and his contemporaries can perhaps best be described as violenceprone fantasists and cold romantics, behind whose ‘objective’ facade was really a burning desire for community. This community was imagined as something fundamentally different, however, from the bourgeois youth movements of the previous generation. ‘Communities of will’ and ‘combat units’, a young theoretician wrote in 1930, had taken the place of outmoded ‘life-philosophy leagues in that inward-looking sense wished for by the youth movement’.2 The use of violence, assuming it did not serve purely personal goals, was widely recognized as legitimate and exerted an enormous attraction on many individuals in interwar Germany. Though certainly not attributable in a monocausal way to a wholesale ‘brutalization’ of society resulting from the First World War, it was nonetheless a structural problem in the Weimar Republic. ‘Cool conduct’ and a ‘culture of distance’, to use

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The Making of a Nazi Hero the words of Helmut Lethen, were internalized by these young people in quick and brutal fashion.3 The émigré Klaus Mann expressed a certain understanding for these young people’s rejection of liberalism. In autumn 1933 he wrote: ‘The anti-liberal pathos, the new call for commitment, was the necessary reaction, dialectically speaking, to a liberalism gone languid and shallow.’ Tired of ‘stiff and dry intellectualism’, the young generation surrendered itself to emotion, to the ‘depths of the irrational’. The turn to National Socialism was not a foregone conclusion, however. The latter ‘deformed’ the new current ‘demagogically’, ‘used and abused’ it for its own purposes.4 Historian Michael Wildt put the basic problem of Wessel and his contemporaries in a nutshell in his study on the Reich Security Main Office, An Uncompromising Generation: Anyone born between 1900 and 1910 had experienced the stability of the Kaiserreich at most as a child. In contrast, war, revolution, post-war confusion, and the hyperinflation of 1923 had made a decisive and lasting impression on them. It was difficult to convince this generation of the future viability of liberal civil society.5

Violence was a key concept of National Socialist ideology and policy from the very start. The Nazis sought mental and physical confrontation with the political enemy. ‘We do not come as friends or as neutrals. We come as enemies!’ Goebbels threatened in Der Angriff, addressing the other parties.6 As a political splinter group that could hardly hope to be respected in bourgeois-liberal circles, the NSDAP won new followers through its ‘battle for the streets’, with a mixture of völkisch-nationalist conceit, anti-Semitic claims of a Jewish world conspiracy, militaristic Freikorps rhetoric, antiCommunist scaremongering, and vulgar racism. Instrumental in this struggle were the Nazi stormtroopers of the SA, who served as the ‘strong, hard-hitting arm of the movement’.7 From the very outset, historian Peter Longerich persuasively argues, the SA, which also fronted as an athletic organization, was not merely a defensive protection force, as the Nazis often claimed. As early as the summer of 1921, its appeals and statements were predominantly marked by an aggressive tone that left no doubt about the true aim of these units: toppling parliamentary democracy.8 The tasks of the SA units changed when Hitler, having failed with his ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ of November 1923, decided to seize power in Germany by legal means. The most important aim from the mid-1920s on – according to statements made by leading National Socialists – was no longer the immediate fight against the Republic but the political mobilization of the

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The SA’s Battle of the Streets party, which often amounted to the same thing. SA stormtroopers were to think of themselves as ‘soldiers of the idea’ and, as SA leader Franz Pfeffer von Salomon wrote, act as ‘an expression of the incarnate will to power of a political organization’, not as ‘undisciplined street rogues’ (Adolf Hitler).9 In the course of the 1920s, the SA developed into the NSDAP’s private army, organizing illegal target practices – sometimes in the guise of a small-calibre rifle club, and often relying on the skills and weapons of former Reichswehr members.10 Contrary to official statements of the NSDAP, the SA gave its men extensive military training: in fanning out, advancing in skirmish lines, even the cordoning-off of entire towns. Sometimes, an early history of the NSDAP from the pre-1933 era reports, ‘downright fighting and combat operations’ were practised. ‘Moreover, by constantly keeping SA men at their bases on standby and quartering some of them in barracks with frequent emergency drills, SA leaders were in a position to deploy combat-ready formations at very short notice.’ Both ‘outwardly and especially inwardly’ the SA man was ‘formed into a “soldier” whose specific task is the use of force, without this purpose ever needing to be expressed in speech or writing’. Such programmatic self- and other-ascriptions did not correspond to social reality, however. Not unlike the men of the Communist stormtroopers, the Berlin SA was made up ‘partly of social and criminal elements’, ruffians and at least one young adventurer who felt he was called to higher things.11 Characteristic of the Berlin SA’s ruthless actions were the attacks carried out in the early evening of 20 March 1927 by several hundred Nazis against a small group of Communists at the Trebbin and Lichterfelde Ost railway stations on the south side of the capital. Two dozen members of the Red Front Fighters’ League, accompanying a Communist member of the Prussian Landtag, Paul Hoffmann, were travelling back by train from a rally in Jüterbog when they were attacked by uniformed SA men – police reports speak of 700 – at both stations and even during the train journey. With cries of ‘Strike the Red dogs dead!’ (Schlagt die roten Hunde tot!) the Nazis tried to storm the two compartments occupied by the Communists. Unsuccessful, they destroyed the windows, bashed the trapped individuals with flagpoles and hurled stones at them. Shots were fired. The Nazis then marched to Kurfürstendamm, where they beat up passers-by with a ‘Jewish appearance’. Detectives found 230 rocks, empty cartridges, a revolver and three knocked-out teeth in the demolished railway carriage. Numerous pools of blood, according to the prosecutor’s pithy report, indicated that ‘the Red Front Fighters must have suffered badly from the National Socialists’ attack.’12 Six people, including two Nazis, had to be taken to hospital with injuries, in some cases severe.13

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The Making of a Nazi Hero We do not know if Wessel took part in the attack. We do know that in Politika he ranked the encounter in Lichterfelde among the most important early incidents in the ‘Battle for Berlin’. His commentary shows how – wholly in the manner of his mentor Goebbels – he interpreted the cowardly attack as a heroic deed: ‘Gunfight at Lichterfelde Ost railway station. Three seriously injured, but victory. Victory wherever the SA does battle. […] Seeing the party comrades’ willingness to make sacrifices inspired us with ever-new courage in these days of desolation, and restored our faith in the future.’14 Wessel became a leading figure of the Berlin SA in late 1928. With his men, quite often former Communists, he organized excursions to the environs of Berlin as well as marches provocatively passing through working-class neighbourhoods on the north and east sides of the city. Supposedly he got into uniform himself and rode a bicycle through Friedrichshain on multiple occasions, flanked by about 20 SA men in mufti – ‘cotton wool’ (Watte) in Nazi jargon – who discreetly followed him in small groups. These staged provocations worked, one of the participants later recounted: ‘Suddenly two would jump him, one of them had a cudgel, they pulled him off the bike – and we knew what we had to do.’15 Attacks on vastly outnumbered opponents, the examples show, seemed to be the rule rather than the exception. The SA were escorted by the police when they marched in uniform through working-class districts, as seen in contemporary photos. Campaigns like these were not about conquering the streets with fists and weapons, but about visual and acoustic presence. Wessel composed song lyrics for these occasions: simplistic, functional poetry with no real literary value, which he had his men sing to popular melodies.16 He knew lots of songs, particularly of the army, student or religious variety, from his time in the bündisch youth movement and Viking League as well as from Sunday church services. He is said to have had a good ear for music and could play a tune by ear on the piano. There is no evidence of how well he mastered this instrument or if he knew how to write down his songs in musical notation. Wessel mentions in Politika having taken piano lessons as a boy for some time. He presumably played the guitar, too, which like the mandolin was a typical instrument of the youth movement. There is a photo of him, at any rate, sitting in a meadow with other young people, holding the instrument in his hands. The caption chosen by Wessel – ‘Wild Bunch’ – ironically toys with the ambivalent attitude of his parents’ generation towards this vagrant life of singing and hiking.17 Discipline in Nazi units was not the best. Even after Horst Wessel’s funeral ceremony, an orderly affair by most accounts, groups of adolescent ‘swastika rowdies’ caused a stir in the city by jostling pedestrians on Leipziger Strasse

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The SA’s Battle of the Streets

Horst Wessel (left, with guitar) with the Viking League, presumably 1924–25. His commentary: ‘Wild Bunch’. The photo was not used in party propaganda.

and hurling ‘boorish insults’ at them.18 Only briefly, with the banning of the NSDAP and SA in Prussia on 6 May 1927, did the National Socialists restrain themselves somewhat. Wessel’s Sturm 2 unit in the Prenzlauer Berg district, part of SA-Standarte I at that time, met in the ensuing months at Hahmann’s pastry shop on Pasteurstrasse 15 and called itself the ‘Edelweiss Hiking Club’. Other SA troops in the capital posed as the ‘All Nine’ skittles club, the ‘High Wave’ swimming club, or even as a Christian book club.19 The Berlin National Socialists, in those days a largely youth-dominated subculture, used a variety of gestures to identify each other, and apparently enjoyed this kind of surreptitious sign language. This ultimately strengthened their feeling of belonging as well as intensifying their perception of the fluidity of political boundaries – with eminently political consequences.20 The Nazi Party leadership in Berlin was quick to take note of the articulate, song-writing, committed young man Horst Wessel. ‘A fine boy who speaks with incredible idealism’, wrote Gauleiter Goebbels in his diary on 16 January 1929. Later a meeting with him. He regrets the lack of activism in the SA. I’m in a quandary. If we become more activist in Berlin, our people will smash everything to pieces. Then Isidor [Bernhard Weiss, the Jewish deputy chief of police in Berlin] will smile and ban us. We have to accumulate power for now.21

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The Making of a Nazi Hero According to a contemporary police report, party leaders credited the young man in particular with ‘knowing how to hold together in some kind of order the occasionally rather down-at-heel former KPD members’.22 His powers of persuasion and relatively sound education made him an important asset to the National Socialists, because men of his calibre were rarely drawn to the SA, with its generally low intellectual standards. ‘Of course it is out of the question’, wrote SA commander Ernst Röhm on 31 August 1931, ‘to train the SA man so thoroughly that he can act as a propagandist for our movement.’23 Briskly marching and fearlessly lashing out at the enemy, those were and remained the chief duties of an ordinary stormtrooper. In the late 1920s, most Berlin SA men belonged to the war-youth generation and were between the ages of 16 and 30. Many of them without work or families, they spent their time in the established haunts and hangouts, their so-called ‘storm taverns’ – in Friedrichshain, ‘Heinrich’s’ and the ‘Keglerheim’, the latter of which also served as an SA torture prison in 1933. Wessel’s Sturm had opted for the ‘Möwe’ as their meeting place in 1929, on Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 84, across the street from the flat of Frau Salm where he later lived as a lodger. This was not only practical, but shortened the perilous journey through enemy territory to their meeting place or ‘forward combat post’. How weak the National Socialists still were in Friedrichshain at the end of the 1920s is evident in their choice of meeting places. All of them were in the immediate vicinity of large thoroughfares, allowing even uniformed Nazis relatively safe access. They did not dare set foot in the side streets of the labyrinthine and densely populated residential quarters, for fear of attack.24 The habitual haunts of National Socialists were run by proprietors who either sympathized with völkisch nationalists or relied on them as steady customers. Even here the effects of the brewing Great Depression could be felt. The SA men, themselves not particularly solvent, could nevertheless consume a little bit more on average than their Communist counterparts, and this modest margin made the difference in the calculations of many a proprietor. In the working-class districts of Neukölln and Friedrichshain, the National Socialists apparently even guaranteed some tavern owners a minimum sale of 30 kegs of beer a month.25 The considerable consumption of alcohol that party work entailed strengthened these young men’s latent propensity to violence. In the back rooms and cellars of the storm taverns the SA set up secret arms caches. Better social discipline, a ‘quasi-barracks life’, was made possible by SA hostels, where the young unemployed and homeless could find cheap board

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The SA’s Battle of the Streets and lodging if they signed up for the ‘movement’. The official National Socialist history of the Berlin SA from 1937 emphasized the importance of these institutions: ‘At the storm taverns [Sturmlokale] the men find what they almost always lack at home: the warm heart, the helping hand, an interest in their “person”, the harmony of thought and feeling in their community. They find fellowship and, with that, everything: home and the joy of living.’26 Of course, this ‘joy of living’ could end up costing one’s life. The number of people killed and wounded in political clashes increased sharply in the late 1920s. Official police statistics for the capital in 1929 listed 579 operations against ‘political rowdyism’, up from 318 in the previous year.27 On 30 December 1929, two weeks before the attack on Wessel, the police noted that the violence almost always emanated from the storm taverns of these enemy camps. Evening after evening, members of the respective units assembled there ‘on stand-by, as it were, ready to follow a plan of attack against individuals, small groups or the meeting places of the other political persuasion’.28 Since the use of helmets of the type later used by the SS was forbidden by police order, the NSDAP sold an ‘insert made of an arched metal plate with a soft, elastic foam-rubber lining’, which could be worn under the SA uniform cap or any civilian headgear. For the price of two reichsmarks and eighty pfennigs, it could withstand – or so the party promised – ‘any, even the most forceful blow’ with an iron rod, steel pipe, or the leg of a chair. The protective headgear was not primarily intended to protect its wearer but to ensure his battle-readiness, as a Nazi advertisement explained: ‘He no longer requires his arms to protect himself from blows to the head, but frees up his fists to flexibly fend off the attacker.’29 The working-class neighbourhoods in the eastern parts of Berlin became Wessel’s hunting ground, a deployment zone and recruiting area in equal measure. Verbal quarrels and fist fights with Communists escalating into full-blown brawls were the order of the day there in the late 1920s. The adherents of opposing political camps came face to face at public rallies. They made no attempt to keep out of each other’s way but directly provoked these clashes as a pretext to let themselves loose on the enemy. For many of these young men violence became an end in itself. Basically, they were hooligans. The typical Berlin brawl was not unlike the one described by a police report in Vienna, where the situation in 1930 was likewise coming to head:

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The Making of a Nazi Hero The next speaker, Gauführer Anton Adolf Kirchner of the Hitler Youth, was nevertheless interrupted by the Communists present in the hall, whereupon all at once a brawl ensued among the meeting’s attendees, apparently set off by a catcall, in which beer glasses, armchairs and so-called pop bottles went flying, and thrust weapons, presumably pocket knives, were used by both sides. The actual free-for-all lasted only a few minutes, as the adversary was forced out of the hall by the National Socialists just as security forces stepped in. […] The brawl nonetheless resulted in 25 glasses, 11 soda bottles, 1 armchair and 4 windowpanes being smashed to pieces, and 5 people sustaining injuries.30

In Berlin, these fights were not clashes between local, Communist-minded ‘residents’ and nationalist ‘intruders’, as Leftists later claimed, but were usually neighbours duking it out. Hitler even claimed, in a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast on 9 February 1932, that no less than two-thirds of the SA stormtroopers were former members of the Red Front Fighters’ League.31 Though the SA may have struck a chord with quite a few members of Berlin’s working class, this figure cannot be correct. According to a statistic from 1931, provided by Berlin’s chief of police Albert Grzesinski, just over half of SA members were labourers, which corresponded more or less exactly to the share of labourers in the overall male working population of the capital. The National Socialists tended to reach out to skilled labourers, whereas the Communists had more success recruiting from among the unskilled.32 Later propaganda emphasized how courageously Wessel would pass through the city’s proletarian quarters. Ingeborg Wessel wrote: A single SA uniform would cause a commotion back then. […] Hate-filled faces, wherever he looked. Clenched fists itching to strike […]. Rude names like traitor, murderer of workers and Goebbels bandit burn in the ears of the young SA man, who is himself a labourer, is himself out of work.

While availing herself of the usual Nazi anti-Communist rhetoric in depicting KPD followers as violence-prone, inhuman brutes, Wessel’s sister was careful to point out her brother’s affinity, if not coequality, with the people from this milieu, thus enabling them to identify with Wessel the ‘martyr’. Even a Communist led astray by Soviet propaganda was not irrevocably lost, but could still be converted to National Socialism. ‘Misery and despair’, his sister claimed, in accordance with the ideological dictates of the NSDAP, could be overcome through faith in Adolf Hitler.

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The SA’s Battle of the Streets The early Nazis were often compared with the first Christians, wading ‘through a sea of persecution, […] derision and incomprehension with knowing smiles on their faces’.33 In reality, the Friedrichshain SA unit under Horst Wessel had the reputation of being a band of thugs, a brutal raiding squad.34 In the summer of 1929, the Communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne described the effects of Nazi attacks in quite dramatic terms: ‘The blood of proletarians stains the streets of Berlin blood-red.’ The paper – perhaps in reaction to successful Nazi recruiting in Friedrichshain – demanded intensified efforts: ‘Powerful anti-Fascist youth organizations must sprout up in every working-class borough of Berlin.’35 The economic crisis following the stock-market crash of October 1929 played a substantial role in driving into the ranks of the SA parts of the working class that were gripped by fears of social decline. Not even in working-class neighbourhoods was Berlin ever ‘Red’ to the core. In the 1930 elections to the Reichstag, the NSDAP drew no less than 11.6 per cent of the vote in Friedrichshain.36 Under the young squad leader’s command, the number of members in the Friedrichshain SA unit rose from 30 to 250. ‘Splendid human material [Menschenmaterial], lots of veteran soldiers’, wrote Wessel, in his handwritten memoir in the style of a military leader. This assessment was surely idealized, because more than a few of the men in his unit, as in the other SA-Stürme of the capital, were potential or actual failures, Wessel included.37 Sometime in the spring of 1929 the young man quit his studies for the last time and moved out. He reportedly lived first in his new girlfriend’s room on Palisadenstrasse, ‘a den of streetwalkers and pimps’, before moving to Frau Salm’s on Grosse Frankfurter Strasse.38 His lodgings there were cheap and, what’s more, within walking distance to the comfortable retreat of his mother’s place. In the summer of 1929, Wessel is thought to have lived by doing odd jobs – as a taxi driver and construction worker – though he called himself a ‘working student’. His last stint might have been in building the underground railway to Friedrichsfelde, today’s U-Bahn No. 5.39 It is doubtful the money he earned was enough for himself and his girlfriend. Erna Jaenichen testified in court in 1930 that in the end they were living off the charity of Wessel’s mother. Horst had also borrowed ‘some money’ from relatives in Hanover. He planned to look for work with the U-Bahn but got sick, she said, before he could find a job.40 In fact, Wessel was one of the many unemployed men in 1929 who made up more than 60 per cent of some SA-Standarte in Berlin. Unlike many of his comrades, however, this was not the result of a string of frustrating, often existence-threatening personal crises, but was a self-chosen fate, not

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The Making of a Nazi Hero to mention the half-hearted attempt of a young man to break with his bourgeois family. Whatever the case may be, the SA developed for Wessel and his men into a social network and surrogate family, in which the use of violence was not the means to a political end but above all a community-building exercise.41 The members of this community lent expression to their feelings through a highly emotional language intended to strengthen their sense of fellowship. Typical is the report of an SA man from Sturm 5 in Friedrichshain, describing a comrade’s reaction upon hearing the news of Wessel’s death: One of my comrades starts sobbing out loud. A convulsion rising from the depths of his being shakes him. Tears roll down his cheeks. A fellow not afraid of Death and the Devil, […] whom nothing and no one could soften, stood there and sobbed and shed bitter tears.42

The message: an SA man should never be ashamed of genuine feelings. Thus, the men depicted in the drawings of SA illustrator Hans Schweitzer (‘Mjölnir’), squeezed into their uniforms and threatening-looking with their tough outer shell, were in fact, at least in their self-perception, quite vulnerable and ever-threatened. This, too, served a purpose. By presenting itself as a community under attack composed of a few, select members, the SA could make its use of violence seem like self-defence to its followers, the ‘deep’ feelings they shared for each other lending it its legitimacy. The aggressiveness of these radical political parties with their men’sclub-style private armies left the Prussian police increasingly hamstrung, and by 1929–30 had widened into a latent civil war.43 Former Chief of Police Grzesinski defended himself in retrospect by noting that the political department of the criminal police was in over its head. His men were arresting 20 to 30 individuals daily for political offences.44 Interrogations had to be conducted in each of these cases. If there was enough evidence to suspect them of criminal activity, investigations were launched. The police authorities, according to Grzesinski, had just under 300 officers at their disposal for this work. Added to this was the fact that ‘Nazi-friendly rallies’ were on the rise in the police’s own ranks. Grzesinski was under no illusions about the danger posed by the National Socialists. He wrote from French exile in 1933 that he had often had young Nazis in detention brought forward and was consistently appalled by ‘the level of moral depravity and brutalization that most of these youngsters had reached’. They had no respect whatsoever for the lives of others. Even murderers showed no remorse if their crime was against a political adversary, no matter if the slain man was a classmate or erstwhile friend.45

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The SA’s Battle of the Streets Wessel zealously contributed to this climate of violence until he himself became its victim, though a stroke of fate that threw his life off the usual track could conceivably have prevented his violent end. On 22 December 1929, his younger brother Werner and three other people his age perished on a Nazi-organized winter excursion in the Silesian part of the Giant Mountains (Riesengebirge). The group had been on a ski tour when they got lost in a snowstorm. Collapsing from exhaustion, they froze to death in the cold. Der Angriff reported on the tragedy in the militant rhetoric of the 1930s: After a long and fatiguing march, part of the troop reached the refuge of a mountain lodge and dispatched a rescue expedition […]. Three party comrades could not be located. After the untold suffering of a superhuman struggle with snow and cold and wind, they ultimately fell to the ground, depleted.46

The newspaper evoked supernatural forces in explaining the death of these young people, who in the midst of battle had exceeded their limits and only after extreme feats of physical endurance were defeated by the hostile forces of nature. No one bothered to question who was responsible for the tragedy. Horst, whose Nazi career his younger brother had striven to emulate, was ‘stupefied’ by the news, his sister later wrote. Other accounts talked about a ‘nervous breakdown’. National Socialist propaganda admitted he was going through a serious crisis. Biographer Max Kullak, for example, reported that in January 1930 some comrades had gone to see Wessel in his room on Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62, where they found him in a critical state, listlessly staring into space and rambling incoherently. They brought him ‘home to mother’ with a serious case of ‘nervous fever’, where he was laid up in bed in a ‘life-and-death’ struggle. His health improved only gradually.47 During the weeks leading up to the incident, Wessel had avoided the SA and their meeting places altogether. His last appearance as a speaker had been scheduled for 22 October 1929.48 He fought with his family and friends over his new girlfriend Erna Jaenichen, with whom he apparently preferred to spend his evenings now, instead of with the SA. Only on special occasions did he speak in public any more, at his brother’s burial, for instance, on the afternoon of 28 December 1929. What he talked about is unknown. According to the Nazi Hans Flut, in a book about Wessel written in 1932 and therefore still relatively undistorted by propaganda, there were even plans to remove Wessel from his post as Sturmführer in early 1930. Flut wrote with surprising candour: ‘The Sturm evenings were

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The Making of a Nazi Hero not like they used to be; a cold, sober tone prevailed. The subordinates filling in for him were not up to scratch at first. Dark elements set to work undermining [Wessel]. Covert attempts to oust the leader were thwarted by the Sturm’s unity.’49 Commentaries like this indicate how fragile the balance was within SA units and how much group solidarity depended on certain individuals. Few SA men were committed to the National Socialists out of political conviction alone. Many did not even join the party, and others left it quickly.50 More important than the ideological platform of the NSDAP was the fact that activism in the ranks of the SA offered many of these young men a kind of compensation for the hollowness of their humdrum lives. The mixture of a decidedly male and military bearing and emotionally charged camaraderie was particularly appealing when combined with pre-existing personal ties. Thus, regional SA units were not infrequently gangs of youths bound together by their familiarity as neighbours or their shared experiences of school and recreation.51 Sturmführer Wessel had to embody authority if he wanted to count on his men’s loyalty, but he also had to be their companion. Fulfilling this dual role required his constant presence and above-average dedication to the cause. Nazi propaganda spoke in this case of a ‘firm sense of duty’ and a ‘boundless willingness to make sacrifices’. An ideal Sturmführer had to put aside his personal ambitions and look after his men for all he was worth, whether helping them look for work or lodgings, providing them with financial assistance, or paying prison visits to boost the morale of those behind bars.52 In this way someone like Wessel could establish a stable social network while securing a position of authority for himself, though of course he had to assert his position over and over in word and deed. This work-related burden meant that his family saw him less and less in the last year of his life. ‘The harmony of our family life had yielded completely to concern for our boys,’ his sister later wrote euphemistically. In plain terms she probably meant to say that neither mother nor daughter was particularly delighted about Horst’s (and later Werner’s) development: his dealings with mostly unemployed labourers, his dropping out of university, his relationship with a prostitute, and his getting involved in fights with political adversaries.53 Perhaps their warnings could have made a difference. It is not impossible that the fatal gunshots, fired on 14 January 1930, hit a man intent on remaking his life, changing it from top to bottom. Horst Wessel, in any case, was going through an existential crisis. He allegedly had a premonition of his death in December 1929, and

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The SA’s Battle of the Streets talked about it ‘with his intimates’. The penning of his autobiography that very same year might also be an indication that he sensed his approaching end. According to his sister, Horst had a latent death wish that he tried to cover up through his activism in paramilitary youth leagues and, later, the SA: ‘From the very first Horst seemed to have formed a silent and furtive friendship with Death.’54

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5

The Culprits Flee

Police photos of Albrecht ‘Ali’ Höhler. His numerous tattoos branded him as a ‘professional crook’ in the eyes of his contemporaries.

On 15 January 1930, the gunman Albrecht Höhler ate lunch as usual at the Galsk tavern. Then he bought a copy of the 12 Uhr Mittagsblatt newspaper, which announced him as the main suspect in the attack on Wessel the previous evening.1 Höhler stayed in the bar until nightfall together with his companion Erwin Rückert, before the two set off to the flat of Hermann Schmidt on Rosenthaler Strasse 43 in Berlin-Mitte.2 Schmidt was the Berlin director of German Red Aid (Rote Hilfe Deutschland), the Communist legal defence and escape organization. The party-membership and identity

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The Culprits Flee cards of the two Communist stormtroopers were burnt in his flat on the night of the incident.3 This was an awkward situation for the KPD. If the police had found the two men’s hideout, the Communist version of the story – that the attack on Wessel was a purely private settling of scores in the red-light milieu – would not have sounded plausible any more. After all, the KPD could hardly tell the police or public that it was using Red Aid to harbour a wanted murder suspect and his accomplices out of proletarian solidarity. The perpetrators of the attack on Wessel were by no means a feather in the cap of the party of the working class. This was doubly true of Albrecht Höhler, who worked as a pimp and procurer in Berlin. Höhler was five foot ten with a brawny build and conspicuously tattooed on his entire upper body. His hairless chest was emblazoned with the face of a young woman in profile. She wore a kind of turban adorned with a plume, and had strikingly large earrings. Exotic fashions of this sort were popular back then and were often celebrated by the cinema in the form of opulent costume dramas.4 Ali’s back and arms were also tattooed, with crucifixes, swords, and even more female heads, all the way up to his shoulders. On the morning after the crime, Rückert and Höhler found refuge at Schönfliesserstrasse 51, the villa of businessman Wilhelm Sander, a KPD sympathizer, on the northern edge of town in Berlin-Glienicke. Sander ran an advertising agency for workers’ newspapers at Hedemannstrasse 25 with his business partner Theodor Will.5 Käthe Schmidt, the daughter of the Red Aid director, worked at the agency and was the link to the party leadership at Karl Liebknecht House. Following the orders of Will and Sander, she reportedly made sure that the two suspects were picked up by car from Schmidt’s flat and brought to Sander’s villa.6 In the days that followed, Höhler and Rückert were addressed by their code names ‘Kurt’ and ‘Karl’. They stayed at Sander’s for eight days. Sander warned his guests to watch what they said, especially around the chambermaid, whose fiancé was a Nazi from the neighbouring village. Rückert and Höhler slept late and spent the afternoons playing cards and chopping wood. Their room on the first floor had a radio in case they needed some entertainment. On the final evening, everyone gathered for a kind of farewell party. Alcohol flowed like water. Höhler was given a new suit and had his picture taken wearing it.7 While in custody awaiting trial in early April 1930, Höhler stated that he was given detailed instructions by KPD Reichstag deputy Ottomar Geschke on how to behave if arrested. Geschke gave him to understand that the KPD would withdraw all support to him if he portrayed the deed as politically motivated and not as a crime of passion.8 This was

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The Making of a Nazi Hero not an idle threat. According to Höhler, Geschke said there would be dire consequences should Höhler think of betraying them: ‘Do as we agreed and don’t be tempted to try any funny business! If you do, Pieck told me to let you know there’s a bullet waiting for you.’9 Wilhelm Pieck, chairman of the German section of the International Red Aid from 1924, would go on to become the first president of the German Democratic Republic in 1949. Geschke served as city councillor for social welfare immediately after the war and, as of 1947, was chairman of the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes).10 Around noon the following day, their ‘holiday’ on the outskirts of town was over. Höhler and Rückert parted ways. Where Rückert disappeared to would remain his secret. All the criminal police could find out was that he stayed for three days with his brother in Frankfurt an der Oder. After that he is said to have gone into hiding in Berlin in the hope of being smuggled to Holland by Red Aid. Apparently, or so the police were told in confidence, Rückert refused to accompany Höhler to Prague, suspecting that Höhler would be ‘done away with at an opportune moment’.11 Höhler was picked up around noon by Theodor Will and Viktor Drewnitzki. The latter was employed at this time as secretary of the Central Committee of the KPD and was later described by his party as a ‘tough old revolutionary’. Drewnitzki handed Höhler a forged passport with the photo taken the day before. Then the three men were driven to the south in a chauffeured grey Buick, the advertising agency’s company car.12 Little was spoken. Will stayed on until just after the Saxon town of Löbau, close to the Czechoslovak border. In parting he reportedly gave Drewnitzki a sum of money, 200 reichsmarks.13 Höhler and Drewnitzki continued their journey on foot. After a march of nearly an hour, having bypassed the official border crossing with the help of Drewnitzki’s navigating skills and knowledge of the local terrain, they arrived at Jiříkov (Philippsdorf-Georgswalde), where they boarded an express train to Prague.14 The Berlin criminal police knew from an informer that this was a common escape route. ‘Mild cases’, with expected sentences of under three years, were usually put onto Soviet ships in Hamburg or Stettin (Szczecin). More serious ones that brooked no delay would be smuggled by Red Aid out of the country through Dresden or Görlitz, usually to Prague. Their flight would often continue through Vienna to the Dalmatian coast. To safeguard against abuses, Red Aid would issue its fugitives an ID, a scrap of cloth bearing a stamp, to be hidden inconspicuously in their clothing. Those at the receiving end were given a matching piece of cloth in advance. In the case of Wessel’s assailant, the criminal police suspected that Höhler was

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The Culprits Flee ‘fleeing to Russia’, perhaps under one of his many false names: Heinrich Friedrich Georg Müller, Friedrich Schmidt, Hermann Machelbke, Erich Tochtenhagen.15 Having crossed the border without a hitch, Drewnitzki gave Höhler part of the money from Will – according to Höhler 200 Czech crowns, or about 20 reichsmarks. Höhler suspected Drewnitzki of conning him, keeping the bulk of the money actually intended for him. His travel funds, at any rate, did not last very long, though he did get money for food a few days from a German-speaking party comrade. Once in Prague, Höhler was taken in by a local family with the assistance of Red Aid. This, too, was a common practice. According to police reports in Berlin based on information supplied by their spies, a politically reliable host family of this sort would receive about 17 reichsmarks a week in rent money. One or two marks of this were to be passed on to the fugitive as an allowance for his personal needs. Höhler’s claim to have received a one-time sum of 20 crowns, about two marks, is consistent with this information.16 In Prague, Höhler befriended an Austrian woman by the name of Karoline Sulistava. When asked by her what brought him to Prague, he answered evasively that he was gathering information on behalf of the Berlin KPD about the work of Czech Communists. Höhler accompanied the 31-year-old woman on walks and trips to the theatre. She began to trust in him, a stranger, and even fell in love. But Höhler was eager to get back to Berlin, and was thinking of ways to finance the trip. In this sense his amusements with Frau Sulistava were a good investment, because when he ran out of cash his new girlfriend offered to help. Höhler declined at first, but eventually accepted, persuading her to accompany him to Berlin. She was more likely to find a job there, he said, and besides he wanted to marry her. With prospects like these, Frau Sulistava was happy to pay for two train tickets, hers and her intended’s, from Ebersbach to Berlin via Dresden. Little did she suspect that he had just crossed the German–Czech border illegally. The two arrived in Berlin at Anhalter Bahnhof on the morning of 3 February 1930. Then they roamed through the city in search of a place to stay, Frau Sulistava later told the criminal police, but were turned down wherever they went. Then, on Koppenplatz, Höhler chanced upon an acquaintance, the unemployed construction worker and party comrade Karl Godowski, who put them up temporarily in his apartment. He took Frau Sulistava straight to Karl Liebknecht House to enquire about support for his ‘Czech comrade with Austrian roots’. Again they were turned away. The KPD told them they were not a ‘relief agency’ but a ‘fighting organization’, a vexed Karl Godowski recalled.17

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The Making of a Nazi Hero No sooner had the petitioners left the building than the KPD proceeded to act. Höhler had squandered his chance – he was far too much of a risk for the party. An anonymous tip to the police sufficed to do him in. Easy to identify on account of his many tattoos, Höhler, the prime suspect in the attack on Wessel, was arrested that same afternoon in Godowski’s flat.18 It was statements he made that allowed the police to apprehend the other suspects over the next few weeks. The assailants rightly spoke of ‘betrayal in their own ranks’. Furious at his comrades and the KPD, who disparaged him as an apolitical criminal, and presumably hoping to get off with a lighter sentence, Höhler had come clean.19

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6

Traces to Nowhere

The story recounted up to this point is a plausible version of the actual events. The investigation files, locked away for more than 60 years, ultimately in the archives of the Stasi, East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, turned up in 2008 in the course of researching this book and are evaluated here for the very first time. They contain numerous statements, clues and observations that contradict this version in important points, without refuting it, however. For the historian doing detective work, these fragments are hard to put in order – the leftover pieces of a puzzle, traces leading nowhere, as it were. Though they may not fit in with the existing story, this doesn’t mean they’re superfluous. Rather, they point to blank spots that no historical account should leave out. The investigation files of 1930 are probably complete. The Stasi seems to have sorted them, but not to have thinned them out. Even an envelope with bullet remains and bone fragments, removed from Wessel during either the operation or autopsy, is still there.1 Two questions need to be addressed in light of this extensive material. First, is the ‘pimp and crime of passion’ argument really obsolete? Second, was the attack perhaps premeditated after all? Even if Höhler’s shooting of Wessel was not a personal act of revenge, a pimp’s quarrel over his girl, this version propagated by the Communists need not necessarily be fiction. There had indeed been a violent quarrel over Erna Jaenichen, albeit three months before the attack. On 17 January 1930 the chauffeur Georg Ruhnke, who at that point was suspected of being involved in the incident of 14 January, was put on record as saying that he had once exchanged blows with Wessel over a woman: The reason for the fight was one Fräulein Jaenichen, who was once my girlfriend. J. had an affair with Wessel while I was still involved with her. I knew

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The Making of a Nazi Hero about this. And since J. had lied to me about it before, she got a slap in the face from me. Wessel caught wind of this and basically said he wanted to give me a walloping for it. The result was the fight that occurred. I was through with Jaenichen after that.

According to Ruhnke, the ‘amorous affair’ that caused the fight was nothing ‘personal’. So was it a quarrel between pimps after all?2 The National Socialist Ewald Bartel, who likewise worked as a chauffeur and lived at the time with Richard Fiedler in a fortress-like ‘SA stronghold’ on Petristrasse 15, dated this fight to 7 October 1929, just before Wessel’s twenty-second birthday. It supposedly took place in a restaurant called ‘Mexiko’ – as fate would have it, the same place Wessel met Erna Jaenichen. Ruhnke was said to have injured Wessel above his right eye with a knife, though he himself claimed he delivered the blow with Wessel’s own rubber truncheon.3 The incident was included – in a sanitized and romanticized form – in Hanns Heinz Ewers’s propaganda novel Horst Wessel. Ewers placed the event in June 1929, and expunged every trace of an armed altercation in a proletarian setting. What remained was the heroic but corny tale of a selfless knight in shining armour, saving his damsel in distress.4 Ewers does indicate elsewhere in the novel that the relationship that developed between Horst and Erna was anything but romantic. Horst Wessel comes across as a cold, almost sexless individual, his mother and sister having fiercely opposed any portrayal of the physical side of Horst and Erna’s relationship. All the family’s censorship permitted was ‘ten fervent nights’ with a young Austrian woman during his supposed student days in 1928 Vienna. Ewers did succeed, however – perhaps out of revenge, perhaps not to stray too far from reality – in inserting a number of references to Erna Jaenichen’s being a prostitute. He wrote, for instance, that Erna accompanied Horst Wessel on an ‘SA recruiting march’ through Potsdam in ‘too high heels’ and with a showy red hat on her head. The author has Richard Fiedler, Wessel’s fellow Sturmführer, make the following insinuations: ‘Everyone knows her, no one likes her. Had anyone else dragged around something like that, they would have long since wisened him up.’ Berlin SA leader Albert Sprengel, known to the Nazis as ‘Barricade Albert’, is even allowed to say outright: ‘At bottom, she will always be and remain the thing she used to be: a filthy whore from Alexanderplatz!’5 National Socialist historical narratives about the rise of the SA in Berlin did not hide the fact that some SA men in the capital made their living from pimping. SA-Sturm 25 in Neukölln was even known as the ‘Pimp Sturm’ (Ludensturm).6

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Traces to Nowhere That Wessel was perhaps less an altruistic protector of Erna than a pimp is suggested by a testimony from the first days of the investigation, of particular relevance here because it was made right after the attack. When examined by the criminal police, a female witness of no further description except that her name was Hoffmann stated that in June 1929 she had become ‘casually acquainted’ with Wessel on Münzstrasse, a street known back then for its second-hand clothing shops, dusky cinemas, and street prostitution. Supposedly Wessel told her that he’d become a pimp on account of a girl.7 Of course there is no way of ruling out that her testimony was deliberately false, intended to back up the recently circulated Communist theory that the incident had been a murder among procurers. This theory was also advocated by Höhler’s well-known left-liberal lawyer Alfred Apfel in his critical legal history of Weimar Germany written from exile in Paris. According to Apfel, Höhler told him in 1930 that ‘his’ girls often squabbled with Erna Jaenichen. Wessel had also been attacked by the Nazis for his pimping, Apfel wrote. He then went on to say: ‘I would run the risk of filling up an entire concentration camp with Nazi-party men if I listed all the names of the people who personally thanked me at the time for not explicitly mentioning Wessel’s moral misconduct.’8 Apfel’s version, too, is not entirely reliable, though. Thus, we have no way of knowing with certainty the exact nature of Wessel’s relationship with his girlfriend in the weeks leading up to the attack. The same goes for the question of whether the attack was premeditated. The initial investigations give some indication that this might have been the case. The above-mentioned Nazi Ewald Bartel, surely not a reliable witness, said on 17 January, less than 72 hours after Wessel was shot, that he had seen Ruhnke and two other men in the entrance hall of Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62 as early as late November 1928. When asked, Ruhnke allegedly told him about the rent dispute between Frau Salm and Wessel. Bartel had no doubts: ‘All of this made me certain that the three were plotting something against Wessel at the time and that it was my interference alone that kept them from carrying it out.’9 Like Bartel, other National Socialists shared the opinion that the attack on Wessel was by no means an impulsive act. On 16 January 1930, party member Wilhelm Bade duly reported to the Berlin Gau leadership what he had learnt from the hairdresser at Jüdenstrasse 49, the house next door to the Wessel family: that Ali Höhler had spent quite a while there on 29 December, the day after Werner Wessel’s funeral, enquiring rather conspicuously about Horst Wessel, ‘whom he didn’t seem to know’. One week later he paid another visit to the hairdresser and began another discussion about

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Wessel. The police, who somehow got their hands on this report, began an investigation immediately. The three hairdresser’s assistants they questioned confirmed that on two successive Saturdays, the second being 11 January 1930, an unknown man had enquired about the Wessel family’s elder son. When the police showed them pictures of Höhler, however, all three agreed that Höhler was not the man.10 The lead ultimately came to nothing. The interrogation of habitués at hang-outs around the ‘Mulackritze’, an old tavern and notorious club in the Scheunenviertel, only strengthened the suspicion that Wessel was not a chance victim. Several men with ties to the Communist stormtroopers told the police that Wessel was well known in the neighbourhood. A typical statement was that of a certain Karl Stürmer, a former or perhaps still active member of the Red Front Fighters’ League. He said that Wessel was ‘much hated among KPD members for his provocative behaviour’. He said he knew him personally and had often seen him parading by in NSDAP protest marches.11 None of this, though, was convincing legal evidence of conspiracy to murder. What Erna Jaenichen told the police the day after the attack is just as sketchy. Though she did confirm that Elisabeth Salm left the flat on 14 January and returned a mere five minutes before the attack, her speculations about the underlying causes are inconsistent with the results of later investigations. Erna Jaenichen did not think the attack was politically motivated, or at least this is what she explicitly claimed: The culprit who fired the shot is known to me by sight. He’s about five foot nine inches tall and has a wide, two-inch scar on his left cheek. I often saw the culprit together with the chauffeur Georg Ruhnke, Berlin, Proskauerstrasse 28, at Fournier’s, rear building 3rd floor. I don’t know the other two. […] After the incident, the culprits drove off in a car, probably Ruhnke’s. […] I assume Frau Salm asked these people to come in order to ‘put one over’ on my fiancé, as she had put it before. It’s possible that the whole thing was caused by disputes about the flat. […] It’s also possible that the whole thing was Ruhnke’s doing. I was involved with Ruhnke once, but broke it off about a year ago. Ruhnke repeatedly asked me to break up with Wessel and go back to him. Ruhnke repeatedly beat me in the street as well.12

A rumour soon surfaced after the attack that Erna Jaenichen was spying on the Nazis for the KPD and was therefore not entirely innocent in Wessel’s death. If we take this claim seriously for a moment, it is at least conceivable that she intentionally wanted to deceive the police, implicating her

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Traces to Nowhere ex-boyfriend and pimp Georg Ruhnke perhaps for reasons of personal revenge. But would she have sent Albrecht Höhler to his ruin, the man with the scar in his face, well aware of his commitment to the Communists? On 15 January 1930, Erna Jaenichen appeared once more before the police. Having been assured that her statements were confidential, she said that she clearly recognized the gunman: I can’t possibly be mistaken. I met this man two years ago on Münzstrasse and often had casual encounters with him. I know that he makes his living as a pimp and doesn’t have a steady job. His girl is called Grete and walks the street on Münzstrasse almost every day, especially in the evening hours. I know the man only by his nickname, Ali, and that he is a member of one of the pimp’s associations, probably ‘Harmonie’. These people had always had close ties to the KPD, and I think it’s fair to assume that he hatched the plan with them to assault my fiancé. I believe this all the more because the two accomplices are complete strangers to me, and I know almost everyone by sight who’s in a similar line of business on Münzstrasse. What’s more, my fiancé is well known and hated by these people as a Sturmführer of the NSDAP. In this connection, I should mention the chauffeur Georg Ruhnke, who used to be my boyfriend and whom Ali knows quite well. It’s safe to assume he’s been meeting up with Ali lately and perhaps even put him up to the attack.13

It is hard to take Erna Jaenichen for a Communist sympathizer after reading this statement. The theory that it was a purely selfish act of revenge by Höhler is likewise out of the question. It does seem plausible, though, that Wessel really was threatened from three sides: for personal reasons by his rival Georg Ruhnke, by his landlady Frau Salm, as well as by his political enemies. Ruhnke might well have turned to a pimp-acquaintance and friend for help, Frau Salm to the Communists. As a party of the marginalized, the KPD had close ties to the criminal underworld of the Scheunenviertel. Ali Höhler was thus potentially complicit in a number of ways. If Erna Jaenichen is telling the truth, Höhler was aware on the evening of the attack that Ruhnke had plans for revenge, from a pimp’s perspective quite legitimate ones; what’s more, as a member of the KPD, he was also fully aware that Wessel was a political problem. All of which might help explain why he fired the shot, an act at first glance so reckless and frenzied. Höhler presumably went to Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62 at the behest of the Communist stormtroopers, and fired his gun there – on no explicit orders – with the aim of restoring order on his turf.14 But maybe it was the

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The Making of a Nazi Hero other way around, and the incident was primarily a private business matter, or so one of the attackers, Josef Kandulski, claimed after his arrest. For him the act was ‘criminal, not political’; he was paid by Höhler to cooperate.15 Höhler himself testified as a witness in another trial, concerning the shooting of Camillo Ross just a few hours before that of Horst Wessel, commenting rather vaguely that, while the attack on Ross had indeed provided an incentive to take revenge on Wessel and give him ‘a proletarian drubbing’, the principal motive was ‘altogether different’.16 It is no surprise that Höhler later cited purely political motives, because only in this way could he hope for a relatively lenient sentence. A politically motivated murder, numerous trials since the early 1920s had shown, often ‘cost less’ than a capital crime committed for personal reasons. The police determined just a few days after the attack that it was not at all an impulsive act but had been planned at least a few days in advance. In a press release of 17 January 1930, they talked of a ‘well-planned and coordinated attack by members of the Communist Party’.17 They did not follow up on the traces leading to the pimping milieu. In his ‘preliminary investigation results’ of 23 January 1930, Chief Inspector Teichmann noted that, to all appearances, the crime was ‘carefully orchestrated in advance’. This theory would seem to be confirmed by the two red swastikas marking the entrance of Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62, as if to designate the right building. When the circle of suspects was widened to include Elisabeth Salm and other men of the Berlin-Mitte Communist stormtroopers, the police were more convinced than ever that the attack was not only premeditated but also aided ‘by political leaders of the Communist Party’.18 They could never prove this assumption, though. The Communists maintained from the very beginning that the police were not at all interested in shedding light on the crime; all they wanted was to portray the KPD as the wire-pullers in order to discredit their work.19 Such allegations, of course, served the strategy of denying that the party was involved in the attack in any way, but did certainly have a kernel of truth. The investigation files of the police and state prosecutor reveal a certain imbalance, at any rate. The first thing that strikes us is that inquiries were conducted quite intensively in the Communist milieu, whereas Wessel’s family and members of the Berlin NSDAP and SA were not even called in for questioning. Moreover, no statements made by any of the latter were mentioned even indirectly in the interim reports on the state of investigation drawn up by police officers for internal use only, allowing us to safely rule out a subsequent, politically motivated purging of the files during the Third Reich. The Berlin criminal police evidently had no interest in combing

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Traces to Nowhere

Police photos of Ernst Lange, January 1930. Though Lange claimed to have been involved in the attack on Wessel, the police released him from custody after just a few weeks.

the city’s Nazi scene in search of clues as to why the crime took place and who might have been behind it. Perhaps this was an early instance of Nazi infiltration in the political and criminal police, a tendency that increased with time.20 Irritating as well is the fact that a young man apprehended in January 1930 under strong suspicion of involvement in the crime was released from custody in late February. The man was Ernst Lange, a coal delivery man born on 23 August 1908 in Berlin, who belonged to the KPD’s 4th District Jungsturm (Young Storm). On 29 January 1930, he told the police that he wanted to ‘confess the whole truth’ and that he was one of the three men who assaulted Wessel in his apartment on the evening of 14 January. He said, in addition, that apart from Ali Höhler, a certain Wilhelm Pietrzack was also involved in the incident. He had not met Pietrzack until the evening of the incident, he said, whereas Höhler he had known for a couple of months, both men being patrons of the ‘Alexanderquelle’ bar on Münzstrasse: On the Friday before the incident – this must have been the 10th of January, according to my calendar – there was a meeting of our Jungsturm at said ‘Spoors’ tavern on Kniprodestrasse at around eight o’clock in the evening. The meeting was finished at around nine o’clock in the evening and I was just about to go home when I saw three people from the 1st District, to be more precise, from the Mitte stormtroopers, enter the tavern and talk to our treasurer. These people were Ali, whom I knew already, the aforementioned Pietrzack, and a third man I later learnt was Gruppenführer of the 1st District. A moment later our treasurer called me back and said to me: ‘Ernst, don’t leave yet!’ Up to this moment I had no clue about the plan. […] At this point

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Ali spoke up and explained that the Nazi chieftain, a certain Horst, had often attacked our comrades and that this Fascist had to be bumped off because of it. […] Ali proceeded to explain the detailed plan to us. He told us he knew the Nazi ringleader and that on Tuesday, that was the 14th of January, we would go together to his flat on Grosse Frankfurter Strasse. He, Ali, would plug him himself and the rest of us, i.e. Pietrzack and I, should be ready in case the Nazi has any of his men there with him.21

They supposedly met on Monday evening, 13 January, for a ‘preliminary discussion’ at Alexanderquelle. Lange went on: The next day I showed up at the arranged meeting place and met Ali and Pietrzack right on time at seven o’clock. The two had brought along a girl I didn’t know and Ali said: ‘She’s coming with us, she has to go up first and see if he’s there.’ Then we crossed Alexanderplatz on the way to Grosse Frankfurter Strasse and Ali said we still had time until ten o’clock. Then he showed us the house, with three red swastikas next to the door. Then we walked up and down the street. So as not to be too conspicuous, I walked on the other side of the street while Ali and Pietrzack walked back and forth with the girl on the side where the building was located. Ali called the girl ‘Erna’. She was five foot seven, medium-slim, wore a brown coat and a black cap with a little peak pulled down into her face so far that I couldn’t even make out the colour of her hair. Two hours later I only saw Ali and Pietrzack walking back and forth. Then I noticed that the girl came out the door of the building and Ali called me over right away. I might add that I also saw the girl entering the house and Ali unlocking the door beforehand. I didn’t hear what the girl said. Ali told us: ‘Time to go up!’ Since the building was dark I had to assume that Ali, who was the first to enter, knew exactly what to do. I was the last to enter. When we arrived upstairs, Ali rang the bell and talked to the landlady, who opened the door for us. I gathered from the conversation that Ali apparently knew the woman already. I couldn’t understand what Ali talked about with the woman, because both of them were whispering. Then we entered and the woman showed us the door. Ali reached into his pocket and pulled out a pistol. I was standing right behind him, and he poked me in the chest with his elbow. Meanwhile the landlady had passed straight ahead through a door, closing it behind her. Ali now pressed the latch of the door, and at the very same moment the door was opened by a man from the inside. Ali took aim and shot the man in the face. He immediately tore the door open and we entered the room. The man had meanwhile fallen. I walked up to the window

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Traces to Nowhere while the little fellow (whom we called ‘Piepel’, I now remember) opened the wardrobe up against the wall. Ali had told Piepel (Pietrzack) something about searching for weapons and Piepel went for the wardrobe first. Then Ali approached the woman standing by the bed and spoke to her. I didn’t really understand what he said in the midst of all the excitement. I might add, though, that Ali had told us already that he knew Wessel’s girl from before. All of this took place in a matter of seconds. Then we bolted out of the room and down the stairs.22

Lange was questioned again one day later. He stuck to his story, but added that he might have been wrong about the identity of ‘Piepel’. In the meantime, the police had questioned Wilhelm Pietrzack, born on 17 July 1904 in Charlottenburg near Berlin, who convincingly denied any involvement in the attack. Confronted with this statement, Lange conceded that he was no longer sure whether his ‘Piepel’ was indeed this Pietrzack. But he easily identified Frau Salm, Erna Jaenichen, and Klara Rehfeld when shown to him.23 What were they to do with Lange’s detailed confession? It seems odd that Höhler never even mentioned him in his own voluminous statements, incriminating his chum Erwin Rückert instead.24 Was Lange, for whatever reason, trying to implicate himself in a crime he had not committed? Indeed, he did recant his statements on 18 February 1930, pointing out that he suffered from chronic convulsions. In this he matches the description of the ‘criminal epileptic’, a diagnosis introduced by Italian doctor and criminologist Cesare Lombroso in the late nineteenth century. Lange now insisted that he was not involved in the attack on Wessel. He said he lied and had no idea why he would have made himself out as one of the culprits. He had been to court before, he reported, but was acquitted on the grounds of mental incompetence.25 Was Lange a fantasist who pieced together his version of the crime from news reports and rumours picked up in the bars of Berlin? Was an excessive desire for recognition at work here? Some crucial objections would militate against this. Many of Lange’s statements dovetail so closely with those of other suspects and the results of on-the-scene investigations that it is hard to dismiss his account as vicarious. When Lange said, for example, that right before the shot was fired ‘the landlady had passed straight ahead through a door’ and closed it behind her, his description matched the floor plan perfectly. He even remembered details like ‘pressing the latch’ of the door. The most incriminating piece of evidence, though, is the fact that Erna Jaenichen, Klara Rehfeld, and Elisabeth Salm all told the police that Lange was one of the three assailants. Erna Jaenichen even said that there ‘can’t possibly’ be

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The Making of a Nazi Hero any doubt about it. She recognized Lange by the tattoo on his right hand when he posted himself close to the window, she said, and was prepared to testify under oath. Elisabeth Salm claimed also to have recognized Lange ‘with certainty as one of the three’ perpetrators.26 All the same, the state prosecutor decided on 22 February 1930 to cancel the warrant of arrest against Ernst Lange, as there was no longer any strong suspicion of his involvement.27 The court’s reasoning, the examining magistrate assigned to the case pointed out, was that given ‘the consistent accounts of Höhler and Kandulski’ Lange could not have been involved.28 The magistrate did not even attempt to refute the testimonies of Erna Jaenichen and Elisabeth Salm, both of whom had identified Lange as one of the perpetrators. The police still assumed there were three attackers. That would change a month later, but Lange’s trail was never picked up again. Did the police encourage a potential culprit to retract his confession in exchange for his services as a spy? We have no way of knowing for sure. In the Nazi propaganda pamphlet The March on Berlin from 1932, a ‘Sturmführer Lange’ in any case was said to have given orders for the attack on Wessel.29 Despite the fact that so much remained unsolved, the police and courts were quick to settle on a single version of the crime, according to which a multitude of men from the Communist stormtrooper scene were involved in the attack on Wessel. It is also important to note that they began by investigating attempted murder, which as of 24 February 1930 became an actual case of murder.30 Only with the end of preliminary investigations in June 1930 did the senior state prosecutor come to the conclusion that there was not ‘sufficient evidence’ for a murder case. He justified his decision as follows: ‘Neither the behaviour of the perpetrators before the incident, in particular their claim that they only planned to beat up Wessel, nor the circumstances surrounding the attack, allow us to determine with any certainty that the crime was committed in full awareness.’ Höhler, Rückert and Kandulski were thus indicted for jointly committed manslaughter. The court order of 24 July 1930, which opened the main proceedings, also stated that the offence was ‘not committed with deliberation’.31 The courts, it seems, were still following an age-old maxim: innocent until proven guilty.

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7

Sensation in the Criminal Court: The First Horst Wessel Trial (1930)

‘In the vast Nazi literature about Horst Wessel there is not a single detailed description of his killers’ trial. The topic is a delicate one. Should the German people know about the circumstances surrounding and the reasons for the death of this “young hero”?’ This was Klaus Mann, writing in 1939.1 His words suggest that a hidden truth suppressed by the Nazis had come to light in the September 1930 trial. This was no little compliment to the Weimar courts, which only a few years earlier were almost always – and understandably – judged very harshly by Leftists and liberals. The phrase ‘crisis of confidence in justice’ was something of a slogan in the 1920s. Socialists and liberals denounced a politicized justice system that was lenient in cases of political crimes committed by the Right but meted out severe punishments for offences perpetrated by the Left. There can be no doubt from today’s perspective that many of the judges, predominantly raised and educated in the German Empire, were sceptical if not disapproving of the new democratic form of government, and that this attitude was reflected in many of their verdicts. On the other hand, it is clearly evident that by the mid-1920s the first real steps had been taken to democratize the judiciary, especially in Berlin. Democratically minded justice ministers were changing staffing policy in their departments, and critical journalists working as professional crime reporters chronicled events on an almost daily basis at the criminal court in Berlin-Moabit.2 It was no different at the first Horst Wessel trial. On the morning of Monday 22 September 1930, the first day of the trial, there was already a crowd of people outside the criminal court building. A week before, on 14 September, the NSDAP had garnered just under four million votes in the Reichstag elections, 18.5 per cent of all votes cast. In some districts of Prussia they had quintupled their share of the vote compared with the local elections of 17 November 1929, thus establishing themselves once and for all as a force

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The Making of a Nazi Hero to be reckoned with – one, moreover, that profited substantially from the rapidly worsening economic situation and was able to win the support of many protest voters.3 The NSDAP was the centre of public attention when the Wessel trial opened, which perhaps explains the strong police presence stationed outside the courthouse to prevent potential clashes between hostile political forces. Extensive coverage of the trial in the papers drew an ever-increasing crowd of curiosity seekers in the days that followed. The first spectators showed up at three-thirty in the morning in the hopes of gaining access to courtroom 253. The situation escalated on the third day of the trial. Police intervened with truncheons in the attempt to restore order. Some ‘raucous scenes’ ensued, which correspondents from the Berliner BörsenCourir reported with obvious relish: ‘Women standing at the front were lifted up and carried by rowdy lads over the heads of those standing behind them. When the doors were finally opened, a downright battle ensued among the throng of waiting people, each of whom tried to get in first.’ Those who succeeded in being admitted were searched for weapons when entering the courthouse. A few years later, attorney Alfred Apfel recalled that half the spectators were members of the Ringvereine and their ‘broads’, the other half sensation-seeking members of Berlin high society from around the Kurfürstendamm. Two different worlds came face to face here.4 We do not know for sure if Wessel’s family members were among the spectators of this courtroom drama. The unexpected death of the younger son Werner and the attack just three weeks later on the elder son Horst left Margarete Wessel and her daughter distraught, hoping and fearing, in vain, for his recovery. The two women left the city after Horst’s funeral, an occasion the Nazi Party used to stage a political demonstration. On 4 May 1930, they registered with the Hanover police at the address of Margarete’s sister Gertrud Richter, Stolzestrasse 32. According to Goebbels’s diary entries, Wessel’s mother was in Berlin when the trial took place. She met the Gauleiter twice, the second of these meetings for lunch and dinner on Sunday 28 September 1930. Goebbels, who was not quite sure what to think of his interlocutor, noted: ‘I tried all I could to console her in her terrible pain. At midnight, farewell at the station. She departed quite satisfied. A profoundly sad and emotionally broken mother.’5 Only about a year later did Margarete and Ingeborg Wessel return to the German capital. They avoided the areas they knew, however, and on 26 March 1931 moved into a flat in the middle-class neighbourhood of Wilmersdorf, on the relatively calm western side of town.6

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Sensation in the Criminal Court The Berlin press reported neither the absence nor the presence of the Wessel women in the courtroom. The case was of interest as a political issue and not as a personal tragedy. The big Berlin papers sent their own court reporters to cover it, the most famous being Moritz Goldstein, writing under the pen name ‘Inquit’ (Latin for ‘he said’). Treading in the footsteps of the legendary Paul Schlesinger (‘Sling’), he described in a thoughtful and ever more alarmed manner the increasingly radical street violence in the capital.7 Another prominent figure sitting next to him on the press bench, at least on the second day of the trial, was Der Angriff publisher Joseph Goebbels.8 The Gauleiter was sending a clear signal, particularly to his followers. The savage threats in Der Angriff left no doubt that even at this point the Nazis were intent on seeking ‘revenge for Wessel’. The trial was a good opportunity for them to familiarize themselves with the culprits, committing to memory their faces and personal details. The trial at Regional Court I (Landgericht I) was presided over by Judge Tolk, whose criminal court was facetiously known as the ‘Chamber of the Brothers of Mercy’. The prosecution was led by Public Prosecutor Dr Fischer. Höhler’s defence was originally assigned to top lawyer Erich Frey, but Frey resigned his brief shortly before the trial was to begin.9 This move was presumably linked to the financial crisis faced by Red Aid, whose funds had dramatically dwindled since the autumn of 1929. By early May 1930 the organization had debts of 120,000 reichsmarks, threatening its very existence. Frey’s replacement was Alfred Apfel, a man who had defended numerous Communists in court before on behalf of Red Aid – including anarchist revolutionary Max Hoelz and poet Johannes R. Becher – despite the fact that he himself was a member of the German Democratic Party (DDP) and worked out of a stately office on the corner of Leipziger and Friedrichstrasse. This was nothing unusual, but rather was the result of tactical considerations. In trials of great public interest Red Aid normally assembled a team of lawyers from different political parties, not least to emphasize the KPD’s neutrality.10 Apfel was exclusively responsible for the main defendant Höhler. The other defendants were represented by Fritz Löwenthal, who held a seat in the Reichstag for the KPD from 1930 to 1932, a man named Fuchs, Counsellor of Justice (Justizrat) James Broh, and the young Hilde Benjamin, a sister-in-law of philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, who had recently set herself up in the Wedding district of Berlin. Benjamin pleaded for landlady Salm with consummate skill and was apparently jeered in return, being called a ‘Red sow’ by an SA man.11 Benjamin later went on to serve as the first minister of justice of the GDR after the Second World War, becoming a notorious symbol of the political injustice there, which earned her the moniker ‘Red Hilde’. Her

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The Making of a Nazi Hero colleague Löwenthal later became a member of the Parliamentary Council that drafted the Basic Law, or quasi-constitution, of the Federal Republic in 1948.12 The defence counsel organized by Red Aid was interested in obtaining a ‘political sentence’ for the defendants, with the sole exception of Höhler. This contradicted the statements made by the KPD immediately after the incident, but was in fact in keeping with the general strategy pursued by the Communists of using court decisions like this to expose what they perceived as the ‘bourgeois class justice’ of Weimar Germany, even if this were to the detriment of individual defendants.13 Writer Felix Halle, who directed Red Aid’s legal department from 1922 and became a victim of Stalin’s Great Terror in 1938, had unambiguously outlined the principles of Communist defence tactics in the early 1920s: When engaged in a political lawsuit, it is not the result alone, the judgement of the bourgeois court, that counts. […] It might be imperative for the movement to conduct a trial with severity of principle [mit grundsätzlicher Schärfe], forcing the bourgeois courts to reveal their class justice in the clearest of terms to the masses.14

Red Aid had been preparing for the trial since May 1930. Die Rote Fahne and a number of other Communist papers were requested to give a big spread to the impending trial for the shooting of Camillo Ross – the victim of the Nazi assault just two hours before the attack on Wessel – and this ‘out of general considerations as well as in view of the Wessel affair’. The more the public took notice of Nazi acts of violence, the greater the chances were of portraying their own men’s actions as legitimate self-defence. Added to this were considerations of a basic ideological nature, as formulated a year before by the propaganda organ of the Red Front Fighters’ League: ‘Every comrade indicted for a political act must know that his struggle […] is part of the greater revolutionary struggle.’15 The statements made a few years later by Hermann Kupferstein, accused of aiding the escape of Höhler and Rückert, in a report on the defence strategy used in the first Wessel trial are insightful: It is well known that I directed the trial from the dock and that Ali Höhler, who was about to tell all, suddenly changed course. Erwin Rückert, too. Both retracted what they had said in the preliminary examination, depicting their statements as false and extorted. […] The Party and R[ed] A[id] could not be implicated. I spoke for one hour, denouncing the intentions of the Nazis and of class justice.

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Sensation in the Criminal Court The KPD had been worried beforehand that someone might deviate from the prearranged story: that the murder of Wessel had been the result of a private disagreement and not politically motivated. The party, for obvious reasons, did not trust the members of its illegal stormtroopers an inch. Just to play it safe and ensure that the KPD’s reputation did not suffer any more than it had already, all the defendants had to give back their membership cards before the trial began.16 The court reporting in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger of 1930 confirms Kupferstein’s statements but of course evaluates them differently. In the eyes of this conservative newspaper, part of the Hugenberg press empire, Kupferstein, whose Polish origins were referred to explicitly and disparagingly, had a ‘fanatical Mephistophelian mind’. The paper reported on the trial as if it were an election rally. Kupferstein was said to have fulminated against the statements of Chief Inspector Teichmann as well as against the ‘pack of hounds in the bourgeois press’. Turning to the spectators, he allegedly even demanded ‘countermeasures by the class-conscious proletariat’.17 Kupferstein wrote his 1934 report as a vindication. He was with his wife in Parisian exile that year, where proceedings for his expulsion from the KPD were underway. The Emigrant Commission of Red Aid had demanded his expulsion on 4 April 1934 on the grounds of ‘insulting and slandering the Party’ as well as ‘corrosive faction-building among comrades’ in emigration in Paris. It supposedly even came to fisticuffs in the French office of Red Aid. But the party turned down the request to expel Kupferstein and, in light of the married couple’s ‘difficult personal situation’ (‘illness and overexcitement’), merely gave them a serious warning. Kupferstein was, however, firmly requested to forgo his ‘massive production of printed materials’ and stop the collecting of documents.18 Kupferstein’s claims need to be treated with considerable caution, but his choice of words is nevertheless revealing. If Höhler, for instance, was planning to ‘tell all’, he must have been in on some kind of agreement, having been persuaded to portray the incident as a purely private affair and not as a political crime, as he had in pretrial custody. And later ‘depicting’ a statement made in pretrial custody as extorted would imply, by way of inversion, that the statement was actually correct, and that portraying it as an alleged extortion was in fact at odds with the truth. The trial, a relatively quick and routine affair, was covered by most of the papers at length, usually along their respective ideological and party-political lines. Its highlights were the testimonies of principal defendant Höhler and of Wessel’s former girlfriend, who took the stand as a witness. Jaenichen, who broke her leg beforehand, had to be picked up in a squad car from

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Urban Hospital in Berlin-Kreuzberg.19 Part of the reason Höhler and Jaenichen attracted such wide interest was that both were stereotypes of courtroom reporting and satisfied the reading public’s craving for sensation: the young prostitute nearly lifted out of the gutter by her middle-class saviour, and the hard-boiled ‘professional crook’ whose well-mannered behaviour in court was proof of his dangerous cunning. ‘Ali speaks. Talks in a turgid, florid and phoney literary German. His language is in its Sunday best.’ Compared to some of his co-defendants, the muscular Höhler, doing his best to show some poise, was an impressive sight indeed. Even the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, wholly devoid of sympathy for the Communist Höhler, had to grant him a seasoned nonchalance. Höhler, the paper wrote, ‘felt quite equal to’ the situation, had rehearsed his big performance, and even had the chutzpah to give everyone a friendly salute when entering the courtroom. His speech, which lasted the better part of an hour, was by and large delivered without notes.20 The prosecution, however, was little impressed by Höhler. His description of the course of events in his defence – that he fired inadvertently and was acting in self-defence, because Wessel, too, had a gun in his room – did not seem credible to the court. The acting state prosecutor, Dr Fischer, pleaded for a prison sentence of ten years and three months for the gunman. Rückert he requested be sentenced to eight years and one month, Kandulski to seven years and one month, Walter Jambrowski to five years, and Frau Salm to two years in prison. For Else Cohn, who fainted with fright during the prosecutor’s speech, he requested a sentence of one and a half years. The other defendants were to receive prison terms ranging from two months to three years. The atmosphere was tense during Fischer’s summing up, the courtroom having filled with more and more Nazis as the week wore on.21 The verdict was handed down on Friday 26 September 1930. As expected, the principal defendants were condemned to long prison terms for joint manslaughter. Höhler and his partner in crime Rückert, whose previous convictions increased the severity of his punishment, received the harshest penalties, with six years and one month of prison each. Josef Kandulski was sentenced to five years and one month, Max Jambrowski to two years. Walter and Willi Jambrowski, along with Elisabeth Salm, were given prison sentences of one and a half years, Walter Junek and Else Cohn one year. Defendants Kupferstein, Will, Sander, and Drewnitzki were given a suspended sentence of four months for aiding and abetting the crime. The only ones to be acquitted were the Schmidt family and Karl Godowski, whose apartment Höhler was arrested in. Hermann Schmidt had defended himself skilfully.

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Sensation in the Criminal Court Accused of having aided the escape of Höhler and Rückert, he testified that during the night in question he had ‘got himself so drunk’ that he went to bed ‘without a care in the world’.22 According to Schmidt, his wife and his daughter Käthe – a member of the Communist Youth Association (KJVD) at the time – had given shelter to the two men out of proletarian solidarity without even asking about what had happened. The prosecution had no way of refuting this version of events. The opinion of the court was as follows: ‘The defendants went to the flat to, as they themselves conceded, give Wessel a “proletarian” drubbing. It is therefore a case of wilful killing.’ Just what the defendants meant at the time by ‘proletarian drubbing’ could never be determined with absolute certainty, though. Max Jambrowski gave the clearest account on the first day of the proceedings: ‘For us it’s like this: when we stormtroopers plan to give someone a proletarian drubbing, we intend to beat him up, naturally to the point that he’s hospitalized. But only with our fists, not with weapons.’23 In its written verdict the court assumed that it was ‘common knowledge’ among the accomplices that Höhler and Rückert were in possession of firearms when heading to Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62. And there could be no doubt about it, ‘because this type of business between political adversaries, which Communists and National Socialists happen to be, is generally never conducted nowadays without firearms.’ The judges did not differentiate between perpetrators and accomplices. Even those who did not shoot were considered co-perpetrators according to Article 47 of the Reich Criminal Code. The court came to the conclusion that a clearly defined plan of attack, including the possibility of Wessel’s murder, was elaborated in both storm taverns on the evening of 14 January 1930. A passage in the verdict, which sounds like a description of house-tohouse fighting in the First World War, reads as follows: Höhler and Rückert, the ones in possession of firearms and who knew how to use them, were put up front; Kandulski was assigned to them as a direct assistant. In close cover, that is to say posted in the kitchen of Frau Salm, was Walter Jambrowski; rear cover, outside the building, was provided on the street by Max Jambrowski, Willi Jambrowski and Junek. Frau Salm’s role was to provide her kitchen, located right next to Wessel’s room, as a base of attack. Finally, Else Cohn was to act as a lookout. All of them, in other words, are perpetrators and not aiders and abettors. Moreover, as each of them was consciously willing to work with each of the others, all of them are accountable under criminal law as co-perpetrators in the incident.24

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The Making of a Nazi Hero What seems problematic here is the court’s assumption that the deed was planned by all of the participants in unison. The court failed to furnish proof that the incident really was the result of an agreement not to drive out or hurt the unwelcome subtenant but to kill him. The judges should have determined each defendant’s individual willingness at each stage of the crime. The will to commit the crime in the case of someone not directly involved in the incident cannot go beyond his or her imagination. The court, however, was content with the collective antipathy for Wessel and the collective will to give him a ‘drubbing’. What’s more, the court conceded that the various participants were not clear on what exactly was going to happen once the men entered the flat. Following this line of thought, it is only fair to say that most of the defendants had little more than a willingness to commit bodily harm. If, as the court acknowledged, the participants could not foresee what would happen, the accused could not have had a concrete will to commit it. And yet the judges imputed the motive of premeditated murder to all of the participants. The key passage in the verdict reads: The opinion of the court is, furthermore, to the effect that none of the participants was unfamiliar with the intended purpose of the firearms, to wit: breaking any resistance that Wessel might put up while giving him his ‘proletarian drubbing’. As the use of firearms generally leads to the death of the shooting victim, because the use of firearms at least implies the possibility of the shooting victim dying, the court takes for granted that the participants entertained this idea. And since the court, moreover, is convinced that each of the perpetrators sanctioned the action against Wessel even if it were to end in Wessel’s death, it has no scruples establishing the intent to kill in the case of each participant and thus pronouncing each of them guilty of wilful killing in accordance with Article 212 of the Criminal Code.25

Despite these remarks, which essentially endorsed the findings of the prosecution, the efforts of the defence counsel were successful in at least one important point: the last sentence of the court’s statement attested that all of the defendants condemned were acting out of political conviction.26 Thus, the Communist press could decry the verdict as another instance of class justice. The KPD, Kupferstein argued (not very persuasively), had ‘not been sullied’, as its alleged links to the world of organized crime in the capital had now been unmasked as a construct of bourgeois justice.27 This did not constitute mitigating circumstances for most of the accused. Those condemned to long prison sentences appealed against the verdict. Rückert withdrew his

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Sensation in the Criminal Court appeal a few weeks later. Höhler and Kandulski’s petitions for appeal had no success either, being rejected by the Reich Supreme Court (Reichsgericht) in two separate decisions on 13 December 1930 and 28 February 1931. With that, the September 1930 verdict of Berlin Regional Court I was final.28 The Wessel trial was less controversial than one would assume from today’s perspective. Another murder trial held at Berlin Regional Court III at the same time as the arraignment of Höhler and his comrades shows that such trials were hardly unusual. Three Nazis from SA-Sturm 2 – Edgar Meier, a 19-year-old journeyman tailor; Heinz Prüfke, a painter and decorator of the same age; and Kurt Dömske, a 20-year-old bank messenger – were accused of homicide. In a ‘clash’ on 17 May 1930 with athletes from the working-class football club ‘Germania Weissensee 1910’ on Naugarderstrasse in the district of Prenzlauer Berg, 23-year-old Erich Schumann and 20-year-old Albert Selenowski were shot to death in a ‘brawl with political tendencies’, as the court records put it with understatement.29 The two victims, the verdict of 27 September 1930 determined, were fatally wounded by shots fired at close range penetrating stomach, heart and intestines. Despite the fact that some of the bullets entered the victims’ bodies from behind, meaning the victims were presumably fleeing or on the ground already when shot, the court did not find the defendants guilty of joint manslaughter but merely of ‘brawling’, in accordance with Article 227 of the Reich Criminal Code, as well as contravening the Firearms Law of 12 April 1928. Though ‘guilty of being drawn into a brawl’, they had nonetheless acted in ‘putative selfdefence’. The court was extremely complaisant towards the defendants, determining – quite dubiously, according to the investigation results – that this alleged self-defence was neither self-provoked by the defendants nor an instance of excessive force. The judges meted out mild punishments as a consequence. The principal defendants each received two years in prison.30 They appealed nevertheless, with mixed results at first. Concluding, on 19 February 1931, that although the conviction for brawling could not be upheld, the Leipzig judges did rebuke the jury court for not at least examining the facts of the case with regard to involuntary manslaughter. On 8 June 1931, the Berlin jury court gave another ruling on the case. This time the verdict was acquittal. The Berlin chief state prosecutor filed for appeal, but retracted it a few weeks later.31 This trial of a few young National Socialists shows how harsh the convictions in the Wessel trial were by comparison. A juxtaposition of two court verdicts reveals that, when in doubt, the justice system decided against the Communists and in favour of the Nazis. In this sense both verdicts were paradigmatic of the bias bemoaned by critical contemporaries: that Weimar

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The Making of a Nazi Hero courts applied a double standard in cases of political crimes and, whatever the reason in each individual case, clearly favoured the nationalist Right.32 In concrete terms, Nazi attackers succeeded in portraying themselves as the ‘victims’ of an – at least potentially – life-threatening menace. Convinced of the political danger posed by the Communists while at the same time underestimating the Nazi threat, the judges tended to interpret the violence exercised by SA men as subjectively perceived acts of self-defence.33 Rudolf Olden, an attorney at the Berlin Supreme Court (Berliner Kammergericht) and journalist at the liberal Berliner Tageblatt, summed up the political trials of the summer of 1932 in a sarcastic but apposite manner when he spoke of the ‘construction of a permanent state of self-defence for National Socialists’.34 Democratically minded Weimar officials such as Prussian Minister of the Interior Grzesinki, on the other hand, had to suffer being called ‘Jew bastards’, and this with the blessing of the courts. The expression – or so the fourth vacation court of Berlin Regional Court II ruled just four weeks prior to the Wessel trial – was stating an ‘actual fact’, because Grzesinksi’s father was a Jew and his mother a Christian. The accused, a Nazi city councillor, had stated in his defence that his intent was not to offend Grzensinki personally but to ‘reproach [him] racially’.35 Neither the defendants, the political parties involved nor the police and prosecution were satisfied with the outcome of the trial against Wessel’s assassins. The criticisms of Chief State Prosecutor Thomas, who reviewed the case in 1933, were symptomatic. He considered it a contradiction that the court, assuming as it did that the attack was planned and premeditated and the joint will of all the perpetrators, did not investigate if there was an intent to kill, hence if it was a case of murder. Thomas pointed out, however, that value judgements of this sort were at the discretion of the court, and that a faulty decision by no means constituted a culpable breach of official duty. Reopening the proceedings once the Nazis came to power was out of the question from a purely legal standpoint, he asserted. They would have to live with the verdict, or so the jurist thought.36 Such verdicts fanned the flames of already escalating street fighting in the early 1930s, as reactions to the Wessel trial show. It was clear to the Communists in the course of the trial that they could reckon with a ‘vengeance verdict’.37 Die Rote Fahne was indignant not only at the judge’s ruling but also at the ‘brutal jail sentences’ that followed. For the Communist daily, it was a clear case of class justice when combined prison terms of 27 years and one month were imposed in the Wessel trial, whereas the mild punishments in the parallel proceedings against the ‘National Socialist murder gang’ were, in effect, ‘rewarding the Fascist murder of workers’. The party paper openly

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Sensation in the Criminal Court threatened to take revenge against the judges responsible for these verdicts: ‘The workers will not tolerate justice of this kind. They will firmly commit to memory the judges who do not rule by their sense of legality but by the dictate of the bourgeois class.’38 What the Communists viewed as ‘class justice’ was ‘racial justice’ for the anti-Semites of the Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung. As opponents of the Republic, the Nazis should not expect fairness of any kind from a politically instrumentalized justice system, claimed the völkisch-nationalist press, using arguments strangely analogous to those of their political arch-enemy. Der Montag Morgen commented: ‘It is, of course, difficult to hold accountable in a court of law the intellectual authors of this banditry – alas, it is always the proletarians, led astray by their leaders, that are punished.’ And later, when investigators set their sights on the leader of the Berlin-Mitte Communist stormtroopers, Polish-born Hermann Kupferstein, Der Angriff fumed: ‘Horst Wessel’s Death – The Work of a Jew!’39 Conspiracy theories were much in vogue in those days. The nationalist Tag reported on the ‘usual leniency for Marxists’ after the verdict was handed down. The Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung published its article on the end of the trial in the column ‘Vengeance Verdicts of the System’, and the commentator in the Völkischer Beobachter maintained that the verdict was an indirect challenge to the political adversary to intensify its political struggle: ‘This manner of administering justice is effectively cheering on subhumanity to commit even more such deeds!’ The comparatively mild punishments were ‘a scornful slap in the face’ to any ‘German sense of justice’, the paper would write a few years later. A satisfactory and sufficient atonement was yet to come, it said.40

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8

Cult and Commerce

Spectacular footage of crowds at the Nuremberg rallies and of the multitude cheering Hitler or marching in rank and file – these and other images of the Third Reich show the self-dramatization and aesthetics of National Socialism. Less visual evidence survives of the sheer brutality and often ‘ridiculous manifestations of the revolution’, mockingly and appropriately noted by the Polish correspondent and bohemian Count Antoni Sobański in the 1930s.1 He also observed that the sense of identity and the promise of salvation offered by the National Socialists, as expressed in their savvy political cult of the masses, were eagerly greeted by many Germans. Many contemporaries noted that what was known as the ‘Brown cult’ had conspicuously religious features, or at least that it made use of sacred forms of expression and rites that had a certain suggestive power and were able to reach the masses. Whether National Socialism merely adopted these forms or was itself a ‘political religion’ is still a matter of debate. There is general agreement, however, that the ‘sacralization of Führer rule’ was a central component of the Nazis’ self-enactment. This was true first and foremost for the cult of personality around Adolf Hitler, but also extended to the veneration of a number of dead men who served the National Socialists as ‘martyrs’ (Blutzeugen) until 1933, and later, after the seizure of power, rose to the status of ‘Party saints’, as it were, authenticating the story of the NSDAP’s ascent as well as its historical mission.2 The Berlin SA leader and pastor’s son Horst Wessel, gunned down in 1930, was one of the more prominent figures in the Nazi pantheon of the dead. His glorification began as he lay in the hospital, critically wounded, and reached its first peak at his funeral ceremony shortly afterwards. The fate of Wessel, who – in the Nazi take – was perfidiously murdered by Communists on account of his uncompromising commitment to the nationalist cause and with it the national rebirth of Germany, helped the Nazis legitimate their actions in the waning years of the Weimar Republic. They portrayed

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The Making of a Nazi Hero the increasing violence on the streets as a unilateral Communist threat, while touting themselves as champions of law and order. The cult of the dead, modelled on the cult of fallen and front-line soldiers of the veterans’ associations and ‘patriotic societies’ after the Great War, had an even deeper significance, as it contained an emotional appeal to the living. The identification in solemn rituals with ‘heroes of the collective’ allowed every ‘believing’ National Socialist to partake in their imagined ‘heroic substance’.3 The price of this self-enhancement, argues political scientist Peter Berghoff, was persistent feelings of guilt. In collective rituals of commemoration and invocation, the deceased heroes had to be kept alive, in a sense, as the vitality of the community was ultimately only guaranteed through the idea of a bond with the dead. Every living person was indebted to the dead heroes, Nazi propaganda never failed to remind them. The NSDAP called upon its followers to make the ‘sacrifice’ of its martyrs meaningful by carrying on the struggle.4 The singing of the Wessel song was cleverly linked to a physical gesture that created a sense of community and left a deep impression in the minds of many a ‘national comrade’. Standing erect, they were to slightly raise and extend the right arm in a Hitler salute and hold it in this position – at least during the first and final stanzas.5 The glorification of a dead party member through the singing of an anthem in his honour was not a specifically Nazi ritual. The Communists had sung a song since the mid-1920s, commemorating one of their martyred followers: the not-yet-28-year-old August Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Weineck, who was murdered in a public park in Halle an der Saale. A bugler in the marching band of the Halle Red Front Fighters’ League, Weineck was mortally wounded on 13 March 1925 at a campaign rally of the Communist candidate for Reich president, Ernst Thälmann, when the police allegedly fired random shots into a crowd of followers. The only detailed account of events in East German historiography says that the policemen fired with a ‘fiendish desire to kill’. It goes on: ‘White terror rages. People collapse in the hail of bullets. Among the dying – Fritz Weineck.’ The death toll, according to the police – whose official version was that they merely wanted to end the KPD rally on account of disturbances and overcrowding – was devastating: ten people were killed, many more seriously wounded.6 The Communists spoke of the ‘murder of workers’ and made an icon out of the wholly unknown victim Weineck. He was commemorated by ‘The Song of the Little Bugler’ (Das Lied vom kleinen Trompeter), which, sung to the tune of the soldier’s ditty ‘Of All the Comrades’ (Von allen Kameraden), later became one of the most well-known songs of the Young Pioneers and the Thälmann Pioneers in the GDR. The first stanza went as follows:

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Cult and Commerce Von all unsern Kameraden War keiner so lieb und so gut Als unser kleiner Trompeter Ein lustig’ Rotgardistenblut.7 Of all our comrades None was so dear and so good As our little bugler With his merry Red Guard blood.

In 1958 a monument was erected on the banks of the Saale River in Halle – meanwhile renamed the Fritz Weineck Riverbank – which became the site of regular wreath-laying ceremonies and oaths of allegiance by Young and Thälmann Pioneers. As of 1967, a barracks of the National People’s Army (NVA) in town also bore his name.8 But the memory of the ‘Little Bugler’ could hardly compete with the Wessel cult, especially since the SA had its own version of the song that it sang at its hero’s burial on 1 March 1930: Schlaf wohl, du Sturmführer Wessel Du tatest stets deine Pflicht Noch lebende SA-Kameraden die halten dann Gericht.9 Sleep well, Sturmführer Wessel You always did your duty The SA comrades who survive you will take vengeance on your behalf.

The Nazis even employed the Passion of Christ to present its dead hero to his best advantage, for the apotheosis of Horst Wessel had strains of a modern-day Passion narrative. As early as March 1930 Goebbels was referring to the late pastor’s son and SA leader as a ‘Christ-socialist’, harking back to a notion he had used in his novel Michael. Ein Deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern (Michael. A German Fate in the Pages of a Diary), composed in 1922–23. In Der Angriff as well, just a few days after the attack, Wessel was called a ‘second Michael’ who had tried ‘to understand the soul of the proletariat from the depths of its living manifestations’.10 Wessel’s short and comparatively unsettled life, his moving out of his parents’ home and quitting university, could be reinterpreted in the form of a hagiography. Accordingly, the young man

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The Making of a Nazi Hero was seen as consciously renouncing a promising bourgeois career in order to place his life in the service of the National Socialist cause.11 Goebbels also characterized Horst Wessel as a modern ‘worker-soldier’. He was not the only one to see in the worker the embodiment of the man of the future. The right-wing intellectual writer Ernst Jünger prophesied in his 1932 manifesto Der Arbeiter (The Worker) that it was the figure of the worker as an ‘emerging master man’ (heranwachsender Herrenmensch) who would accelerate and overcome the ‘bourgeois order’s process of self-destruction’ in an imminent revolutionary upheaval.12 Alluding to the myth of the ‘unknown soldier’, Goebbels spoke of Wessel as an ‘unknown worker’, the former student who, having wholly given himself to political agitation, now had ‘hard and rough worker’s hands’. The Westfälische Neueste Nachrichten was also graphic in its description: He works in the daytime, a shovel in his hand, and evenings he is with the SA. They do not have an easy time of it, the Brown battalions in Red Berlin; they are still few in number, and the enemy’s hatred is huge. It is a struggle for life and death. They warn Horst-Ludwig, beseech him; a mother cries. What’s the use, he has to do it, has to drink the cup of martyrdom. There is only one thing that matters: Germany!13

Blasphemous kitsch was part of Nazi rhetoric. An SA man wrote on Wessel’s birthday in October 1930 that, standing at his graveside, ‘barely healed wounds began to bleed again’. Goebbels used the occasion to announce that Wessel’s mortal body, though carried to the grave months before, had risen ‘in soul and spirit at this very same hour’, resurrected in a ‘new generation of Germans’.14 ‘In the face of this death’, declared Wilfrid Bade, rife with emotion, ‘the life of the one who was shot has almost become inconsequential’. Wessel’s life apparently acquired its higher meaning by virtue of his death, ‘as fate had willed it’. Wessel, so the message went, was a National Socialist Christ who gave his life for the national community. Messages like this struck a chord with the movement’s followers. An SA man wrote from his jail cell: ‘People are still willing to die and make sacrifices, and that is why I do not lose heart.’ The Horst Wessel myth was supposed to help SA men find meaning in the possibility of their own violent death: ‘A young man shows the movement how one can die and, if need be, must die,’ Goebbels wrote in Der Angriff. A few years later cynical party propaganda would even disseminate the myth that rarely had a man died ‘so courageously, so willingly and in such joyful certainty, believing in his idea.’15

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Cult and Commerce The Wessel cult is a typical example of how heroism was understood in modern authoritarian societies. In his 1935 essay entitled In the Shadow of Tomorrow, Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga argued that the idea of heroism in such societies was no longer based on the hero’s commitment to moral values but was tantamount to the ‘glorification of action as such’. This type of heroism as a modern ritual was of prime sociological importance, he asserted, as it generated the very tension ‘in which great things are done’. The ritual, he continued, was therefore a preferred political instrument of authoritarian states to manipulate their citizens, yet one devoid of substance: ‘The shirt-and-arm heroism of today in practice often means little more than a crude assertion of the “we”-consciousness. A particular subject, “we and those with us” called “party”, has a corner in heroism and parcels it out to its servants.’16 In this sense, the Horst Wessel cult was indeed devoid of substance: an artfully arranged shell that gave a face to National Socialism and its ideology without committing itself to the associated content. It was not Wessel’s life story that guaranteed authenticity, but the state-sanctioned cult.17 In the years before 1933, Nazi propaganda had primarily tried to present an authentic-seeming image of Horst Wessel. ‘Martyrs’ were needed at this stage to lend credence to the vision of a coming Third Reich. A key figure in the creation of a Horst Wessel legend at this point in time was the writer Hanns Heinz Ewers. The German nationalist freethinker, society man and bohemian, notorious for his provocative offences against good taste and his grotesque literary style, became a partisan of the völkisch Right in the late 1920s, beginning with his Freikorps novel Reiter in deutscher Nacht (Riders in the German Night, published in English as Rider of the Night).18 A year after the death of Wessel and the first wave of ‘transfiguration’, Ewers decided to turn this young man’s brief life into literary propaganda. He thus joined the ranks of a long line of artists since the turn of the century, and even more so since the First World War, who had taken the theme of a young man’s untimely death and idealized it in works of literature. Whereas authors such as Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke and Walter Flex cultivated an effusive, erotically charged style, Ewers was more interested in political expediency. Ewers’s Wessel novel – the modern canonization of a ‘party saint’, as it were – dramatized the final year of the hero’s life, turning it into a contemporary Passion narrative and picking up rather seamlessly where Goebbels’s idealization of Wessel as the ‘Christ-socialist’ left off. The book was supposed to be the writer’s ticket to the inner circle of National Socialists.19 On 3 November 1931, Ewers, who was celebrating his 60th birthday, met with Adolf Hitler in Munich. He later claimed that it was Hitler himself who commissioned him to write a ‘great SA novel’. Most likely it was the other

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The Making of a Nazi Hero way around: Ewers presented his idea and tried to win Hitler’s approval. On the very same day he was admitted into the party as member No. 659,057. That Ewers of all people began such a project with Hitler’s knowledge was not as surprising as it might seem. Though rejected by many Nazis as a writer of ‘obscene and trashy literature’ (Schmutz- und Schundliteratur), he had a few things going for him as the author of a Wessel novel. He had known the Wessel family personally since the early 1920s, and Horst Wessel had even appeared as an extra in Ewers’s 1926 remake of the silent film The Student of Prague (released in the US as The Man Who Cheated Life). Both were members of the Corps Normannia Berlin – Wessel as a student, Ewers as an ‘old boy’.20 Added to this was their ideological affinity. Ewers’s commitment to National Socialism in the early 1930s seems to have been a mixture of conviction and opportunism. At any rate, he was fascinated, perhaps even overwhelmed, by the Nazis. In June 1932, while working on the Wessel novel, Ewers wrote to his friend and fellow writer Herbert Eulenberg, in the same kind of language he put into Wessel’s mouth: ‘You really can’t imagine […] the immense bitterness that overcomes us when we think of these unfortunate 13 years of peace. […] We have given our earnings, our work, our blood, in short, everything for the movement – and we will carry it through to victory!’21 A handwritten dedication to Adolf Hitler (‘to the Führer in loyal admiration’) that Ewers inscribed in a copy of Reiter in deutscher Nacht in March 1932 went as follows: ‘ “German Fate is burning for change,” called the Führer into the night. “Follow the arduous path to the end, until the new day dawns! Be faithful to this purpose to the very last breath: Though you give your life to Germany, you still have not given enough!”’22 Ewers’s second wife, the American Josephine Ewers-Bumiller, was extremely critical of her husband’s new book project. The literary estate of Ewers contains a handwritten ‘draft of a letter to Hanns Heinz Ewers’, which, hastily jotted down in pencil and full of grammatical errors in German, objects to many aspects of the manuscript. Josephine Ewers was concerned that this propaganda novel would jeopardize her husband’s reputation as a writer. Her verdict on the book was devastating, diagnosing no less than literary impotence: ‘Dearest Hanns – What happened to your magnificent imagination, your wonderful sense of humour, your divine creative power? […] anyone who tells you it’s your best book is an imbecile, or a sycophant of the worst sort.’ She did think the work had commercial potential, but the subject matter was flimsy from a literary point of view. Wessel, she wrote, was ‘a very simple person free of inner conflicts’. Ewers should also count on being censored by the ‘staid W. family’.

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Cult and Commerce It is still a propaganda book for the party, on top of which it is too personal and lacking any fighting spirit. It is a very straightforward description of the facts, and the life of H.W. has nothing inspiring or transforming about it. He won people over with his personality, people who could just as easily have followed him in another direction. They followed him – not the thought, the idea or the ideal.23

Ewers was deaf to his wife’s warnings. Apparently he was so convinced of an impending Nazi victory that he willingly took the risk of being perceived by colleagues and critics as the author of third-rate political literature, of a tendentious novel with a purpose. Artistic and personal concerns had to take a back seat to his political ambitions, as evidenced by Ewers’s relationship with the self-confident Wessel women. In private he complained about the changes requested by Horst Wessel’s mother, who wanted to expunge all kinds of ambiguous passages from the novel manuscript: ‘She wants a Sunday schoolbook for boys from 8–11 years of age.’24 And yet he ultimately dedicated the book to Margarete Wessel – for obviously opportunistic reasons, though not without a certain sarcasm. The novel fashioned her into the ideal type of the ‘German mother’, as did the later Wessel cult, borrowing from the store of Christian and especially Catholic symbols. This ‘mother cult’ propaganda could draw on an established topos. Ever since the First World War, the nation’s Fliegermütter, or ‘airmen’s mothers’, had played an integral role in honouring the ‘heroes of the skies’.25 The ‘life story’ of Freikorps ‘hero’ Albert Leo Schlageter, written by Berlin journalist Rolf Brandt, first published in 1926 and reprinted many times into the 1940s, also ended with the motif of the mater dolorosa, the Mother of Sorrows. Schlageter was executed on 26 May 1923, after committing acts of sabotage against French occupying forces in the Rhineland, and was posthumously celebrated as a patriot by the national Right.26 Brandt wrote: ‘And his mother, who passed away in 1926, stood at his grave, her eyes tearless with pain. Over the wreaths, over the speeches, over the pain and over the laurels waved the flag of the Fatherland.’ Ewers outdid this description, writing in his Wessel novel: His mother was dreaming again. An enormous cross, tall and upright, the crossbar entwined with a swastika. Horst was standing beneath it, in his brown stormtrooper’s uniform; he […] looked up earnestly. Never would this image leave her. […] And she knew: when the people’s plight demands a sacrifice, it is always the bravest, the most noble and the best who are chosen. And always, always it ends like this: under the cross stands a mother!27

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Ewers mixed Nazi ideology with Christian symbols of sacrifice, turning Horst into Jesus Christ and Margarete Wessel into Mary, the mother of God – a woman mourning her son, but in her case with an unshakable faith in victory. This crude mixture was eagerly received by the Nazis at first. Der Angriff called the Wessel novel ‘the first epic of National Socialism’. Joseph Goebbels, by his own account, read it in one sitting: ‘The book is marvellously written. It moved me to tears. This was the SA, this was the fight for the streets, this, too, was Horst Wessel, take him for all in all. I finish at five in the morning. And then I fall asleep in bliss.’ Other high-ranking Nazis too greeted the novel’s publication enthusiastically in the autumn of 1932. A brochure from the publishing house J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachf., formerly known for its carefully prepared editions of German classics, quoted letters from its readers. Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach declared his intention to promote this work ‘born in the spirit of the young generation’ as recommended reading for Nazi youth. No other book professed ‘the gospel of our time with such artistic skill’. Others, in praising the work, underlined their own contribution to the book and its subject. Ernst Röhm congratulated himself on ‘providing the initial impulse for the creation of this heroic epic’. And Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia was most impressed by the passages in which he himself was mentioned: ‘You succeeded superbly in portraying what made Horst and me friends at a time when he was marked by death. I’m taking the book to Holland with me on my visit to the Kaiser…’28 Outside the nationalist Right, however, the book and its author met with disapproval. As was to be expected, many critics accused Ewers of literary opportunism. The book by the ‘bloodlust bard of the Browns’ was poorly written and full of lies, and Ewers’s ‘mawkish style’ unbearable, as was his penchant for the fantastic, they wrote. One reviewer found an ‘utter lack of class’, another attested to the author’s considerable talent for ‘trend sniffing’.29 The Stuttgarter Sonntagszeitung was more nuanced in its appraisal. Its reviewer acknowledged that Ewers in his Wessel character had hit upon the ‘genuine and beautiful desire for struggle and “commitment” ’, but said that the novel nonetheless revealed ‘a questionable amalgamation of the most noble youthful impulses and stale, clichéd drives’. The Nazi battle for the streets, it continued, did not come across as the least bit ideologically motivated, but rather part of an erotically charged, self-referential action for the sake of action: The ‘victories’ of these supposedly ‘young’ people awaken uncontrollable enthusiasm […], and thus the so-called human conquests that are part of the triumph of nationalist renewal are obviously not the result of racial selection, but quite simply of youthful erotic bonds (e.g. the delight in ‘snappy’ fellows

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Cult and Commerce even if they are on the side of the odious ‘Reds’ and are little more than ‘scum’), that it takes the ‘thrilling pace’ of a scribbler like Ewers to make a ‘monument’ of German history out of it.30

With Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship on 30 January 1933, the cult of the dead hero Horst Wessel assumed proportions that are hard to imagine today. Alongside official party-sanctioned commemorative activities mainly under the direction of Goebbels, a form of remembrance ‘from below’ emerged that had traits of popular hero worship and was hard to keep under control. The young Sturmführer, Nazi propaganda everywhere proclaimed, was entitled to a place of honour alongside other famous Germans. For Hitler’s birthday on 20 April 1933, German radio broadcast a dramatized version of the Wessel novel. By mid-May the book was out in Braille, and as of September the new hero’s life story was available in Swedish translation. Hans Bernd Gisevius, the former director of the paramilitary units of the DNVP and in 1933 an employee of the Gestapo, wrote laconically after the Second World War: He became a national saint, Obergruppenführer of Valhalla, so to speak. His picture was displayed on every kiosk. Unable to appear in person any more, his mother and sister were passed around from place to place at popular rallies before falling, together with the Horst Wessel myth, into oblivion about a year later.31

The Wessel cult had certainly not fizzled out by early 1934, as Gisevius claimed, but he was correct about the special role played by the two Wessel women in staging and commodifying the dead Sturmführer. The Wessel family was elevated to iconic status and became a kind of role model, a common feature of such cults of personality in this period. Mother and daughter accepted awards and accolades as the dead martyr’s representatives and vouched for the authenticity of the hero’s life. In this way they were instrumental in the family’s most prominent member being virtually omnipresent at the start of the Third Reich – and they were not the poorer for it either. Horst’s mother was even Mussolini’s guest of honour in October 1937, at the 15-year anniversary of the Fascist ‘March on Rome’.32 Her daughter Ingeborg published two books and numerous articles about her brother. Her biography Mein Bruder Horst (My Brother Horst), published in late 1933 by Franz Eher, the central publishing house of the NSDAP and the largest publishing concern of the Third Reich, sold fabulously well and was already in its 12th printing by 1941. She was also the editor of Das neue Buch für Mädels (The New Book for Girls), which ran to at least seven editions in the 1930s, as well as the volumes Mütter von morgen (Mothers of Tomorrow) and Deutsches Land in fernen

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Zonen. Ein Kolonialbuch für Jungen und Mädel (German Country in Distant Zones. A Colonial Book for Boys and Girls).33 Ingeborg Wessel can be called a National Socialist writer even if she contributed little to her first publications. After the war she made the following comments about her propaganda books: I saw the need for a kind of counter-reaction to the sorry efforts of Ewers and Reitmann, and that is how I came to publish the books My Brother Horst and Horst Wessel in Pictures [Horst Wessel im Bilde]. With the consent of my mother. It was then that I accepted an offer from Eher-Verlag, the party’s publishing house, to give the project the backing it needed, and that is how I published my brother’s diaries. I also accepted the offer of a politically well-versed editor at the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in Berlin, since I lacked the necessary political facts for the connecting text about the events mentioned by Horst in his diary – things I witnessed on the sidelines when my brother was still alive. […] In this way I just provided the materials and did not even write the foreword. The military parts about the SA were done by a former SA leader named Stenzmann. […] The books that were eventually published were inspected not once but several times by the Gauleiter and modified as he saw fit.34

The hero’s sister was a clever marketer and a successful young woman. Having passed her school-leaving examinations in Hildesheim at Easter 1931, Ingeborg Wessel began studying medicine at Berlin University in the summer of that year. In 1932 she spent one semester at Rostock University35 but was back in Berlin by October 1932, where she claimed to have completed her state examination in medicine in 1937.36 The following year she married her classmate Ewald Rudolf Sanders, a ‘corps student’ from a prosperous peasant family who was born in Recklinghausen on 8 November 1909. Sanders began his studies at Berlin University in the winter semester of 1931–32 and ended them as a doctor of medicine in December 1937. The civil wedding ceremony took place on 3 June 1938 in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin.37 Ingeborg Sanders-Wessel, or plain Inge Sanders as she called herself, then worked by her own account as a resident physician at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin. She claimed to have earned her doctorate in 1942,38 though her 16-page dissertation, submitted to the medical department of Berlin University, is dated 1944.39 Inge Sanders said she worked for two years, from 1942, as a company physician for the electronics manufacturer Telefunken AG, being employed for a time in the same function at Tetenal Photo Works. By 1945 she had had three children with her husband – who was drafted into the army in 1941 – thus fulfilling the Nazi ideal of a doctor–mother.40

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The ‘hero’s mother’ Margarete Wessel as Mussolini’s guest of honour during celebrations on the 15th anniversary of the ‘March on Rome’, 1937

By August 1944, at the latest, she had moved with her children to Krummhübel (today Karpacz, Poland) near Hirschberg (Jelenia Góra) in Silesia to escape the air raids on Berlin. Her mother had received a 3,600-square-metre plot of land from the municipality in 1936, just a few kilometres as the crow flies from the place where Werner Wessel had frozen to death in 1929. This prime piece of real estate on the edge of town had originally been reserved for a large hotel or sanatorium, but Margarete Wessel had a villa of ‘the finest, first-class workmanship’ built, complete with garage, central heating and 200 square metres of living space. The total costs for construction, provision of infrastructure and furnishings had – she said in the 1950s – amounted to 70,000 reichsmarks, presumably an inflated sum. Rumour had it that she had also received money from the NSDAP to build her house.41 After the war, Wessel’s sister claimed that she had neither enriched herself from the cult of her brother nor made any personal contribution in support of Nazism: ‘I kept away from politics.’ Though she did attend the Nuremberg rallies of 1933 and 1935 and had complimentary tickets from the party, she claimed to have been there in a private capacity. She had had close but strained relations with leading Nazis during this period, she said, and refused Goebbels’s offer to transfer Horst’s Nazi Party membership number to her and her mother.42

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The Making of a Nazi Hero In reality Margarete Wessel had already applied for party membership for herself and her daughter in early 1933, requesting, if possible, to take the numbers of her two deceased sons (Horst’s was 48,434, Werner’s 92,715) or at least to have similarly low numbers in order to enjoy the privileges of old-guard National Socialists. Despite the freeze on new members, mother and daughter were eventually admitted into the party, effective from 16 February 1934, but were given high numbers ‘for reasons of principle’, 2,084,783 for Margarete Wessel and 2,084,611 for her daughter.43 Ingeborg claimed – untruthfully – after the war that she had only joined in 1935 or 1936, for personal reasons. Her interlocutor was not convinced. He noted that ‘Frau S. makes a decidedly bad impression during her interrogation.’ She allegedly answered evasively and could not refute that she had totally identified with National Socialism at one time. When he confronted her with her calumny of Berlin’s former deputy chief of police, Bernhard Weiss, whom she referred to as ‘Isidor’ in one of her books, she merely replied: ‘That’s Berlin slang!’44 Inge Sanders also claimed after the war that she had not made any real profit from her books. Even Mein Bruder Horst had only had a print run of 20,000, she said: ‘It was far too boring for people.’45 In reality the print runs were probably much higher, her books being sponsored and promoted by the party, especially considering that she was named by boys and girls as one of the most popular authors of children’s books in a survey conducted in 1936.46 In a de-Nazification questionnaire filled out in 1948, Wessel’s sister had indicated that from 1933 to 1936 she supported herself solely out of her earnings from the party’s own publishing house, Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH in Munich. Only for the following year did she claim to support herself primarily from her husband’s earnings. By their own accounts, the Wessel women received no money or gifts from the NSDAP. Benefits of this sort were presumably not necessary, because as the guardian of the Wessel cult the family was making a handsome profit. Ingeborg Wessel, just like her mother, was glad to be courted by Nazi worthies. The two women were honorary guests at the dedication of Wessel monuments, at commemorative ceremonies, as well as at the christening of the navy training ship Horst Wessel on 13 June 1936. They guarded the new national hero’s personal estate as if they were the relics of a saint. Only from time to time did they allow an occasional ‘devotional object’ – a few pages of his diary, a photo, a letter – to be viewed in public, and this presumably in exchange for a fee. In the spring of 1933 Ingeborg Wessel was not only working on the books about her brother, she also tried to market a music box featuring the ‘Horst Wessel Song’. Dubbing it an organino (Italian for ‘barrel organ’),

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Cult and Commerce she planned to have it produced in the Black Forest. State Commissioner and Reich Culture Administrator Hans Hinkel answered her in the negative, however, on 7 July 1933, turning down her request to use the song for commercial purposes. Though he certainly did not underestimate the benefits to be had from the large-scale manufacturing of a music box, that is to say, as a job-creation scheme in the structurally weak Black Forest region, it was ‘still merely a toy’, which is why Hinkel rejected the idea ‘from a purely intuitive standpoint’.47 The many attempts of party comrades and opportunistic businessmen alike to make a commercial profit from the political sea change of 1933 was curbed somewhat by the ‘Law for the Protection of National Symbols’ (Gesetz zum Schutze der nationalen Symbole), which took effect on 19 May 1933. The law forbade ‘the public use of symbols of German history, of the German State and the National Revolution in Germany in a way which might offend the sense of dignity for those symbols’. An order from Goebbels, the Reich minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, of 26 July 1933 on the ‘Protection of Sacred Songs’ decreed furthermore that it was prohibited to ‘sing and play in restaurants, coffeehouses and all places of entertainment the “Horst Wessel Song”, the “Song of the Germans” and other patriotic songs or National Socialist fight songs that are particularly hallowed by force of tradition or content’. Exceptions would only be permitted when ‘the setting, the gravity and the magnitude of the event [constituted] a special occasion for singing or playing said songs’. Violations could be prosecuted with fines of up to 150 reichsmarks or imprisonment.48 The attempts to allow only certain, party-sanctioned forms of Wessel commemoration indirectly affected the Horst Wessel film as well, which was slated for release on 9 October 1933, Wessel’s 26th birthday. The 90-minute feature, largely based on Ewers’s novel and directed by Franz Wenzler, was censored by Goebbels and banned from the screen.49 The ban came as a surprise, because the movie, starring the largely unknown Emil Lohkamp as Wessel and the popular actor Paul Wegener (playing a Soviet Communist leader and bearing a strong resemblance to Lenin), had been uniformly praised following advance screenings. Wegener, in particular, who first became famous for his role in the 1920 silent classic The Golem: How He Came Into the World, was impressive as the ‘diabolical Moscow mastermind’. The press even referred to him as the ‘Asiatic Commune Golem’, alluding to his most famous role.50 Preview audiences were deeply impressed by the many – extremely realistic – mass scenes, in which appearances were made by the fourth, fifth and sixth Berlin-Brandenburg SA-Standarte, corps students from the Normannia, and a police unit.51 The filming was apparently so lifelike that

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The Making of a Nazi Hero some of the extras actually got violent while shooting a brawl scene. One newspaper reported: The few policemen with the task of clearing the hall were put to flight, so that shooting had to be called off in order to explain to the overzealous fighters that the police were supposed to win here… The police, for their part, saw their reputation on the line and went after the ‘enemy’ with ‘genuine enthusiasm’ during the second take, resulting in the most realistic shots imaginable.

Ernst Hanfstaengl, who wrote the music to the film, told a similar story in his anecdote-rich memoir Hitler: The Missing Years. A crowd scene filmed in the working-class district of Wedding escalated in a similar manner when the locals, still strongly sympathetic to the Communists, took the actorCommunists for the real thing and, rallying to the old battle cries, rushed to the aid of their presumed comrades, pouncing on the real SA men as well as the police. Hanfstaengl’s conclusion: a day of utter chaos, but firstrate shots.52 The Wessel picture was produced by the newly founded Volksdeutsche Filmgesellschaft, a German film company that was essentially the brainchild of Ewers. It was the only feature film the company ever made. Ewers had a hard time salvaging his project after Goebbels’s veto, despite the fact that he had stepped up his work for the Nazis, offering his services as a spokesman of the writers’ union, the ‘Protective Association of German Writers’ (Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller), and speaking at many Nazi rallies. Goebbels gave his opinion of the film in his diary: ‘Bloodiest amateurism’. He spoke almost as candidly in public, calling it an ‘artistic failure’. Sentimental kitsch could not be justified by Nazi convictions, he said. Wessel, the ‘greatest theme of the National Socialist Revolution’, should only be put on screen in a ‘real work of art’.53 An entry from six weeks earlier, dated 28 August 1933, suggested other reasons for his dislike of the film: ‘Read into the night yesterday. H.H. Ewers’s Fundvogel. Filth and perversion! This beast is now doing Horst Wessel. We’ll put an end to that.’54 Rumours also began to circulate suggesting that Goebbels’s ban was not for aesthetic or political reasons, but because of his wounded vanity. The former Berlin Gauleiter played no part at all in the Wessel film – unlike his rival Hanfstaengel, a crony of Hitler’s who advanced to the position of chief foreign-press officer of the NSDAP in 1933 and not only composed the movie’s music but also acted as its official party supervisor. In the inner circle of Nazi leaders, Goebbels allegedly complained as well that the film had turned out to be too bourgeois and placed

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Actors and extras enact the supposed riots during the funeral procession. Still photo from the propaganda film ‘Hans Westmar’, 1933.

too much emphasis on Wessel’s Christian roots. It conveyed too little, he thought, of the ‘National Socialist Revolution’.55 Goebbels eventually approved a modified version and the film, which premiered on 13 December 1933 under the title Hans Westmar. Einer von vielen. Ein deutsches Schicksal aus dem Jahre 1929 (Hans Westmar. One of Many. A German Fate from the Year 1929) at the Capitol cinema, not far from Zoologischer Garten station.56 The new and estranged title was to make clear that this was not the authoritative, party-sanctioned version of the Nazi hero Horst Wessel. The renaming also suggested that Westmar’s was a typical fate of the Kampfzeit, one that befell many Nazi followers. In this way the celluloid hero became part of the Volksgemeinschaft. Margarete Wessel tried to the end to prevent the picture’s release. On 2 November 1933 she personally cabled Hitler: ‘Ban this film, whose change of title and dismemberment are a disgrace to my dead son. All of Germany will see this shoddy piece of work as the fate of my son, regardless of the change in name.’57 Her efforts came to naught. Reich ministers Franz Seldte, Richard Walther Darré, and Bernhard Rust attended the film premiere as representatives of the Third Reich’s elite leaders. Local SA notables of Berlin were also present at the event.58 Hitler, Goebbels

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Film poster of ‘Hans Westmar’

Cult and Commerce and Göring were not. Predictably, the Nazified press praised Hans Westmar as a ‘cinematic feat’. The audience was both ‘shaken’ and ‘enraptured’. But audience reactions in the coming weeks were by no means unequivocal. Some rose to their feet during the Wessel song and even made the Hitler salute, whereas others left the cinema in silence without the slightest applause. The film service of the Central Institute for Education and Instruction in the Reich Ministry of the Interior rated it ‘politically commendable’ and ‘highly commendable’. There is no record of how many people went to see it. It apparently ran for a relatively short time and with only moderate success. On the other hand, it was repeatedly shown in the following years. The SA-Gruppe Lower Saxony, for example, screened it in February 1936 after a Horst Wessel memorial event in Hanover. The organizers hoped it would help relive the history of the rise of the NSDAP, treating it more or less as a documentary film. In 1939, the Reich Propaganda Administration distributed a shortened version as an ‘educational film’ for schools.59 Hans Westmar basically came too late. The other two motion pictures dealing with the Kampfzeit and the death of Nazi heroes, Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex) and SA-Mann Brand (SA Man Brand), had already found their audiences by the time Hans Westmar was released in late 1933. The lure of the new and unseen had worn off. Added to this was the fact that the consolidation of Nazi rule diminished the usefulness of such films as propaganda. The more that Nazi elites assumed the role of a governing power, the more they found such a film inappropriate, depicting as it did the recent Nazi past as taking place in smoky bars and popular meeting halls as well as on the streets. Ewers’s allegiance did not pay off at all. He did not become a Gustaf Gründgens of German literature, but was soon put under a publication ban. Under pressure from numerous critics in the NSDAP, the distribution of his Wessel novel was prohibited in the spring of 1934. The number of copies printed up to that point had reached an impressive 200,000, meaning it was quite a commercial success. Ewers’s adversaries also saw to it that most of his works went out of print and could not be sold. By the end of 1938, all of the author’s works, with the exception of Horst Wessel and Reiter in deutscher Nacht, had been placed on the ‘list of harmful and undesirable literature’. Symptomatic of the Nazis’ critique of Ewers’s entire oeuvre was a report on his 1928 novel Vampir: ‘The content of this volume is a single chain of abnormalities and perversities as well as racial defilement [Rassenschande]. […] Ewers embraces here the rather odd notion that the future German race will and must be a mixture of Germans and Jews!!! The book must not be authorized for publication!!’ One of the few reactions to Ewers’s death on

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 12 June 1943 said that this ‘prominent writer of the liberalist system’ was not worthy of an obituary.60 Ewers got into another kind of trouble in November 1933. Erna Jaenichen sued Ewers and his publisher J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, citing the defamatory ‘portrayal of her person’ in the novel, which thinly concealed her identity as a prostitute. She demanded that sales of the book be discontinued. Her lawyer Richard Plasch not only argued that the rights of his client had been violated, but also attacked Ewers at his weakest point by trying – like a number of critics before him – to expose the author as a defiler of the National Socialist cause, pointing out the book’s educational effect on the people: Even if the portrayal were fully accurate historically, any other National Socialist-minded writer would have used his artistic liberty to render the character of Erna differently, because a book of this sort, intended as it is for German boys and girls, and which is supposed to depict to the broad masses of our people a young idealist of action and idea, has an enormous pedagogical influence. A book of this sort should steer clear of smut!61

Attorney Plasch had taken the case on in autumn 1933, after numerous lawyers had declined to represent ‘Horst Wessel’s girl’. The case was a political issue in 1933–34, and parts of the SA interpreted the attempt to obtain a publication ban as an affront to the stormtroopers in general. Even Ernst Röhm followed the affair. Thus Plasch appealed to him personally in February 1934. He explained to the SA’s chief of staff that Ewers had used his good links to Berlin SA leaders to exert pressure on his client, and made clear that the trial was not at all about disparaging the reputation of Horst Wessel. According to Plasch, an SA liaison officer with the Gestapo, one Sturmbannführer von Wietersheim, had openly threatened him in early February 1934, saying ‘that the SA would use all available means to prevent the continuation of the trial’.62 The threat seemed to work, because Jaenichen and her lawyer did not resume their efforts until 1935. Röhm had meanwhile been murdered and the SA largely disempowered. Apparently even Goebbels himself now intervened on behalf of Wessel’s former girlfriend.63 He probably saw it as an opportunity to get rid of the now rather irksome Ewers, still one of his main rivals in the business of selling the Wessel myth. The trial eventually ended with a settlement, but no further details are available.64 As to the subsequent fate of Wessel’s former girlfriend, there is little in the way of reliable information. Erna Jaenichen married at least twice in rapid succession, making matters even more complicated. The papers of attorney

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Cult and Commerce Plasch list her as ‘Erna Ruhnke’ in 1934, then one year later as ‘Erna Felgner’. It is quite likely that she married the same Georg Ruhnke that she knew from before her time with Wessel. This might be an additional indication of the partly private motives for the attack on the latter. Even less is known about Erna’s second husband. Writer and journalist Heinz Knobloch, who passed away in 2003, wrote in his book Der arme Epstein (Poor Epstein), published in 1993, that he had been a salaried employee of some sort. It could have been the same Felgner mentioned by SA man Richard Fiedler to the Berlin police in 1929. According to unsubstantiated rumours, Erna Jaenichen and her husband were living in or near the city of Magdeburg at the time of the lawsuit.65 In the 1935 Magdeburg directory there are three men by the name of Felgner who conceivably could have been her husband: a waiter, a prison sergeant, and a master baker. According to the city’s municipal administration, the post-war Magdeburg register of residents was not reinstated until the 1950s. Thus we know nothing more about these men and a possible wife named Erna.

The decorated Wessel grave in Berlin during one of the numerous commemoration ceremonies, 1933 or later

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9

With God’s Blessing

Both of the major Christian churches in the Reich had their Nazi martyrs. The Nazi Protestants had Horst Wessel, the pastor’s son killed by Communists, whereas nationalist Catholics had Leo Schlageter, executed in 1923 and later idealized as the ‘first National Socialist German soldier’.1 According to propaganda, Schlageter even joined the NSDAP shortly before his death. The Union of Catholic German Student Associations played a key role in forming a national cult around him. In conspicuous agreement with the heroic idealization of Wessel, a representative of the Falkenstein Catholic student fraternity declared at the dedication ceremony for a Schlageter national monument: ‘Here […] the full yearning of a deeply religious young man’s heart comes true, a heart that, born of German hardship, has sacrificed itself. […] This is the legacy he has left us, the genuine notion of fatherland: believing with abandon and dying for the sake of the whole.’ These circles never tired of stressing that Schlageter had been a ‘fierce advocate of the Catholic religion’ during his lifetime. He was a ‘model Catholic and son’, they claimed, as well as a ‘very pious man’.2 Love for the fatherland and the willingness to make sacrifices – these values were likewise cherished by large parts of the National Protestant community. The heroic figure of Wessel was particularly suited to strengthening the ties between Protestantism and National Socialism. Protestant church leaders, though officially neutral in party politics, had opened themselves to the programmatic aims of patriotic and völkisch-nationalist groups as early as the mid-1920s. The strong presence of Protestant clergymen at Nazi commemorative ceremonies for Wessel from the early 1930s on can also be taken as an indication of increasing convergence. The same goes for the foundation of a working group of Nazi Church ministers in Bremen in May 1931.3 At any rate there were no unbridgeable differences to speak of between the two camps, especially considering that the Nazis had repeatedly announced their

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With God’s Blessing intention of once again putting state and society on a Christian foundation. A Nazi member of the Bavarian Landtag, Hans Schemm, who also served as chairman of the National Socialist Teachers’ Union, thought it self-evident that ‘German schools [must be] Christian schools that play a positive role in the [national] community’; even in a National Socialist state the ‘underlying idea of education’ was Christianity.4 The Nazis’ professed aim of ‘cleansing’ the national community of Jews, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, the disabled and ‘antisocials’ was well received in many Protestant quarters. A majority of the faithful were even prepared to accept radical measures if it meant securing the Church’s political power in the new state and if autonomy was respected in its internal affairs.5 As of 1933, church leaders endeavoured to integrate their congregations into the new Volksgemeinschaft. The vast majority of ministers were quite well disposed to the völkisch-national revolution and the basic tenets of new state policy. Historian Manfred Gailus talks about a ‘euphoric phase of long-cherished expectations and hopes’ that many Protestants perceived as the ‘wonderful turn of an era’. The Deutsche Christen (German Christians), who viewed themselves as the ‘Renewed Church’ and represented the bulk of Protestant faithful in the early years of the Third Reich, were intent on marching ‘to battle’ shoulder to shoulder with the new Nazi regime, or so Ludwig Müller, elected to the position of Reich bishop by the German National Synod in 1933, declared one year later. He melodramatically proclaimed: ‘The Protestant Church of Luther will be a German, a National Socialist Church. Otherwise it will not be at all.’6 The crucial connecting link between Protestants and National Socialists was their shared anti-Semitic stance. Such prejudices were particularly widespread in the National Protestant milieu to which the Wessel family belonged. On top of centuries-old Christian anti-Judaism, a modern, nationalist notion of racial anti-Semitism emerged in the 1870s that attempted to curb the allegedly corrosive influence of Jews on the German state. Even later Protestant luminaries such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller took the view in 1933 that the ‘Jewish question’ was a historically rooted and urgent problem. Bonhoeffer even expressly conceded that the new powers-that-be could address the issue in ‘new ways’ so long as the rule of law were not violated.7 A short text entitled The Reawakening of Faith in the Present written by Otto Dibelius, the general superintendent of the Electorate of the Mark Brandenburg, is illuminating in this context. With a mixture of theological and political arguments, the high-ranking National Protestant Church official sought to interpret the developments of the year 1933 as a step towards

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Christian faith. He singled out Marxism as the common foe, with its inherent tendency towards secularization, and was thus in agreement with the majority of his brethren. Dibelius, who regarded himself ‘as a confirmed anti-Semite despite the word’s often evil-sounding connotations’, argued as follows: The aim of German freedom, the aim of a new, vigorous, promising nationhood [Volkstum] is of a different kind than the aim of the classless society the Marxist movement imagines. It was not thought up by the sharply calculating mind of a Jew. […] It stems from feeling, from instinct, from blood impulses. […] The faith in victory that animates [the ‘national movement’] is the faith in forces that cannot be calculated but are doubtless stronger then all material goods. […] Such a movement, however, even if it owes its existence to worldly objectives, impels us towards religion. One who lives for ideals that are not thought up by human beings but that he feels in his blood, […] this man’s gaze will be drawn to the Creator. His notions of this Creator might be rather vague, but his gaze seeks Him nonetheless.’8

An author in the weekly Berliner Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt entertained similar illusions: ‘Certainly a man is not yet Christian in the deeper sense by virtue of his joining the NSDAP. But there is by far more good will in him to listen to the Gospels.’9 The authors of such texts turned a blind eye to the extreme acts of violence being committed by gangs of Nazi thugs in the hope that an emotional and ‘racially appropriate’ (rassengerecht) communal relationship would form the basis of a new religiosity under National Socialism. It is therefore not surprising that the Deutsche Christen in particular made frequent reference to Wessel once the Nazis seized power, and this not only on account of his family background. He symbolized the ‘fresh fighting spirit’ that, according to pastor Erich Stange, director of the Protestant Young Men’s Society (Evangelisches Jungmännerwerk), ‘should at all times be the way of a Christian’.10 Some Protestant church representatives even claimed in 1933 that nowhere had the nationalist ‘front-line spirit’ (Frontgeist) survived more intact ‘during the years of organized godless propaganda’ – which is to say, in the Weimar Republic – than in German Protestantism: ‘Countless young men who have gone through this school of youth have become pioneers of the movement. […] SA men in uniform were constantly coming and going in our homes! The national stance and bearing is our deepest characteristic of being.’11 In a brochure from the year 1933, National Socialist Will Kelter said that it was no coincidence that Horst Wessel came from a Protestant parsonage. After

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With God’s Blessing all, ‘these plain and pure surroundings’ had produced many an important German. The bishop of Bremen, Heinz Weidemann, wrote that same year to a similar effect that even in the ‘age of boundless egotism’ the Protestant pastor’s home was a ‘source of strength for the German people’ thanks to its abundance of children. Weidemann, too, did not fail to mention Wessel: ‘What pastor isn’t proud that Horst Wessel was the son of a Protestant pastor?’12 Many elements of the Wessel cult were not unfamiliar to Protestants – Goebbels’s restyling of the dead SA man into a ‘Christ-socialist’ was largely based on Christian martyrology – and therefore required no explanation. On 5 February 1933, at a commemoration ceremony at the Berlin Cathedral attended by Hitler and Göring and organized in honour of SA-Sturmführer Hans Maikowski, who was killed on 30 January 1933, Nazi pastor Joachim Hossenfelder evoked the ‘great grey army in the other world’ that was under orders to keep ‘heavenly guard’ for ‘the eternal Sturm of Horst Wessel’. The heroes of the Great War and the SA men killed in street fights had sacrificed themselves for Germany, just like Jesus on the cross. Adolf Hitler, he said, was ‘a man sent by God’.13 Hossenfelder, Reich leader of the Deutsche Christen since 1932, was one of the first clergymen in Berlin whose sermons, in effect, equated street fighters with religious warriors. Another Berlin pastor wrote in 1936 that Horst Wessel was ‘forever a model of positive Christianity in the Third Reich’.14 The new martyr was present in the parish in varied ways. The Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin-Mariendorf, consecrated in 1935, has largely preserved the Nazi symbols in its interior. The church organ was played at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally before it was installed in Berlin. A carved wooden figure under the pulpit has the clearly discernible features of an SA man and is perhaps intended as a reminder of the dead Sturmführer hailing from a Protestant pastor’s home.15 The Wessel song, the official party anthem of the NSDAP, was adopted by the Protestant Church as well in 1933. Along with the ‘Song of the Germans’, it was sung in some places of worship at the end of Reformation Day celebrations on 31 October.16 At the Berlin Parochial Church, just a stone’s throw away from the former Wessel family flat on Jüdenstrasse, the notorious fight song was repeatedly played on the glockenspiel. On 22 February 1939, the ninth anniversary of Wessel’s death, the Wessel song and other Nazi fight songs were performed there at a concert in his honour.17 In May 1933, pastor Paul Humburg in Wupper-Barmen used the Wessel song as a model, composing his ‘Hitler Song’ (Hitlerlied) to the same melody:

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Der Tag bricht an! Jungdeutschland stillgestanden! Zum heilgen Schwur empor die treue Hand! Deutschland erwacht aus Not, aus Bruderzwist und Banden! Heil Dir, mein ein’ges deutsches Vaterland.  Das Alte sinkt! Aus Blut und Kriegesgrauen strahlt neuer Lenz. Durch Schatten und Verrat bricht durch ein Mann, Millionen folgen voll Vertrauen. Sein Wort und Wille reisst zu Sturm und Tat. Die Sonne steigt! Wir rüsten uns zum Streite. Zum Opfer trotz der Feinde Hass und Hohn. Auf, Brüder, Tritt gefasst, wir schreiten Seit’ an Seite. Mit Adolf Hitler, Deutschlands treuestem Sohn. Die Hand ans Werk! Jungdeutschland wagts aufs Neue! ‘Deutschland’, das Feldgeschrei in Not und Tod. Der Führer ruft: wir alle jubeln, ‘Treu um Treue’! Vor uns der Tag! Und unsre Burg ist Gott!18 The day is breaking! Attention Young Germany! Raise loyal hand in sacred vow! Germany is awakening from its need, from fraternal strife and fetters! Hail to thee, my united German Fatherland. The old is waning! From blood and the horrors of war a new spring radiates. Through shadow and betrayal one man breaks through, millions follow confidently. His word and will rouse to storm and action. The sun is rising! We arm ourselves for battle. For sacrifice despite the enemy’s hate and scorn. Get up, brother, stride composed, we’ll march side by side. With Adolf Hitler, Germany’s most faithful son. Hands to work! Young Germany ventures again! ‘Germany’, our battle cry in hour of need and death. The Führer calls: we all rejoice, ‘Faithful for the sake of faithfulness!’ Before us the day! And God is our fortress!

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With God’s Blessing Pastor Humburg’s ‘Hitler Song’ was a crude mixture of National Socialist slogans and various other influences. The now persecuted socialists had also marched ‘side by side’; the verse ‘Hail to thee, my united German Fatherland’ is reminiscent of the corresponding lines in the patriotic song ‘Heath of the Mark’ (Märkische Heide), and even the Martin Luther hymn ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God’ (Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott) was used.19 The nationally inspired occasional poet, who in August 1933 was promoted to head of the Confessing Church in the Rhineland, sought in particular to reach out to the young faithful in the Protestant young men’s associations. Thus, the song was published as an offprint by the Westbund-CVJM, a German branch of the YMCA, and was also printed in the publications Der Ruf (The Call) and Spielet dem Herrn (Play for the Lord), the official magazine of the League of Protestant Trombone Choirs. To the regret of its composer, whose creation was intended to express his ‘full’ admiration for Adolf Hitler, the song was rarely sung. This was due not so much to Church opposition, but to the melody he chose. Already in May 1933, Nazi-minded pastors explained to their colleague Humburg ‘in the harshest of manners’ that no other lyrics were allowed to be sung to the tune of the Wessel song. A competition was then held to come up with a new melody and at least salvage the song text. Forty compositions were entered, but the winner seems not to have caught on.20 Humburg was not the only prominent clergyman to do a creative variation on the Wessel song. Pastor and ‘trombone general’ Johannes Kuhlo in Bielefeld wrote a four-part setting of the Wessel song in spring 1933 that was distributed by the Bertelsmann publishing house in Gütersloh.21 Kuhlo was enthralled by Hitler even before 1933, expecting him, as many of his fellow clergymen did, to ‘break the godless rule of Black-Red-Gold’. In National Protestant and völkisch circles, Hitler seemed to be the man of action they had sought for more than three decades and whom they hoped would complete the ‘work of Luther and Bismarck’ in an evangelical spirit, true to the slogan: ‘One people, one God, one Reich!’22 The Protestant community in Bielefeld, the birthplace of Horst Wessel, was taken with Nazism in general and especially with the Wessel cult. In the 1930s, the dead Sturmführer was a role model at the hospitals for the mentally ill run by the von Bodelschwingh Institution in Bielefeld-Bethel, fascinating in particular the male deacons of the Westphalian Brotherhood of Nazareth. The young clergymen of the Inner Mission, not a few of whom viewed themselves during the Nazi dictatorship as the ‘SA of Jesus Christ’ or ‘Front Fighters of the Inner Mission’, were especially susceptible to elements of the Wessel cult, proclaiming its ‘missionary work’ in the godless East of

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The Making of a Nazi Hero the metropolis Berlin. An article in the Berliner Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt also saw parallels between church social work and the services of the SA. In its 19 November 1933 edition the Christian weekly pointed out that ‘genuine SA spirit’ could be found in the ‘self-sacrificing service’ of the Inner Mission. The deacons and deaconesses, it went on, were ‘something like an SA’ of the Protestant Church.23 Against the backdrop of a ubiquitous völkisch ideal of masculinity, many deacons now found their occupations effeminate. Wearing a brown SA uniform helped offset this impression, allowing them to present themselves as ‘real all-weather fellows’, agents of a nationally renewed and ‘manly church’.24 A similarly militant rhetoric had prevailed since the second half of 1933 in articles of the Protestant paper Deutsches Diakonen-Blatt. A short poem (originally from the early eighteenth century) reprinted in the April 1934 edition was symptomatic of this trend: Wer will ein Streiter Jesu sein und nicht ein Widerchrist, der stell sich auf dem Kampfplatz ein, wie er berufen ist! Die Kreuzesfahne weht, wohl dem, der bei ihr steht. Drommeten schallen weit und breit: Frisch auf, frisch auf zum Streit!25 He who wants to be a fighter of Jesus and not an antichrist, should turn up at the battleground as he has been called to! The crucifix flag is flying, happy is he who stands by it. Trumpets sound far and wide: Off he goes to battle!

Another contributing factor to the Wessel cult, at least in Bielefeld-Bethel, was the Sterbefrömmigkeit or ‘death-piety’ they cultivated there. This was a core component of religiosity at the von Bodelschwingh Institution, which saw itself as a sanctorum communio, a sacred working and living community of the sick and dying. Even today, writes historian Reinhard Neumann, the ‘myth of the deacon sacrificing himself to the point of his own untimely death for the sake of his patients’ is still one of the legends handed down at Bethel.26 Wessel’s early passing was twisted to fit the scheme of Nazi ‘deathpiety’ and explained as a ‘victorious and blessed death’. It is therefore no

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With God’s Blessing coincidence that it was the von Bodelschwingh Institution that donated the Horst Wessel memorial stone in Bielefeld in 1933.27 The SA also found many supporters in the theological seminary of Bethel. Of the young men living in the student hall of residence there, newly ‘modelled after the comradeship houses [Kameradschaftshäuser]’ and ‘applying the Führer concept’, more than half belonged to the SA in 1934. Their training was more like a military drill than an exercise in academic freedom, at least as far as we can gather from the ‘records of the living fellowship’ found in 1968 on a rubbish heap not far from the dormitory. The daily slogans for the morning flag parade jotted down in these books illustrate how successfully the Nazi worldview had pervaded theological training in Bethel after the party’s seizure of power. On 5 June 1934 the slogan ran ‘The Jew has no honour because he has no homeland.’ On 19 June, less than two weeks before the murder of Röhm during the Night of the Long Knives, his dictum ‘Germany has been won through the deeds of dutiful SA men’ was chosen and, finally, on 8 November 1934 the words of Paul de Lagarde, an anti-Semitic scholar, were used: ‘To be a people means feeling a common hardship.’28 Pastor Wilhelm Brandt, who from 1927 lectured on the New Testament and Inner Mission at the Bethel seminary, was delighted in 1933 about the new ‘spirit of a marching column’ at his college. When Nazi theology students vehemently demanded the expulsion of a nonconforming fellow student, Brandt, who was also an SA reservist and rector of the school, wrote with a threatening undertone to his employer Friedrich von Bodelschwingh that he could not guarantee there would not be ‘a few sudden acts of violence’ at the seminary.29 The Wessel song and its creator were equally popular in the Evangelical Foundation of St John at the gates of Berlin, where about 30 per cent of the deacons were SA members and approval for the regime remained high throughout the 1930s despite the ongoing Kirchenkampf, i.e. the struggle between church and state for control of the Protestant churches in Germany, and the growing ‘deconfessionalization’ of politics. In October 1933, 80 employees of the foundation belonged to the neighbouring SA-Sturm in Spandau. In 1934, deacons were even used to guard inmates at the Emsland concentration camps near Papenburg.30 That the SA later lost importance and prestige among the deacons had partly to do with the latter’s dashed hopes following the initial patriotic exuberance of 1933–34, but also with the increasing polarization of the Kirchenkampf. A general decrease in enthusiasm for the Nazi state and its Volksgemeinschaft cannot be deduced from this, however. Though the Deutsche Christen had lost their position of prominence within the Protestant Churches by 1935, there was still reason

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The Making of a Nazi Hero to believe – as a police report from the same year rightly concluded – that even ‘the Confessing Church movement as such cannot be viewed per se as hostile to the state, and that the majority of its followers are not lacking the honest will to contribute to building the Third Reich.’31 It even happened that the NSDAP would intervene to prevent the all too uncritical worship of Wessel. In October 1937, on Wessel’s 30th birthday, the cornerstone was laid for a Protestant ‘Horst Wessel Church’ in BremenSebaldsbrück. The bishop of the Bremen Deutsche Christen, Weidemann, explained the unusual name by claiming the church had a right to call the pastor’s son Horst Wessel ‘one of their own’. Hitler vetoed the choice of name, arguing that the trade name ‘Horst Wessel’ could not be dragged into an internal church dispute. This issue was important to him as a matter of principle, as the Führer decree ‘On the Naming of Churches after Pioneers of the National Socialist Movement’ indicates. He stated categorically: ‘I therefore request, in particular and out of principle, that church buildings not be named after fighters and heroes of the National Socialist movement who are no longer among the living.’ The Bremen church was consecrated on 27 November 1938 as the ‘Thanksgiving Church’ (Dankeskirche). A commemorative plaque inside confirmed the close alliance between Deutsche Christen and the Nazi state: ‘In thankfulness to God for the miraculous rescue of our people from the depths of Jewish-materialist Bolshevism through the deeds of the Führer, erected in the year 1938.’32

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10

A Hero for German Youth

The curricula in German schools were immediately modified to reflect Nazi criteria after the party came to power on 30 January 1933. This was especially true of German and history lessons, which, ‘in the spirit of National Socialist totality’ and more so than any other subjects, were to ‘help preserve the spiritual substance of the nation in a responsible and guiding way’. Hitler and Wessel now appeared alongside Goethe and Schiller. The attendant loss in literary substance was justified on the part of völkisch German philologists by declaring as a mark of quality the emotional impact of a book or the prominence of its author: ‘Without directly being works of art’, they argued, works that ‘are capable of deeply moving and affecting a pupil through the greatness of their content and the significance of their author’ also deserved to be dealt with in German lessons.1 How this reorientation looked in practice can be seen in the annual report of the Heinrich Schliemann Gymnasium in Berlin for the 1933–34 school year. The school in question was the former Luisenstädtisches Gymnasium Wessel had attended just a few years earlier. The report listed the following classwork topics for sixth-form pupils: ‘National-political values in the film Hitlerjunge Quex’, ‘Ways to Germanness [deutsches Volkstum]’ and ‘How can we prove our love of the Fatherland?’2 This rapid political swing was also evident at the Städtisches Oberlyzeum secondary school for girls in Hanover, where Margarete Wessel’s sister worked as a teacher. In the annual report for 1933–34, the headmaster noted, for example, that his pupils had watched the propaganda films Hitlerjunge Quex and SA-Mann Brand. He also gave speeches on the tenth anniversary of Schlageter’s death on 27 May 1933 and for the ‘consecration’ of a Hitler portrait on 12 August 1933.3 The Nazis, who used the Wessel myth mainly to reach children and young adults, had plaster busts of the young SA man placed inside schools. The dead Sturmführer was the ‘most noble and best companion’ of German youths and

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The Making of a Nazi Hero was to serve as a ‘role model and guiding star’, a teacher at the Köllnisches Gymnasium proclaimed in September 1933.4 Wessel’s sister Ingeborg paid visits to Berlin schools to relate the deeds of her brother. Das neue Buch für Mädels, a very popular read-aloud book that contained some stories she had written herself, praised Horst Wessel as a role model.5 The work, which went through a number of printings, offered a collection of travel reports, historical miniatures and National Socialist heroic legends, but also introduced its readers to racial anthropology (Rassenkunde) and gave practical instructions for bodily hygiene. The first pages were dedicated to exemplary Germans, first and foremost her brother Horst. He was hymnically praised: Horst Wessels Herz ist heiss und treu Horst Wessels Sinn ist stolz und frei Horst Wessel kämpft im braunen Heer Sein Weg ist hart und steil und schwer Und führt durch Qual und bittre Not Und führt zum jähen, frühen Tod Doch furchtlos, voll Begeisterung Geht er den Weg, ein deutscher Jung’ Und hat zuletzt sein jungfrisch Leben Für Deutschlands Freiheit hingegeben Das ist Horst Wessel.6 Horst Wessel’s heart is hot and true Horst Wessel’s mind is proud and free Horst Wessel fights in the Brown Army His path is hard and steep and rough And leads through pain and bitter need And leads to a sudden, untimely death Yet fearless, full of ardour He follows the path of a German lad And finally left his young fresh life For Germany’s liberty This is Horst Wessel.

The Wessel song, like other flag and battle songs, was sung in schools and, of course, in the youth organizations of the NSDAP. In Arnsberg in the Sauerland − and certainly elsewhere as well − the regional government ordered in May 1933 that, starting in their third year of school, pupils should study the Wessel song. At this age, the reasoning went, it was possible to ‘awaken an appropriate

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A Hero for German Youth understanding of the song and life of the poet, [as well as] enthusiasm for his and his fellow combatants’ self-sacrificing love of people and fatherland’. History lessons in secondary schools were to take up the topic again. A deeper approach to the ‘spiritual struggle for national unity and social justice’ had to take into account the ‘mental and spiritual posture of the bearers of this struggle led by the Brown armies and National Socialist defence units’. Thus, once the meanings of contemporary terms such as Red Front, Marxism and Reaction were ‘clarified’ from a Nazi viewpoint, it was necessary ‘at an appropriate moment to deal in detail with the song and life of Horst Wessel and give the children a full understanding of the exemplary unity of the völkisch worldview, the fighting life and the spirit of selfless sacrifice’.7 The journal Pädagogische Warte recommended in 1933 that teachers prepare for instruction by reading, of all things, the Wessel novel of Hanns Heinz Ewers, that ‘stirring fateful book’. It was the best source available, they wrote, but passages needed to be selected carefully. Most of the books about Wessel were not appropriate for pupils, the author of another pedagogical journal, Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde, argued one year later. They delved ‘too deeply into the harsh reality of civil war’, making them only suitable for intermediate grades and up. Few of the written works about Wessel steered clear of ‘difficult domestic-policy issues’, nor were they easy for children to understand in terms of their language and reading level.8 One exception was Das Jugendbuch von Horst Wessel (The Youth Book of Horst Wessel), which had gone through at least 12 printings by 1933. Author Erich Czech-Jochberg, who also had a book for young readers about Adolf Hitler on the market, used child-friendly language to lionize Horst Wessel as a ‘German legend’ of recent history. The book had aggressive overtones: ‘Young people, however, who are not idealists like Horst Wessel was, are loathsome and contemptible!’9 The swastika flag, too, just like the Wessel myth, symbolized core National Socialist values. Allegiance to the flag, if need be unto death, was the theme of countless songs, some of which were explicitly addressed to young people. The refrain of a song written by Baldur von Schirach, widely known as the catchy theme song of the movie Hitler Youth Quex, went as follows: Uns’re Fahne flattert uns voran In die Zukunft ziehn wir Mann für Mann Wir marschieren für Hitler durch Nacht und Not mit der Fahne der Jugend für Freiheit und Brot […] Und die Fahne führt uns in die Ewigkeit Ja die Fahne ist mehr als der Tod.10

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Our flag waves before us We move into the future, man by man We march for Hitler through night and need with the flag of youth for freedom and bread […] And our flag leads us to eternity Yes, our flag is more than death.

Ingeborg Wessel tried to help girls understand the great symbolic meaning of the flag under National Socialism. In her reader, a nameless prototype of a German girl has a conversation with a flag: The honour of the flag is also my honour, the girl answered. […] I suppose I can’t really pledge myself to it by fighting on the battlefield − I don’t have the physical strength for that. But we girls can do this: help the man to grow inside, to find the strength and the inspiration, to find the spiritual mindset that allows him to pledge his life to the flag and its honour without hesitation. I can fight for this even as a girl.11

The specific female form of battle was thus more of the spiritual and emotional type, in line with the traditional bourgeois gender dichotomy that postulated a certain ‘physical culture of women’ as well as ‘female moral purity’. It was the job of girls to play a supportive role, dependent upon the intiative and success of men. Ingeborg Wessel was repeating conventional clichés here. It is doubtful that her readers actually identified with the role she ascribed to them, as numerous books for young people available since the 1920s propagated a more self-determined lifestyle for girls and broadly equitable gender relations.12 At any rate, this is how adolescents were familiarized with the basic tenets of Nazi ideology. The flag had to be defended at all costs, and confessional songs like the Wessel one were to be cultivated and preserved as a sacred treasure of the German people. An essay in a Nazi school newspaper from 1934 ended in this vein, with a fiery appeal to young people: ‘You are the bearers of coming deeds and actions, you have the duty to acquire the heritage of your fathers and own it.’ The treasury of German songs was a legacy of inestimable worth, indeed something sacred, that no one could sin against.13 Since parts of the heritage were only a few years old, zealous Germans of the educated classes tried to lend it a unique and dignified aura. Hence in 1933 the periodical Das humanistische Gymnasium published a Latin translation of the Wessel song.14 Granted, it was no good for singing,

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A Hero for German Youth

The student residence hall on Pfeilgasse 4–6 in the 8th District of Vienna was renamed ‘Horst Wessel Hall’ in 1938

but it was at least good for study purposes: schoolchildren parsed the text with unusual alacrity while at the same time imbibing the attendant ideology. In his annual report for 1935, the new headmaster of the Schliemann Gymnasium informed his superiors that these mobilization efforts for the Nazi movement had actually been successful. By giving preference to the National Socialist repertoire of songs, music lessons had been imbued with a new spirit. Singing the songs together had piqued considerable interest in their unfamiliar contents and established a ‘fine and effective link’ between pupils, parents and school.15 Wessel was supposed to serve as a role model for university students as well. One of his former secondary-school teachers elevated the new national celebrity to the ‘best type of German academic’. Wessel, he claimed, was not only ‘trained as an intellectual and learned in history and literature’, he was also ‘socially ripe for the time and aglow with passionate, national activism’.16 These were some of the last attempts to combine traditional middle-class ideas of education with new National Socialist ones. Those who flaunted their anti-intellectualism and likewise invoked the name of Horst Wessel were little interested in such an approach. Thus, for instance, the theologian and Protestant minister Wolf Meyer-Erlach, well known in

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Bavaria as a radio preacher and the rector of Friedrich Schiller University in Jena from 1935, wrote: Horst Wessel is for all time the archetype of the SA student during the time of struggle [Kampfzeit] who, scorned and derided by the others, misunderstood and fought by their professors, took up the struggle for the German academy. As the comrade-in-arms of peasants and workers, as soldiers of the Führer, they forced open the doors of the university in an onslaught against bookish scholars who were alien to the people [volksfremd], against a student body senile in its youth that was only out to guard the past. Putting their lives on the line, they have cleared the way in higher education for the flow of life that has run through our people for years.17

Comments like these, of course, do not say what the allegedly liberated German academic world should have looked like. Students like Wessel − whose desultory studies, abandoned for good after a few semesters, were reinterpreted by the Nazis as a practical education − could hardly fill a university, let alone build a new state. And yet Hans-Joachim Düning, an ‘activist of the first hour’ in the National Socialist German Students’ League, proclaimed in his book Der SA-Student im Kampf um die Hochschule (The SA Student in the Fight for Higher Education): ‘Will and character […] do not come from reading books and listening to lectures, but are created especially through action.’ The liberal and supposedly unworldly universities of the Weimar period, by contrast, had only ‘produced one-sided intellectuals, witty weaklings, bunglers, strivers and boasters’. Similar thoughts were expressed in the periodical NS-Studentenbriefe in 1934. The National Socialist worldview was ‘no playground for pundits and mental acrobats’. The first thing a National Socialist student must learn is to align and subordinate himself in a hierarchical group founded on ideological reliability and physical fitness. There was no place for ‘educational conceit’. The ‘stay-at-home’ type was completely superfluous.18 A keen observer of the Third Reich like Count Antoni Sobański suspected as early as 1933 that every form of ‘intellectuality’ was construed in the ‘collective subconscious’ of Germans as a sign of being weak-willed. Physical courage and intellectuality were viewed as essentially incompatible.19 Nazi propaganda, then, preferred to describe Wessel as a ‘robust and jolly SA man’ who, despite having been to university, would rather ‘pull a caper’ or two with his men. For a brief period in the mid-1930s a ‘Horst Wessel scholarship’ was even awarded to a handful of socially disadvantaged youths to prepare them for university.20

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A Hero for German Youth The Nazi student regarded himself as a successor to the fraternity member and nationally minded gymnast of the nineteenth century. Ever since the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, propaganda proclaimed, young students had been well acquainted with the notion of Wehrhaftigkeit – the ideal of the valiant and physically fit man, capable of defending himself and bearing arms. Such ideas were propagated not only by the National Socialist German Students’ League (NSDStB), founded in Munich on 8 December 1925; most students’ societies had a similar mindset, as did the umbrella organization of right-wing student groups known as the German University Ring (Deutscher Hochschulring).21 Paramilitary training of the sort that Wessel underwent was declared a central part of student life and education. Regular military sports camps attended from 1930 on by students of the German Student Union taught physical training along with the ‘basics of human community’, i.e. ‘camaraderie and discipline’. During the Second World War it was said that soldiers and students were an ‘indissoluble community’. The ‘German student’ must always be a ‘political fighter for Adolf Hitler and his movement’.22 The ‘Horst Wessel’ old boys’ association in Vienna was also committed to these political aims. It was founded in the autumn of 1938, half a year after the Anschluss of Austria, by the Corps Alemannia (which Wessel had belonged to), Corps Saxonia and Corps Hilaritas. In the preamble to the articles of association of 1942 it pledged to help ‘jointly rebuild German student life and old boys’ associations’ and ‘preserve for new generations of students the lofty inner values’ of the past.23 Students in Vienna were confronted with the cult of Horst Wessel beginning in 1938. The student residence hall on Pfeilgasse in Vienna’s 8th District was now named after the young SA man, whose diligence as a student was by no stretch of the imagination exemplary. Horst-Wessel-Platz in the 10th District (previously and subsequently known as Viktor-Adler-Platz) and HorstWessel-Strasse in the neighbourhood of Rodain (23rd District) also evoked the memory of the dead Sturmführer.24 The renamings were ordered by Gauleiter Josef Bürckel, Reich commissioner for the reunification of Austria with the German Reich. Bürckel decreed on 11 May 1938 that, in particular, the squares and streets named after Social-Democratic politicians of the Austrian Republic should be rededicated to people and events of ‘historic and ethnic-German significance’. ‘We are honour-bound to ensure that the names of the martyrs of our movement are not absent.’25 To be sure, the Austrian Wessel cult was by no means forced upon the Austrians after the Anschluss. The first memorial event was held by the Vienna Hitler Youth at Lembach Hall in early 1931, on the first anniversary of Wessel’s death. In the words of Gauleiter Alfred Frauenfeld, who spoke at the ceremony, Wessel’s death

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The Making of a Nazi Hero had enabled him to fulfil ‘his mission as an apostle of Adolf Hitler’. Just like Goebbels in Berlin, Frauenfeld tended to sanctify Wessel with clear political aims in mind. Everyone had to play their part to help ‘shorten the days of blood sacrifice and pave the way for the Third Reich’.26 When the ‘Greater German Reich’ finally unleashed the Second World War, Nazi propaganda suddenly turned Horst Wessel into a veteran of the Great War, presenting him to young recruits as a ‘volunteer’ and role model. On the tenth anniversary of the Berlin SA leader’s death in February 1940, SA Chief of Staff Viktor Lutze declared that Wessel had fallen as ‘a soldier of the movement and a soldier for Germany’ and ‘even today [was] invisible and ever-present in the heart of every fighter’. Wessel’s spirit, he proclaimed pathetically, was sustaining the German people by ‘kindling the flame inside us’. Poorly put but nonetheless expressive was another remark of Lutze’s: Wessel had become nothing short of ‘the power dispenser […] during these ten years of struggle for inner ascent and outer liberation’.27 That efforts to establish a new tradition were at least partly successful can be seen in a soldier’s song written in 1940 that idealized the war of conquest in the East. The first stanza went as follows: Den Marsch von Horst Wessel begonnen Im braunen Gewand der SA Vollenden die grauen Kolonnen: Die grosse Stunde ist da! Von Finnland bis zum Schwarzen Meer Vorwärts! vorwärts! Vorwärts nach Osten, du stürmend Heer Freiheit das Ziel, Sieg das Panier! Führer befiehl, wir folgen dir!28 The march begun by Horst Wessel In brown SA uniform Is completed by the grey [Wehrmacht] columns: The great hour has arrived! From Finland to the Black Sea March! March! March to the East, you storming army Freedom the aim, victory the motto! Führer, command! We will follow!

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A Hero for German Youth On 24 February 1943 – after the defeat of Stalingrad, when the effectiveness of National Socialist myths was definitively on the decline – the Deutsche Rundschau in Bromberg wrote: When today one nation stands in closed phalanx for the final life-and-death struggle against a common enemy, we can be sure that beside the dead heroes of this war another formation is always marching whose leader is the young singer of freedom and whose slogan we follow with the same unquestioning faith and confidence in victory when ready to transform our will to freedom into action and sacrifice.29

The article talks about ‘waves of Jewish-Bolshevist hatred’ against Wessel, who fell prey to the ‘insidious bullets of Communist subhumans’. As war correspondent Siegfried Mennenöh would have it, Wehrmacht soldiers on the Eastern Front thought of the dead Sturmführer as a fellow soldier treacherously murdered by the Bolshevist foe and whose death was to be the ‘silent signal for a fierce attack’ that would ultimately rout ‘the last bulwarks of the enemy’.30 In general the Horst Wessel cult was strongly anti-Semitic and anti-Soviet during the Second World War. Though this conception of the enemy was already present in the film Hans Westmar back in 1933, it was never a central aspect of the cult before 1939.31 In an appeal to SA men in the Warthegau on the twelfth anniversary of the Nazi icon’s death, the local SA Gruppenführer proclaimed that Wessel had been shot down ‘by the minions of international Jewry, which back then, in the darkest night, was preparing to deal our nation the death blow’. ‘Jewish wire-pullers’, his conspiratorial message went, had sought to annihilate Germany by means of ‘murder and terror’ in order to set up the Soviet star on the ruins of ‘a bygone empire’. But in the ‘battle of light against darkness’ National Socialism had triumphed, and it would triumph this time as well.32 Propaganda Minister Goebbels had already laid the blame on the Jews one year before in the weekly Das Reich, demanding ‘cold and ruthless severity against the corrupter of our people’. The ‘segregation of the Jews from the German national community’, as Goebbels cynically referred to genocide, was characterized by him as a dictate of racial hygiene. The Jews were a ‘parasitic race that has settled like a decaying mould on the cultures of healthy but uninstinctive peoples. There is only one effective remedy: cut it off and discard it.’33 That Horst Wessel could become a patron of both the genocide against European Jewry and the war of extermination against ‘Slavic subhumans’ was due to extreme circumstances and the aggression these gave rise

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The Making of a Nazi Hero to. This aggressiveness is part of any cult around dead (war) heroes, as Peter Berghoff points out. Heroism and victimization – death and killing – are two sides of the same coin: ‘The price of the fantasy of survival [Über-Leben] is paid not only by the sacrificing heroes but also by the victimizing others.’34 But the aggressive propaganda in the name of Horst Wessel gradually lost its plausibility during the course of the war, not least of all because the official hero cult did not correspond to the reality experienced by actual soldiers – anonymous mass death and the prime importance of having good equipment over individual virtues such as bravery and strength.35 The National Socialists held to their notion that fallen German soldiers would continue marching ‘for Führer and nation in the Horst Wessel formation’, as the letters of condolence went that family members received upon the ‘heroic death of their son’. Only in March 1943, in reaction to the capitulation of Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army in Stalingrad, did Goebbels decide that expressions of sympathy should generally avoid mentioning the ‘martyr’ Wessel by name. The clear prospect of impending defeat made references to the Wessel myth seem increasingly inappropriate to the German population.36 The declining popularity of Wessel is also evident in statistics on popular baby names under National Socialism. The first name Horst, which – as in the case of Adolf and Hermann – was an expression of loyalty to the Nazi state for many parents, had come into vogue in the early 1930s with the emergence of the Wessel cult. Two to three per cent of all newborn males in Germany were suddenly named Horst, putting it high up on the list of the most popular male given names. In Berlin, where the name was already comparatively common in the 1920s, it was over four per cent. During the war, however, the name quickly lost favour, going back to the levels of the 1920s.37 Rallies and the laying of wreaths in Wessel’s honour were an ever-rarer occurrence from the early 1940s on. Nothing is known about the effect of radical anti-Bolshevist and anti-Semitic front propaganda in his name. The war produced new ‘heroes’ on a daily basis. Why would anyone care about an SA leader from the 1920s? But the cult of Horst Wessel did not disappear entirely in the 12 years of Nazi dictatorship – if only because the song was still played at official ceremonies throughout the country. It was the anthem of the Third Reich up to the bitter end. On 9 May 1945, one of the few broadcasters of Greater German Radio still in operation, the regional station of Flensburg, announced the Wehrmacht’s surrender in the name of the acting government under Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. German radio then discontinued service after playing the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ one last time.38 No one was marching with ‘firm steady tread’ any more. The ‘Hitler flags on every street’ were hastily taken down and replaced by white bed sheets and tablecloths.

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11

Monuments in Stone and Iron

Nazi Party leaders dedicating the memorial stone to Horst Wessel at the Nicolai Cemetery, 22 January 1933 (f. l. t. r.): Röhm, Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler

The Nazis, following their seizure of power, neither staged an ostentatious cult of the dead in Berlin like the annual ceremonies at the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, nor were they planning to erect a monument for the ‘fallen’ of the ‘time of struggle’. They were content at first with many smaller memorial sites, such as the graves of dead SA men scattered throughout

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The Making of a Nazi Hero the cemeteries of the capital.1 Not until 1936 was a centrally located and representative monument erected: the ‘Monument to the Murdered of the Movement of the Inner City of Berlin’. Near a large parade ground, it was situated directly opposite the former KDP headquarters – a highly symbolic appropriation of a district previously Red to the hilt. Up until that point Nazi symbolism had only penetrated urban space ‘from below’, thus suggesting that their cult of the dead was something entirely normal and natural. The memorial stones and erratic blocks of granite were predominantly plain in design, and stood out from the mass of ‘apolitical’ burial sites thanks to their carved or appliquéd swastikas and other Nazi symbols.2 The Nazis always sought to be close to war memorials and burial places like the Invalids’ Cemetery and the New Garrison Cemetery in the Neukölln district of Berlin, where street fighters of the SA and Hitler Youth were interred in the manner of the fallen of the First World War. Until the mid-1930s, the dead of the SA were turned into patriotic heroes. The Nazis relied on the integrative function of this cult of the dead and avoided polarizing a still rather heterogeneous Berlin populace by setting up a provocative SA monument. Only after three years in power, when Nazi rule had been sufficiently consolidated, did they set up their ‘Monument to the Murdered of the Movement’ and an even considerably larger SA monument, 20 metres high, in the Prussian provincial town of Magdeburg. The Horst Wessel memorials up to this point, though perhaps more numerous and slightly larger than most other memorial sites, were nonetheless typical of the manner in which the Nazis exploited their dead in the capital. The most important one was Wessel’s grave at Nicolai Cemetery, where he was buried on 1 March 1930 and which became the site of regular commemorative events. The grave was done up in representative fashion. On Sunday 22 January 1933, one week before Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, the Führer joined Goebbels, SA Chief of Staff Röhm, SA-Gruppenführer Count von Helldorf, and General Franz Ritter von Epp in dedicating a memorial stone designed by sculptor Martin Meyer-Pyritz at the graves of Horst, Werner and Ludwig Wessel at the cemetery. The granite cube with sides measuring 80 centimetres bore the inscriptions ‘Germany, dear Fatherland. A light has been extinguished that burned for you’ as well as ‘Raise the flag!’. On the stone was a bronze laurel wreath, topped by a flag, likewise cast in bronze, which was draped over the edge of the gravestone.3 The iconography of the war memorial was blended with the symbols of Nazism while also making

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Monuments in Stone and Iron reference to Wessel’s well-known song. Fascist ideology was unmistakably present: on the solid foundation of German manliness (more precisely, the ‘fallen’ male members of the Wessel family, symbolized by the block of granite) some win a conqueror’s crown in battle, which only acquires its true value through the Nazi flag. Margarete and Ingeborg Wessel stood in the front row, accompanied by the pastors of the Nicolai parish. Corps students were also in attendance, as can be seen in contemporary photos. The dedication ceremony – allegedly at the invitation of Margarete Wessel – was originally supposed to take place on 23 November 1932, but was postponed at the last minute for fear of riots.4 The ceremonial unveiling of the tombstone in January 1933 was used by the NSDAP to put on a display of their political strength. The entire Berlin SA, SS and Hitler Youth were expected to proceed to the cemetery in a ‘disciplined march’ from their various boroughs throughout the city. On the last stretch, the Nazi foot soldiers, allegedly 20,000 strong, passed by the Karl Liebknecht House and through the adjoining Weydingerstrasse, where Karl Ernst, Count von Helldorf and Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, reviewed the troops. Most of the demonstrators stayed outside the cemetery, as an admission ticket was needed to enter. The event was closely guarded by the Prussian police, who had even placed marksmen on the surrounding rooftops. Communist counter-demonstrations, still loud and strident three years earlier, had been relegated to the outer districts of the city thanks to a partial ban on protests. The Nazis spoke of victory, one not only spiritual in nature but also having an ‘exceptionally practical, political import’. They viewed their march as a last warning to their political foe, whom they went so far as to threaten outright: ‘The eradication of Bolshevist guerrilla warfare will only really begin when the National Socialists are at the helm.’5 The future dictator was the main speaker at the Nicolai Cemetery. Wessel’s death, Hitler proclaimed, showed the ‘National Socialist truth that the sacrifice of one stands as a symbol for the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands in the movement’. By making the ‘supreme sacrifice’, Horst Wessel set a monument to himself that was more long-lasting than stone or bronze. ‘In centuries to come, when perhaps not a stone will be left standing in this giant city, the German liberation movement of the National Socialists and the memory of its bard will remain unforgotten in the minds of the people.’6 Other speakers followed Hitler, including Hanns Heinz Ewers. The latter sang the praises of Wessel on behalf of the student fraternities Corps Normannia and Corps Alemannia, though Wessel certainly deserved to be

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The Making of a Nazi Hero praised in the name of all German students, he said.7 In the evening the Nazis gathered for a commemorative ceremony in the Sportpalast. Hitler spoke again, proclaiming the same message as in the afternoon, that the ‘sacrifice’ of the martyred Nazis was ‘the duty of our own struggle’. After the rally, Hitler and his ministerial candidates in the NSDAP, Hermann Göring, Wilhelm Frick and Joachim von Ribbentrop, met in von Ribbentrop’s villa to negotiate the final details of the impending change of government with Franz von Papen, State Secretary Otto Meissner and Oskar von Hindenburg, son of the Reich president.8 The Protestant Church also honoured Wessel at the ceremony. The archdeacon of the Nicolai congregation, Pastor Vehse, gave a sermon at the cemetery on the Bible verse ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’.9 The consecration of the gravestone for Horst and Werner Wessel was then conducted by his colleague Hans Schwebel, pastor at the church since 1923. Goebbels’s commentary went as follows: ‘Dreadful. A world away from us.’10 This was remarkable given that Schwebel himself was a convinced Nazi. He had already caused a commotion on 11 August 1929 – Constitution Day in the Weimar Republic – by preaching on the verse ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’. One listener complained in writing to the consistory of the Prussian Union of Protestant Churches that Schwebel’s statements were ‘so full of resistance to and mistrust of our present-day political constitution that a republican can hardly listen to the sermon without protest’.11 No disciplinary action was taken by church leaders, however. The complaints lodged against the pastor by the deputy headmaster of the Heinrich Schliemann Gymnasium likewise amounted to nothing. On 28 January 1933, just a few days after his speech at the Nicolai Cemetery, the pastor gave a talk at the school on the topic of ‘The German Folk Song’. The evening was organized by the diaconate association of the Gethsemane parish, whose church choir sang at the event. Schwebel used the event to propagandize on behalf of the Nazis. According to the letter of complaint, he spoke at length about the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, about its creator, and the consecration of the memorial stone at the cemetery. The pastor pointed out with particular pleasure that Hitler had used the opportunity to ‘hold a kind of review of the parading troops’ there. The written complaint noted that while his comments had met with approval, vociferous protests were heard as well. A few weeks later, Schwebel and the deputy headmaster had a talk together, arranged by the superintendent Zimmermann. The latter afterwards spoke of a ‘misunderstanding’, and with that the ‘incident’ was settled.12

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Monuments in Stone and Iron In addition to the grave at the Nicolai Cemetery, at least five other memorial sites for Horst Wessel were set up in Berlin between 1933 and 1939. On 9 October 1933, the party declared the room where Wessel died at Friedrichshain Hospital to be a memorial, and took this opportunity to name the hospital after the martyr. The municipal district of Friedrichshain had already been renamed ‘Horst Wessel City’ on 28 September, and later became the Horst Wessel administrative district.13 Prominent Nazis took part in a torchlight procession held by the party as part of a dedication ceremony for the room where he died, which was furnished with an SA flag, a portrait of Hitler and a bronze bust of Wessel. A rendition of the Wessel song performed by a shawm band was followed by a speech from the propaganda minister. Goebbels evoked with great emotion the years of struggle against the Republic. They had formed a ‘sworn society’ back then, whose values were worth recollecting, he said. Since the National Socialists had taken power, it was unfortunately ‘cheap and easy’ to stand behind Horst Wessel. Passages like these were intended for the increasingly dissatisfied ‘Old Fighters’ (alte Kämpfer), who had to compete within the party with new and often better-trained members. Goebbels also used the occasion to promote himself. Twisting the facts, and with his characteristic megalomania, he styled himself as a key figure in Wessel’s final days in the hospital: Not once but a dozen times did I myself sit in this room and witness the death throes of our young comrade. I was the one who heard him utter his concern for the movement and the future of our people. I was the one who tried to ease his death by pointing out the greatness of our work that was yet to be done.

Goebbels’s cynicism culminated in the sentence: ‘This movement, too, has consumed human beings – it had to in order to reach its objectives.’14 Four months later, on 14 January 1934, a commemorative plaque for Horst and his brother Werner was unveiled at Jüdenstrasse 51/52, where Wessel had lived with his family until the summer of 1929. Mayor Lachs, on behalf of the city of Berlin, thanked the Nicolai Church, represented by Pastor Vehse, for its ‘promotional support’.15 The ceremonial address was held by the state commissioner, Julius Lippert, who in the 1920s had been an editor of the Nazi newspapers Deutsches Tageblatt and Der Angriff, was convicted in 1927 of violating the Law for the Protection of the Republic (Republikschutzgesetz) and had served as chairman of the NSDAP faction of the Berlin City Council since 1930. He recalled Wessel’s burial in March

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 1930, where they had ‘felt deep down for the very first time’ that National Socialism had become an ‘ineradicable popular movement’. Horst Wessel was a ‘shining Siegfried of National Socialism’, a ‘bearer and pillar of the National Socialist idea’.16 Those gathered sang the Wessel song to the unveiling of the inscription ‘In this house, Horst and Werner Wessel became fighters for Germany’s honour and freedom.’ The commander of SA-Standarte VI, Willi Markus, a ‘former comrade-in-arms of Horst Wessel’, then took ‘faithful charge’ of the memorial plaque. The usual suspects were present as guests of honour: Margarete and Ingeborg Wessel, representatives of Normannia and Alemannia, delegations from the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm, as well as the writer Ewers.17 The year 1934 also marked the beginning of the systematic redevelopment of the area around the Volksbühne theatre, following a number of symbolic renamings during the previous year. The party headquarters of the KPD, the Karl Liebknecht House, was called the Horst Wessel House as of 8 March 1933, when SA men stormed the building and hoisted a swastika flag. Its interior would soon be adorned by the mural ‘Marching SA’, the work of painter Ludwig Dettmann.18 On 28 August 1933, Bürohaus Vulkan GmbH, the real-estate management company of the KPD and owner of the

Sculptor Paul Gruson with a larger-than-life Wessel bust for the planned but never completed Wessel monument across from the Berlin Volksbühne, presumably 1935

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Monuments in Stone and Iron property, was expropriated and nationalized by the Prussian state without compensation, in order ‘to defend against expected Communist intrigues in the future’.19 Bülowplatz, in front of the theatre, was officially renamed Horst-WesselPlatz on 26 May 1933.20 On 29 November 1936, a monument for the ‘Six Murdered of the Movement of the Inner City’ was unveiled on the eastern side of the square. Atop a six-metre-high column made of light-coloured Silesian granite with the words of Wessel emblazoned on it – ‘They march with us in spirit in our ranks’ – soared a five-ton bronze eagle with a wingspan of seven metres. Outwardly, with its mourning wreath carved in stone and the eagle, Germany’s national emblem, the monument resembled the countless war memorials scattered throughout the country since the early 1920s. The new monument was flanked by two memorial groves. One was dedicated to the policemen Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenk, killed in 1931 by Communists Erich Mielke and Erich Ziemer, the other to the Hitler Youth. Plans to erect an elevated Horst Wessel memorial opposite the theatre with an SA guard of honour posted in front of it were never carried out. The design of Berlin sculptor Paul Gruson, the winner of the competition held by the Berlin City Council in 1934, had envisioned a flag-bearing Wessel standing straddle-legged atop an eight-metre column.21 At the opening ceremony in 1936, State Commissioner Lippert referred to it as a newly created ‘gem’ in the Scheunenviertel. The former ‘slums’ around the square had been replaced by hundreds of ‘beautiful, healthy and airy flats’ thanks to the joint efforts of the city, party and private individuals. Lippert made no mention of the fact that the area’s refurbishment had already begun in the early twentieth century and that the houses around the Volksbühne were largely erected in the Weimar Republic according to the plans of architect Hans Poelzig, nor did he mention the forced relocation of many local residents carried out for political reasons.22 He interpreted the construction work as a symbolic National Socialist development project. Future generations should be reminded ‘that only clear objectives and a unified will in implementing set targets can accomplish great things’.23 The Nazification of the area was completed on 19 February 1937 when Weydingerstrasse, leading from Wessel-Platz to Nicolai Cemetery, was renamed Horst-Wessel-Strasse.24 Many residents, however, showed little sympathy for the area’s redevelopment in a National Socialist vein. The local NSDAP-Ortsgruppe complained in 1937 that the parks around Horst-WesselPlatz were shamelessly befouled with the food remains left by ‘Jews, Gypsies and members of the underworld’, and furious Nazi local residents wrote

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The Making of a Nazi Hero to the city mayor: ‘The memorial groves have been turned into veritable football fields, where giant howling hordes battle it out on a daily basis. […] Not even the monument to our fallen comrade is spared; not only do they sully it, the children even climb on top of it.’25 Another Wessel cult site in Berlin was his room at Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62, where the murdered SA-Sturmführer had lived for a little less than three months before being attacked on 14 January 1930. We Journey Through National Socialist Berlin, a travel guide on the ‘memorial sites of the battle for the Reich capital’ published in 1937, said that the attic room, ‘more or less restored to its original state’, could be visited at any time. The room, it continued, was ‘cared for by a woman who lived there in Horst Wessel’s lifetime and stood by him supportively, especially in the weeks leading up to the attack’.26 There is no evidence of whether such a woman really existed and who it might have been. It could neither have been Elisabeth Salm, his former landlady, nor Erna Jaenichen, Wessel’s girlfriend at the time. Frau Salm was in ‘protective custody’ until mid-November 1937. She lived in Mainz after her release, Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the German police, having banned her from residing in the capital.27 Erna Jaenichen had meanwhile married, changing not only her name but also her place of residence. Finally, the Luisenstädtisches Gymnasium, where Wessel had taken his school-leaving exams, received a new name as well. From 1939 on, the school became the Horst-Wessel-Gymnasium, having been previously named after Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, since 1928. Already on 24 February 1934, a ‘commemoration ceremony’ had taken place there on the fourth anniversary of Wessel’s death. A memorial plaque for the former pupil was unveiled in the presence of Berlin SA commander Karl Ernst. The plaque read: ‘Horst Wessel attended this school from 1923 until his leavingexamination in 1926. In memory of the dead hero, a reminder to us all.’28 Monuments, statues and memorial stones commemorating the new national saint were also erected outside of Berlin, beginning in 1933. In some cases adherents of National Socialism had taken appropriate steps in advance. In the administrative district of Kassel, a local group of the NSDAP had unceremoniously set up a Horst Wessel memorial stone on a public street without the permission of the authorities. The district president, Ferdinand Friedensburg, a member of the liberal DDP and a passionate democrat, was not going to stand for this. In November 1932, he made enquiries with the Berlin chief of police to see if the latter had ‘any personal details about this Nazi Horst Wessel murdered by Communists’. He was told that Wessel was a ‘person of no good repute’.29

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Monuments in Stone and Iron

Dedication of the Horst Wessel memorial stone in Bielefeld, 8 October 1933

A Horst Wessel monument, or at least a Horst-Wessel-Strasse, was soon a fixture in many German towns.30 The majority of stone memorials were massive structures, demanding loyalty to the National Socialist worldview as well as ‘battle readiness’. Particularly impressive was the Horst Wessel monument on Kaiserstrasse in Mainz, which was dedicated, after some delay, on 9 November 1939 and, along with a number of other structures in the city, was to help ‘make Mainz more beautiful, elegant and modern’.31 It consisted of a six-metre-high block of porphyry with an image of the SA leader and two large bas-reliefs on the sides, ‘Colour March’ and ‘Oath of Loyalty’. This was capped by a copper basin with an ‘eternal flame’ burning inside. Contemporary photos show seven flagpoles in the background for displaying the swastika flag.32 The erection of monuments was by no means merely the purview of higher authorities. Many local initiatives made zealous contributions to the glorification of Wessel. This was the case in Elgersburg, where a Horst Wessel memorial was dedicated on 16 September 1934. The ceremony was preceded by a drumhead service and a service of remembrance for the fallen. The guests of honour, apart from local party grandees, included Margarete Wessel and a delegation of the Horst Wessel SA-Sturm from Berlin.33 It was claimed that ‘men from all walks of life’ had, ‘for the sheer pleasure of it’, volunteered 1,700 hours of work (other sources mention upwards of 4,500) to see the

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The Making of a Nazi Hero monument put in place. Schoolteacher Otto Gimm, a driving force behind the project in Elgersburg, described the erection of the Horst Wessel stone as a model experience of national community. At the same time it was a ‘work of atonement to vindicate the good old name of our spa town’, where the youth coach Wessel had gone unnoticed in 1928. The approximately eight-ton granite boulder with a swastika chiselled into it and a bronze plaque bearing the name of the dead hero was dragged to Totenstein im Körnbachtal, not far outside of town. The place was said to be Wessel’s favourite spot in Elgersburg. Very close by, at the entrance to the Körnbachtal gorge, another plaque commemorated the privy councillor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The lines of verse the latter allegedly composed here, preserved in the guestbook of a former mill and dated 28 August 1831, sounded quite contemporary in the Third Reich: Lange hab ich mich gesträubt Endlich gab ich nach Wenn der alte Mensch zerstäubt Wird der neue wach.34 Long have I resisted Finally I yielded When the old person disintegrates The new one awakens.

Wessel’s native Bielefeld, back then a medium-sized town with around 120,000 inhabitants, also commemorated its ‘lost son’. True, Wessel had left his place of birth when he was just over a year old, but in September 1926, after a sojourn there of just a few days, he had written a few sentimental, hackneyed lines about it (which local propaganda never tired of mentioning): Mein Weg geht weiter in die Welt Wer weiss, wann je ich wiederkehr’ Behüt’ dich Gott, mein Bielefeld Mein Herz lässt von dir nimmermehr.35 My path continues into the world Who knows when I’ll ever return God be with you, my Bielefeld My heart shall never leave you.

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Monuments in Stone and Iron A local branch of the NSDAP had existed in Bielefeld since 1925, but the party had a hard time at first gaining a foothold there, ‘an old bastion of the SPD’, as the Bielefeld National Socialists wrote apologetically in letters to the Gauleiter of Westphalia. In the area between Hamm in Westphalia and Stadthagen, there were a mere 100 SA men at the time.36 The Nazi Max Hiemisch admitted in 1933 that they were ridiculed at the beginning as the ‘party of the dumb young shavers’. This was even more depressing than the blows ‘we were not spared’.37 Only in the early 1930s did the situation change, when on 30 January 1933 the party suddenly became very popular, even in Bielefeld. In the spring of 1933 the Bielefeld innkeeper Hugo Möller proposed setting up a Horst Wessel memorial stone high up in the Teutoburg Forest, about 20 kilometres away from the Arminius monument (Hermannsdenkmal) dedicated in 1875 in the presence of Kaiser Wilhelm I. This statue of the larger-than-life chieftain of the Germanic Cherusci tribe who defeated the Roman legions under Publius Quinctilius Varus in AD 9 had rapidly developed into a national tourist attraction. The city of Bielefeld had no comparable monument, but Möller had two restaurants at the edge of the forest. Together with a few companions and by way of the Bielefeld Ortsgruppe of the NSDAP, Möller petitioned the municipal authorities, requesting that the city provide a piece of property for the erection of a Horst Wessel memorial stone in the Teutoburg Forest. The request was granted. In May 1933, local citizens were called upon to collect donations for the proposed monument.38 A large block of sandstone, supposedly weighing 20 tons, was set up on a hilltop not far from Möller’s inn. According to an announcement in the paper, it was donated by the von Bodelschwingh Institution in Bethel.39 The main block of stone, five metres high and surrounded by smaller blocks, rested on a pedestal with the inscription ‘Horst Wessel, born in Bielefeld’ carved into it, along with a swastika. The entire structure was meant to resemble a ‘thingstead’ (Thingstätte), the meeting-place of a Germanic assembly. The local press was enthusiastic. The chosen site was an elevation rising up ‘in the hilly landscape amidst richly interwoven Germanic history’. The monument, a ‘great, symbolic venture’, radiated by dint of its plainness a ‘strong and vibrant purpose accessible to the simplest soul’.40 Postcards from the late 1930s suggest that the site had indeed become a tourist attraction. Older residents of Bielefeld could still remember in the early 1990s how as members of the Hitler Youth they kept ‘guard’ at the Wessel stone on important holidays.41 The dedication ceremony took place just before Wessel’s 26th birthday, on Sunday 8 October 1933, the ‘Day of National Song’. It began at

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The Making of a Nazi Hero seven o’clock in the morning. At ten o’clock a commemorative plaque was unveiled at Kaiserstrasse 37, the house where Wessel was born. The highlight was in the afternoon with the dedication of the memorial stone by Alfred Meyer, Gauleiter of Westphalia, and the christening of ‘Horst Wessel Hill’. Wessel’s mother and sister were present here, too, along with the local party leadership and about 120 disabled veterans from the First World War. Propaganda Minister Goebbels did not attend, and the Völkischer Beobachter paid scant attention to the event.42 Those wishing to take part in the ceremony had to buy an ‘artfully crafted ceremonial badge’, the so-called Horst Wessel medal, for the price of 25 pfennigs. In the middle it displayed a ‘sun sign’, a ‘radiant, rising swastika’.43 An estimated 15,000 people participated in the markedly religious ceremony – the party press even talked about a ‘march of the 50,000’, an allusion to Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922. The motor aeroplane ‘City of Bielefeld’ circled over the hill, a symbol of the happy symbiosis between tradition and modernity, between town and party. The municipal theatre celebrated the event in the evening with the world premiere of the ‘blood and soil’ drama Katte by Hermann Klasing. A giant swastika made of white and red roses adorned the stage.44 Just a few months before the German invasion of Poland, another Horst Wessel monument was unveiled in the city centre of Bielefeld. The dedication ceremony was one of the highlights of a tour of Westphalia made by ‘Old Guard’ Nazis. The group, made up of early party members and other veteran National Socialists, visited the city on 14 June 1939, being cheered by the locals in a street parade before the Wessel tribute in the afternoon.45 The two-and-a-half-metre monument, designed by Berlin sculptor Ernst Paul Hinckeldey, displayed a young man with neatly parted hair and an SA uniform standing upright on a pedestal. One hand on his belt buckle, his left leg extended forward, and staring resolutely ahead – this was Horst Wessel, larger than life, vigorously marching westward. Another cast of the monument was erected in 1940 in the Dr Goebbels Homestead, a newly built housing complex in Berlin-Friedrichshain.46 The plans to erect a Horst Wessel monument on the Süntel, a massif in the Weser Uplands not far from the town of Hamelin, dated back to 1933. As in Bielefeld, regional pride and concrete business interests each played a part here. The region Horst Wessel’s parents hailed from tried to brand itself a Nazi heartland after the transition of political power. Anti-Semitic boycotts met with general approval here, and already in 1935 there were blatant death threats against the local Jewish population.47 Its only Nazi points of interest were the ‘Reich Harvest Thanksgiving

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Monuments in Stone and Iron Festival’ on the Bückeberg ridge and the family history of party hero Horst Wessel. Wessel, or so one could read in a 1934 local history (Heimatbuch) about the Hamelin-Pyrmont district, was a ‘genuine son of the soil of Lower Saxony’. While visiting with his parents, and later on holiday with his siblings, he spent several carefree weeks each year with his grandparents in Aerzen and his great aunt in Hemeringen. They played cops and robbers, went fishing, or thought up pranks together. ‘It was only natural,’ the book said, ‘that in all of these “undertakings” Horst was the leader.’ The region’s Wessel cult was markedly local in character, with an understanding of Nazism and an image of the young Nazi hero that probably would have made Wessel laugh. According to the aforementioned local history, ‘It was here in the golden freedom of nature, here in the peasant villages that the roots of National Socialism and its attendant return to the good old ways and naturalness, in particular, were planted in the enthusiastic young heart of the bard of the National Socialist freedom song.’48 Though Wessel may have spent his final years roaming the dark streets of distant Berlin, his character – on this the people of the Weser Uplands agreed – had been formed in the idyllic surroundings of southern Lower Saxony. In 1933, the respected genealogist Werner Konstantin von Arnswaldt, archivist at the Fischbeck Abbey and a card-carrying member of the NSDAP since 1930, wrote in Heimatblätter, a local-heritage supplement of the Schaumburger Zeitung, that the young Horst Wessel’s vitality was rooted in the ‘peasant stock of Schaumburg County’. He derived his ‘depth of spirit’, his courage and his physical strength from the native soil ‘fertilized by the sweat of his forebears’, the ‘soil of the old ancestral homeland’.49 Regional propaganda declared the death of Wessel to be a sacrifice bearing witness to the firm and selfless commitment of all the people of Lower Saxony. The ‘political struggle of the National Socialist movement’ had shown – at least according to a brochure on the representative assembly of the Gau of South Hanover-Braunschweig, which met in Hildesheim in 1936 – ‘that, once convinced of its necessity, the native of Lower Saxony committed himself unconditionally and was willing to make blood sacrifices’.50 Just a few years before, Alfred Rosenberg, the party’s chief ideologue, had emphasized the historical mission of the tribe of Lower Saxony. It was the ‘settlement policy of the Lower Saxons’, he claimed, that had guaranteed the unity of the Reich since the days of Henry the Lion, back in the twelfth century: ‘With sword and plough the Westphalians and Lower Saxons staked out territory in the East.’ Under Hitler’s leadership these ethnic groups had every reason to look ahead with

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Dedication of the Wessel statue by the sculptor Ernst Paul Hinckeldey in Bielefeld, 14 June 1939

Monuments in Stone and Iron pride and optimism: ‘Lower Saxony’s salvation and mission is Germany’s deliverance.’51 The municipal council of the city of Hamelin made Margarete Wessel an honorary citizen on 1 August 1933.52 Just four months earlier, on 20 April 1933, this honour was bestowed on Reich President Paul von Hindenburg and the new Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, as ‘a singular expression of national-mindedness’.53 Margarete Wessel thanked the city for the distinction conferred upon her and for the fact that her native town, of all places, had remained faithful to her son Horst and thus to her as well. The planned construction of a Wessel monument in the Süntel massif was for her a ‘great and sacred pleasure’.54 It would be three and a half years, however, before the city mayor actually handed over the certificate of honorary citizenship to Margarete Wessel in Berlin.55 By that time the intended recipient no longer deigned to accept the honour in person, so she sent her daughter Ingeborg instead, who on 25 March 1937 took the document into safe keeping.56 The honour remained unchallenged after 1945. Only in the 1970s did a discussion ensue about the city’s relationship to its honorary citizens who had since fallen out of favour. In 1979, after a good deal of squabbling, the municipal council of Hamelin reached a decision that would put an end to the quarrel. Instead of reaching a formal resolution to strip them of the honours bestowed on them in 1933, the aldermen agreed on a declaration stating that ‘neither legally nor politically’ were the mother of Wessel and the former Reich Chancellor honorary citizens of the town. Honorary citizenship had formally expired with the death of the laureates. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) faction on the council absented itself from the vote.57 The overwhelmingly positive response in the region to the Nazis’ seizure of power was reflected in the way the locals pushed ahead with the erection of the Wessel monument in the Süntel massif. The plans for its construction, which the project’s initiators hoped would bring them national recognition, were in themselves monumental. Newspaper reports speculated about costs of one million reichsmarks, to be raised mostly from donations. The Reich Labour Service would be called in on a large scale to help erect the monument, the reports continued.58 Klaus Mann remarked sarcastically: The people have to donate, the worker has to build voluntarily: the heroic lad, monumentally magnified, mawkishly idealized, is being hewn in stone. There is no monument like this for Beethoven or Goethe – not even Hitler has one that cost a million marks. Along with Cologne Cathedral, the Reichstag

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The Making of a Nazi Hero that burned and ‘Haus Vaterland’ [a pleasure palace on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin], the Wessel monument in Lower Saxony will be one of the sights to see in Germany.59

The district president of Hanover, on the other hand, was expecting overall costs to be a ‘mere’ 200,000 reichsmarks. A provisional budget from the first planning phase would seem to confirm newspaper reports, as the Reich Labour Service, according to its own estimates, was expecting to foot the lion’s share of costs with 120,000 reichsmarks.60 The site selected was a mountain slope just below the ‘Hohe Egge’, at over 400 metres the highest point on the Süntel ridge. The first design, by Hamelin architect and SS-Sturmführer Fritz Röpe, included a large open-air stage blasted into the mountainside and with a massive slab of stone serving as an overhang. The stone was to form the basis of a steeply rising Horst Wessel tower with a swastika-shaped ground plan.61 The plans in Hamelin met with considerable resistance from the start, and this from two different quarters: the district president of the Prussian province of Hanover, as well as a neighbouring town. The district president pointed out in a letter to his superiors in December 1933 that the Süntel ‘is one of the few remaining tranquil and wonderfully unspoilt wooded mountain landscapes in Germany’. The provincial curator of Hanover expressed his concerns as well. The many monuments to the fallen of the Great War, ‘with few exceptions rather unpleasant and sometimes a downright nuisance’, showed that extreme caution had to be exercised in building new monuments, he said. Instead of a colossal monument, it would be better to have a ‘work of simple and noble form’, ‘big in content and not in its external measurements’.62 In the nearby small town of Hessisch-Oldendorf they were unhappy for other reasons about the efforts in Hamelin to erect a monument to Wessel. ‘Horst Wessel Relatives Take the Floor’, ran the headline of the July 1933 edition of the Heimatblätter, opening the attack on the neighbouring district’s plans. If they wanted to build a monument, the argument went, it would have to be by Hessisch-Oldendorf, in the Gau of North Westphalia, because, after all, it was here that the Wessel family had its roots. The proponents of building it on the Süntel ridge were accused of profiteering. The plan, the paper continued, was largely the brainchild of a Nazi innkeeper who happened to own the quarry that provided the land for building the monument. ‘Expressing one’s thankfulness in such a way would be disgraceful to a Nazi-thinking hero such as Wessel!’ the enraged (and unnamed) author of the article in the Heimatblätter wrote. Of course, the bottom line was that

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Monuments in Stone and Iron Hessisch-Oldendorf should also profit financially from the Wessel cult. The whole thing was a provincial farce, considering that Hamelin and HessischOldendorf are a mere 12 kilometres apart.63 Despite such petty rivalries, the proponents of the Süntel monument pressed ahead with their plans. The necessary funds, the town councillors of Hamelin decided, would be raised in part by selling ‘Horst Wessel postcards’.64 By the winter of 1933, the authorities in Hanover remarked, the local efforts to erect the monument were so strong that any attempt to block it would invariably end up ‘causing a disappointment to the local population at large’.65 Though authorities in Hanover did manage to delay construction, there was no way of preventing it. The district of Hamelin-Pyrmont, where the first initiatives had originated back in the spring of 1933, mobilized some prominent backers, including the Hanover-born Reich Minister of Science, Education and Culture Bernhard Rust, as well as SA Chief of Staff Viktor Lutze. Albert Speer and Wessel’s mother personally inspected the designated site. It is said that Hitler, too, had given his general permission to erect the monument on the Süntel ridge.66 The first design, from 1933, never materialized. The reasons it was rejected are unclear. Presumably the design of a local party comrade did not fit the bill for a national monument. In the spring of 1935, at any rate, the recently formed monument committee launched a competition with a purse of 6,000 reichsmarks. The aim of the project, as formulated in the competition, was to ‘erect an enduring monument’ to the poet of freedom, Wessel, ‘by blood a Lower Saxon’. Seven architects and just as many sculptors were invited to participate. The jury included Hitler’s pet architect and later Minister of Armaments Albert Speer. His inclusion in the process, so the official version went, was to ensure that the planned monument harmonized with the grounds of the Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Bückeberg ridge located just 15 miles to the south.67 Between 1933 and 1937, about a million people gathered there annually to take part in one of the biggest Nazi festivals. Officially the festival was to honour German farmers – in the language of the new regime, the Reichsnährstand, or ‘Reich food estate’ – for their services to the national community. The Nazis used the Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival to put on a display of solidarity between Adolf Hitler and the German people. As of 1935 the Wehrmacht, too, used the Bückeberg to put on mock battles with up to 10,000 soldiers.68 Preparations for world war were already underway. Little is known about how plans for the Wessel monument developed after the mid-1930s. The relevant files of the governor of the province of Hanover contain no further documents pertaining to the project. A possible

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The Making of a Nazi Hero explanation for this blank spot is provided by a note in the Weser Uplands travel guide published by Grieben-Verlag in Berlin in 1939. According to this source, the plans for the monument were kept in a specially created Horst Wessel archive by the local administration of Hamelin. The archive supposedly even contained a collection of ‘all the memorabilia […] that linked Horst Wessel to Lower Saxony, furthermore everything written on Horst Wessel, personal recollections, photos, etc.’69 There are no indications of what happened to this collection after 1945. The establishment of the archive could be the reason the governor’s files contain no further information. A more likely explanation, though, is that the affair was already settled in Hanover. The monument was erected in 1936 by the district of Hamelin-Pyrmont, on its own initiative, because – as even the greatest proponents of the project had to concede – despite having granted his general approval for the plan, Adolf Hitler thought ‘the time [is] not yet ripe for a national monument in view of more urgent political tasks.’ The local press obscured the Führer’s rejection and simply reported that the architects’ competition did not achieve its purpose.70 The project, carried out between 1937 and 1938, was modest in scale compared to earlier plans. On a massive base made of fieldstone, and bearing the inscription ‘Horst Wessel’, rose an 18-metre tower with an enormous metal swastika enthroned at the top. The swastika had a diameter of five metres and supposedly weighed 1.2 metric tons. This simple monument succinctly symbolized the Wessel myth: by his ‘sacrifice’ Wessel had laid the foundation on which the National Socialist movement was built and would ultimately rise triumphantly above all other political movements. A gushing report in the Deister- und Weserzeitung drew attention to the site, which Hitler himself had approved for the national monument yet to be built: It towers up from a dark pine grove, with a view of the wide Weser landscape, down to the place where Horst Wessel, the young martyr of the National Socialist movement, once spent his happy carefree youth, where his grandfather ran the old ancestral farm, and where father and mother were at home and imbued the young Horst with the fighting spirit that is the motor of all action.71

Just a few months after the monument’s dedication on 26 February 1939, the Second World War broke out. Plans to expand the monument were thus rendered obsolete, but even so the Wessel monument became a popular destination for locals in the years that followed. Even without climbing the tower, there was no escaping the Nazi symbol: the metal swastika cross on

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Monuments in Stone and Iron the hilltop could be easily seen from the surrounding villages, glowing in the evening sun. The Wessel monument was blown up in 1945 on orders of the occupying powers, the swastika turned into scrap metal. Some remains have survived into the present: three large, moss-covered blocks of stone from the tower are visible on the forest floor. There is no plaque to provide information about the site’s history. The Horst Wessel cult in Bielefeld was discarded without a trace, the Wessel monument in the city centre being melted down by the Nazi regime in the final days of the war. The Horst Wessel stone in the Teutoburg Forest was removed as well, disappearing by 1946 at the latest. In Elgersburg, located in the Soviet Occupation Zone after 1945, the Wessel stone was simply toppled and renamed the ‘stone of peace’.

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Horst Wessel monument on the Süntel near Hamelin, presumably 1939

12

Exploiting the Myth

Despite resistance from the NSDAP, the Wessel women succeeded in making a personal profit from the cult of Horst Wessel. The family was in the money by the spring of 1938, when Margarete Wessel sold to the Prussian State Library the albums in her possession containing handwritten notes and pasted-in photos of her son Horst. His sister, meanwhile married and using the name Inge Wessel-Sanders, then offered ‘on behalf of the Horst Wessel estate’ the right of first refusal on the ‘remaining posthumous works’, particularly the original manuscript of ‘Raise the Flag!’ The entire estate was to be viewable only with permission of the heirs until the year 1970. They also retained the exclusive right to publish the literary remains. The deputy director of the Prussian State Library agreed to these conditions.1 The library paid 1,269.69 reichsmarks for Wessel’s travelogue Von Land und Leuten. Meine Fahrten und Reisen, officially acquiring it on 30 March 1938 with the funds of the general director. On 20 April of the same year, Hitler’s 49th birthday, it purchased Politika from the same funds. These handwritten notes had originally included 82 photos, three of which were missing. The purchase price for the notebook was even higher, at 7,730.31 reichsmarks.2 The total price of 9,000 reichsmarks, deposited in the account of Margarete Wessel, was equivalent to many years’ wages of an average worker. According to the Statistical Yearbook of the German Reich for 1939–40, a skilled worker employed in 1938 in the confectionery and baking, glass or chemical industries would earn just under 500 reichsmarks a year. Even in the better-paid metal-working industries, annual wages were a mere 650 reichsmarks. A publicly appointed senior government official or lower-ranking secondaryschool teacher would have had to work a good two years to earn the price paid for the two Wessel manuscripts.3 Goebbels became increasingly irritated with the family’s self-promotion, not to mention its financial interest, as it questioned the party’s monopoly

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The Making of a Nazi Hero on interpretation of the Horst Wessel myth. As early as 23 January 1933, a day after the dedication of the Wessel gravestone, he wrote in his diary that Frau Wessel had made the National Socialists wait for half an hour and was intolerably conceited. In June 1933, the two had what was apparently an indepth discussion. Goebbels summed it up as follows: ‘She wants to privatize Horst’s song. I coldly refuse. The song belongs to the nation. His mother is unbearable. She doesn’t deserve this heroic young man.’ Goebbels had noted just a few months before that Margarete Wessel was making ‘hysterical scenes’ and was ‘deeply insincere’.4 It is easy to understand the propaganda minister’s complaints. Margarete Wessel was presumably less an enthusiastic Nazi than an embittered woman who took the party’s honours for granted, as a kind of compensation for the loss of her two sons, while at the same time cashing in on the cult. The conflict between the family and Goebbels was sparked off in particular by the question of who owned the copyright on the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ and was thus entitled to a sizeable source of income. The Wessel women insisted, as the lawful heirs, on their right to own the copyright. They claimed to have signed a contract with the Leipzig publisher Sunnwend, which specialized in Nazi music, awarding it the sole marketing rights.5 Goebbels took the view that Horst Wessel had died for the movement and that his estate, by virtue of his heroic death, belonged to the National Socialists. The song belonged to all Germans.6 Nazi music scholars offered similar arguments. As early as 1934, Josef Müller-Blattau, professor in the East Prussian city of Königsberg (today Kaliningrad), counted the Wessel song among the ‘inalienable property of the people’ and said it had all the characteristics of a ‘folk song’.7 The Wessel heirs could only assert their intellectual-property rights if Horst Wessel was indeed credited with having created an original work. It was a complicated state of affairs, and still is today, even if no longer of practical importance with the expiration of the copyright 70 years after his death. Undisputed in the 1930s was that Wessel had written the lyrics himself, or at least combined elements of other songs into his own. Just as uncontroversial was the fact that he had not composed the tune to the song. Nazi musicologists endeavoured to name the original sources Wessel had borrowed from.8 A report by the Reich Chamber of Music in November 1936 cited as possible source material the reservists’ song ‘What Roams the Streets so Merrily’ as well as the songs ‘Sea Voyage to Africa, Captivity and Liberation’ (with its opening lines ‘Once I lived in a German fatherland…’) and the folk song ‘The Fisherman and His Sweetheart’ (I’m just a poor fisherman…). In Westphalia the so-called ‘Storndorf’ folk song (There once was a man travelling to his homeland…) was supposedly sung to the melody of ‘Sea

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Exploiting the Myth Voyage to Africa’ and might have been familiar to Wessel from his childhood visits to his grandparents. Ernst Hanfstaengl, for his part, claimed to have heard the melody in a Viennese cabaret around the turn of the century. The original lyrics apparently began with the lines: Und als dein Aug’ das meine einst erblicket Und als mein Mund den deinen einst geküsst Da hat die Liebe uns umstricket.9 And as your eye met mine And as my lips kissed yours Then did love enshroud us.

Wessel’s text, too, was modelled on others. It has conspicuous similarities with a ‘navy reserve song’ (The last time I slept was on board…), which in a more recent version called the ‘Königsberg Song’ (with reference to the warship of the same name, sunk off the coast of East Africa in 1915) began with the lines: ‘Gone, gone are all the wonderful moments…’10 There are even more striking parallels with a song well known in the Vienna Hitler Youth and whose three stanzas all began with the cry of ‘Clear the streets!’ It was published in 1927 in the Nazi monthly Hitler-Jugend: Kampfblatt schaffender Jugend. Wessel arrived in Vienna just a few months later, where he made friends with a Hitler Youth leader of the same age named Roman Hädelmayer, whose song ‘Whistles Blow from Every Rooftop’ Wessel took back to Berlin with him. It is therefore entirely possible that he picked up songs such as ‘Clear the Streets’ and later brought them to Germany or, with a few modifications, even passed them off as his own. In particular the second stanza of ‘Clear the Streets’, written by a certain H. Maass, clearly resembles the Wessel song and can even be sung to the same melody: Die Strasse frei! – Wir tragen Ehrennarben Aus schwerem Kampf, geführt in Leidenschaft Und trauernd um die Brüder, die uns starben Weht dunkler Flor von unserem Fahnenschaft.11 Clear the streets! – We bear our scars of honour From hard struggle, fought with passion And mourning the brothers we lost Black crape waves from our flagpoles.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero The question of the Wessel song’s origins became relevant in the course of a protracted legal dispute between the publishing houses SunnwendVerlag GmbH and Helene Schaufuss KG that began in 1933. The latter had distributed sheet music for a piano version of the song without crediting the text. Schaufuss maintained that the melody, too, was not under copyright protection, as Wessel was not its composer. Sunnwend, which was founded in early January 1931 with a start-up capital of 20,000 reichsmarks but soon found itself in economic straits, argued for its part that by signing a contract with the Wessel heirs it had acquired the exclusive rights to song, text and melody.12 On 19 June 1934, Sunnwend filed for bankruptcy. The receiver, one Dr Gerd Gransee from Leipzig, terminated the bankruptcy proceedings on 18 October 1938 ‘for lack of assets’.13 The managing director of Sunnwend, a certain Carl Otto Gaumer, who himself held a 1,000 reichsmark share in the publishing house and acted as the company’s liquidator, carried on the unsettled copyright dispute independent of the bankruptcy proceedings. The dispute went to several courts. The Leipzig Regional Court (Landgericht Leipzig) dismissed the publisher’s suit. The appeal before the Higher Regional Court of Dresden (Oberlandesgericht Dresden) was similarly unsuccessful. The company had no valid copyright claim on the melody of the song, the judges ruled. The possible composer and lyricist Wessel was a real bungler, they said, or at any rate an amateur in his field, and not an ‘artist with pronounced musical sensitivity’. The judges pointed out that, from the very first lines, text and melody did not fit together. The opening words ‘Raise the flag’, they criticized, were accompanied by a drop in the melody for no apparent reason. And in the German original some unimportant words were strongly accented, contrary to sense and the rules of pronunciation.14 We could also add to this that – as with the clashes in real life – it is not entirely clear just who is shooting whom, as ‘Kam’raden, die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen’ can either mean ‘comrades shot down by Red Front and Reaction’ or ‘comrades who shot down Red Front and Reaction’. In February 1936, the Higher Regional Court of Dresden fixed the value of the claim at 6,100 reichsmarks.15 The outcome of the copyright suit, at which Ingeborg Wessel testified as a witness, was of great importance to the Wessel women as well. The proceeds from the contract with Sunnwend were apparently the only direct source of income they had from the song. They received no royalties and had not registered as the rights-holder with GEMA, the German royalty-collecting agency for songwriters, composers and music publishers.16 Since the publishing archives of Sunnwend have not

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Exploiting the Myth survived, we can only speculate on the actual profits made from the Wessel song. The sheet music probably sold into the hundreds of thousands, by a conservative estimate. Every professional musician in the Third Reich had to know how to play the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, and it was included in many songbooks of the era. The bankrupt publisher took the case all the way to the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig in the hope of being awarded the copyright and thus obtaining a sum substantial enough not only to satisfy creditors but also to line the pockets of shareholders. In its verdict of 2 December 1936, the Reich Supreme Court, though largely agreeing with the lower courts, nonetheless overruled the judgement of the Dresden court. The Leipzig judges argued that the few modifications Wessel made to the melodies of older songs he had borrowed from were perhaps in themselves insignificant, but that on the whole it gave the impression of being a new song: ‘The soft, sentimental, ballad-like, sometimes street-minstrel style is thereby absent, and what emerges is a gripping, sweeping, rousing fight song’, which in its new version was indeed worth protecting. The song’s considerable popular appeal also had to be taken into consideration, the judges further argued. Thus, copyright on the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ could rightly be asserted, unless the tune was widespread before. If the latter was the case – as Schaufuss maintained – it was to be reviewed by the Dresden court.17 The prolonged dispute over its party anthem gradually became a burden on the NSDAP, until finally Goebbels saw the need to personally intervene and put an end to the controversy. He began in May 1937 by prohibiting the printing of any written discourse on the origins of the song’s melody. A short time later, on 2 July 1937, the pending proceedings at the Dresden court were adjourned by mutual agreement at the instigation of the propaganda minister in order to reach an out-of-court settlement. The latter never materialized. Sunnwend-Verlag, according to a long report from 1948 by its former managing director Gaumer, subsequently had the adjournment reversed. But no final verdict was handed down in the ensuing years either. By Gaumer’s account, the Propaganda Ministry, having asked for and received the case files, refused to give them back, not even at the behest of the Higher Regional Court.18 The managing director charged with winding up the publisher’s affairs left nothing undone in his efforts to bring the lawsuit to a conclusion in a way that would satisfy both creditors and his own demands. He successfully prevented the publisher from being struck off the commercial register until 1952. A negotiator from the Propaganda Ministry had allegedly admitted in the late 1930s that mistakes had been made in the ministry with regard

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The Making of a Nazi Hero to the Wessel affair; he therefore promised the publisher a settlement of several thousand reichsmarks. It was apparently Goebbels who thwarted this amicable arrangement.19 In his diary entry of 2 December 1937, the propaganda minister noted that he had ‘halted’ the second pending Reich Supreme Court trial when it became apparent that the judges would at the very least grant the Wessel heirs a copyright on the lyrics. Six months earlier he had commented with unusual pessimism: ‘The song cannot be kept as a national anthem in the long run. A new song text has to be written to the tune. It can’t just be done away with, though.’20 Indeed, the Wessel song was extremely popular, as shown by its many adaptations (and parodies, of which more later). ‘National comrades’ were quick to make it their own after the Nazis’ seizure of power by developing new and ‘improved’ versions for various occasions. One National Socialist woman sent Hitler an updated version of the lyrics that began with the following lines: Die Fahne hoch! Lasst wehen die Standarten! Es zog der ‘deutsche Morgen’ nun ins Land, Es schlug die Schicksalsstunde, der wir sehend harrten: ‘Das Steuer ruht in unseres Führers Hand!’ Raise the flag! Let the banner wave! The ‘German Morning’ has come, The hour of destiny has struck, which we with open eyes awaited: ‘Our Führer is at the helm!’

A leader of the ‘Frauenschaft’ – the women’s wing of the Nazi Party – from Ober-Gorpe (Gorzupia Górna) in Silesia also reworked the song, having found the original version ‘too manly for little girls’: Die Herzen hoch und betend hoch die Hände. Die Seele weiht dem Deutschen Vaterland, Dass es zu jeder Zeit uns stolz und stark erfände, Das schwören wir, auch wir, mit Herz und Hand. Raise our hearts and our hands in prayer. Devote your soul to the German Fatherland, That it always find us proud and strong, This we swear, we too, with heart and hand.

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Exploiting the Myth Albert Bormann, at the time the head of Hitler’s personal chancellery, always reacted aloofly to such letters. He would point out that only the original text could be sung to the melody of the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, so as to keep the enemy from parodying it for the purpose of political agitation. In the NSDAP as well, he would say, they wished to ‘preserve the song in its original form within our own ranks’. There were so many reworkings of the text, in fact, that the new rulers announced on the radio that under no circumstances was the melody of the song to be sung with different lyrics. Exceptions were not even made for the SS and Hitler Youth, once the SA, the subject of the song text, lost currency after the murder of Röhm. In February 1939, the Reich Chamber of Music (Reichsmusikkammer) even fixed the tempo at which the ‘revolutionary fight song’ could be played.21 But Wessel’s name was also used to criticize the Nazi regime. Thus in May 1934, for example, the Secret State Police, or Gestapo, formed from Political Department IA of the Prussian police, received a leaflet that was apparently distributed by a uniformed SA man at a Berlin social-welfare office. The leaflet contained a parody of the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ called the ‘March of the Mutinous SA’, which complained about the corruption of Nazi elites and threatened with a revolution from below: Wir brauchen Brot, ihr gebt uns Wachtparaden Und lasst den braunen Rundfunk auf uns los Für unser Geld spielt ihr die Herren von Gottes Gnaden Kein Feuerwerk, kein Fest ist euch zu gross Denkt ihr, wenn ihr dem Volk den Mund verbietet Wird es in Zukunft auch vom Schweigen satt! Es nützt euch nichts, dass ihr das freie Wort verbietet Der Hunger spricht sehr laut in Land und Stadt Es kommt der Tag, da wird sich uns verbinden Der Freiheit Lied und Todesfurcht nicht kennt Da werden wir ein rotes Feuerwerk entzünden In dem das ganze dritte Reich verbrennt (Melodie des Horst-Wessel-Liedes)

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The Making of a Nazi Hero We need bread, you give us guard mountings And unleash upon us Brown radio With our money you play the lords of God’s grace No fireworks, no festival is too big for you Remember when you tell the people to be quiet That at some point they will have enough of keeping silent! It’s no use for you to ban freedom of speech Hunger speaks out loud in countryside and town The day will come when those will join us Who love freedom and know no fear of death We’ll set off Red fireworks And the whole Third Reich will burn (melody of the ‘Horst Wessel Song’).22

The Gestapo never found out who was behind these lines. Dissident rewrites of the party anthem became more and more common during the war. One version of the song went as follows, with reference to worsening food supplies: Die Pfanne hoch! Es gibt schon nix zu fressen Das Volk ist müd und ohne festen Schritt Die Butter ist schon lang von uns vergessen Marschiert nur im Geiste auf unseren Broten mit. Raise the pan! There’s nothing more to eat The people are tired with no firm tread The butter we’ve long forgotten Marches only in spirit on our bread.

Yet another version went like this: Die Pfanne hoch! Das Schmalz ist viel zu teuer Die Butter knapp, sie geht im Preis voran Es schau’n aufs Rübenkraut voll Hoffnung schon Millionen Der Tag für Brot mit Rübenkraut bricht an.23

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Exploiting the Myth Raise the pan! The price of lard is much too steep Butter is scarce, it leads the way in cost Millions, full of hope, look upon sugar-beet syrup The day of bread with sugar-beet syrup dawns.

Nazi rulers considered criticism of this sort – whose true scale and extent is nearly impossible to gauge for certain – to be especially dangerous, as it availed itself of a well-known Nazi symbol. Most of these parodies flouted the promised future referred to in the original text by ironically addressing the oppressive problems of daily life, thus pointing out the deficits of a really existing National Socialist war society. It is precisely because National Socialism was in many respects a ‘dictatorship by consent’, as historian Götz Aly has pointedly argued, that political leaders viewed this witty criticism as treacherous and subversive.24 Fearful of these reversifications and the impact they might have, the state was particularly strict in dealing with derogatory remarks about Wessel or inappropriate comments about his song. On 29 April 1939, the Elbing Special Court (Sondergericht Elbing) sentenced milker Kurt Grummert to one year and six months in prison in accordance with Article 2, Section 2 of the Malicious Practices Act (Heimtückegesetz) of 20 December 1934 (officially the ‘Law on Insidious Attacks on the State and Party and for the Protection of the Party Uniform’). Between 1935 and 1938 Grummert had repeatedly made critical comments about the NSDAP and its Führer in the West Prussian town of Garnsee, where he lived, greeting people with ‘Heil Moscow!’ according to the testimony of witnesses, and carrying on with his ‘foolishness’ while listening, in the presence of others, to a radio broadcast of a speech by Hitler: After the Führer’s speech, the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ was played and the female witness […] sang along out of enthusiasm, whereupon the defendant laughed at this, aped the witness’s singing, made faces and challenged the witness to sing the song again in order to mock her one more time.

The court considered the defendant’s behaviour an attempt to damage ‘confidence in our state leadership’. Moreover, the ‘person of the Führer, sacred to every German’, had been ‘disparaged in a particularly noxious way’. By the time the verdict was announced, the defendant, who according to the court was a ‘depraved human being’, had already been interned for almost a year in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was categorized as ‘workshy’. On 3 March 1939, he was transferred to Elbing for his trial before the special court. On 5 December 1940, he was again taken to Sachsenhausen, where he remained until at least 1941.25

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Carpenter Franz Klabuhn from Berlin-Pankow was luckier than Grummert. He was also charged with violating the Malicious Practices Act. On 4 February 1939, while riding on a bus as it drove past the Nicolai Cemetery, where Wessel was buried, feeling ‘tipsy but not dead drunk’, he allegedly shouted: ‘Here he lies, the one who whored around Alexanderplatz.’ When other passengers took notice, the carpenter purportedly shouted again: ‘Here lies the pimp Horst Wessel. It wasn’t the commune who shot him but his pimps’. The state prosecutor argued that openly reproaching Wessel in this way for having led an immoral life was apt ‘to severely damage the reputation of the NSDAP’. In its session of 18 May 1939, however, the court ruled that it could not be proved without a doubt that the accused actually called Wessel a pimp. The witnesses offered conflicting testimonies and there was no way of ruling out ‘errors in hearing’ and ‘misunderstandings’. Since the accused made ‘no unfavourable impression’ on the court and had ‘not appeared in a disagreeable light’ prior to the incident, the verdict was acquittal for lack of evidence.26 These two cases were typical of the Nazis’ handling of mockery and criticism. When it came to meting out sentences, more important than incriminating testimonies was the character of the individual. The regime was lenient in the case of defendants with no previous criminal convictions and who made a positive impression overall. If the accused had a bad reputation, however, forms of criticism deemed insignificant in other cases could literally cost him his head, especially during the war years.27 With the fall of the Third Reich, the hitherto ubiquitous Wessel song largely disappeared from the public sphere, though not from the minds of Germans.28 It is still considered a symbol of National Socialism. Its public use is prohibited by Article 86a of the German Criminal Code, as is the public display of the Hitler salute or shouting ‘Sieg Heil’. Exceptions to the rule are when the song is sung in private or used in art, academia, research or teaching as part of a report or commentary on historical events. In all other cases, the courts have generally been strict in applying the law in recent decades. Even an estranged or parodied text does not divest the melody of its ‘associative reference to National Socialism’, the Oldenburg Higher Regional Court ruled in 1987. Simply intoning the melody in public is already punishable by law, the court said.29 There have been some noteworthy exceptions, though. The Military Service Division (Wehr­dienstsenat) of the Federal Administrative Court (Bundes­verwaltungs­gericht) in West Germany ruled with peculiar leniency in favour of a number of officers in 1981. The men, all of whom were students of education at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, had taken part in a ‘fellowship evening’, in the course of which some soldiers’ songs

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Exploiting the Myth of the Wehrmacht and at least a few verses of the Wessel song were sung. Supposedly there was even a symbolic burning of Jews at the bonfire, and cries of ‘Put another Jew on the fire!’ But the court did not establish a ‘breach of military duty’ in this case, as it could not determine beyond a doubt which of the accused had committed which of the misdeeds in question.30 An unusual case is that of the Italian pop singer Milva. In 1976 she released the album Libertà, which, according to its cover, was a collection of ‘freedom songs’ from around the world, including the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ (under this title!). The singer, who by her own admission sympathizes with the Italian Left, said, when asked in 2008, that her version of the song, recorded in the 1960s, was a parody penned by Bertolt Brecht that Giorgio Strehler had translated for her.31 Whatever the case, she did not sing an Italian version of ‘March of the Calves’ (Kälbermarsch) by Brecht, the most well-known parody of the Wessel song nowadays, but a very free rendition at best, parts of which follow the Nazi anthem word for word and whose parodic effect only becomes apparent in the second stanza: Avanti marsch A ranghi ben serrati Le SS avanzano nel sol I camerati che la morte ha già baciato Sono sempre qui e marciano con noi Avanti su Ti guida un macellaio E dietro a lui a passo militar Vitello ariano impaurito dal beccaio Tu vai così a farti macellar. Forward, march! In tight ranks The SS marches in the sun And the comrades kissed by death Are always there and march with us Forward, onward! A butcher leads you And behind him in lockstep An Aryan pig afraid of the butcher And so you march on to be slaughtered.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Milva sang the original melody in the style of a Piaf chanson. The song was even included in a 1992 compilation of her songs.32 How tricky it can be to touch on völkisch ideas even in our own day and age can be seen in a controversy over the song ‘Heath of the Mark’, the unofficial anthem of the federal state of Brandenburg, that flared up briefly once again in the year 2008. The song was allegedly written in 1923 by Gustav Büchsenschütz, who, born in 1902, served as the director of the ‘State Hiking Office’ (Landeswanderamt) in the German Bismarck Order, a right-wing extremist splinter group of the Bismarck League.33 It is possible he knew Wessel, as the latter noted in his Politika that he had gone on some outings with a group called the ‘Heath of the Mark Hiking League’, renamed the ‘Electoral Brandenburg Gymnastics Club’ in 1924.34 In 1934 the composer Büchsenschütz called ‘Heath of the Mark’ a ‘much-sung song of the National Socialist Revolution’, which, from the Bismarck Order to the Frontbann and SA, had played its part in the ‘triumph of the völkisch movement’. As early as the 1920s it was frowned upon by dissenters, who considered it a ‘Nazi tune’ despite its apolitical content.35 About its effect Büchsenschütz wrote: ‘Though there may have been some vicious clashes with political adversaries on account of this song, its power remained unbroken. Indeed, the Brandenburg song was heard at the big NSDAP events […], enlisting ever new fighters for the new Germany.’ After being sung at the Nuremberg Rally, ‘the Brandenburg Mark’, he continued, could finally claim to have ‘its own patriotic song’. National Socialist historians confirmed that especially in the late 1920s, when the symbols of the SA were periodically forbidden in Berlin and Brandenburg, the ‘beautiful march of Gustav Büchsenschütz’ was sung with ‘special emphasis’.36 Despite this history of ‘Heath of the Mark’, the first minister president of the State of Brandenburg, Manfred Stolpe, disseminated the song in an effort to bolster the regional identity of this newly created federal state after the fall of Communism and German reunification, promoting it as the unofficial state anthem. He personally congratulated Büchsenschütz on the latter’s 90th birthday in 1992. Steige hoch, du roter Adler Hoch über Sumpf und Sand Hoch über dunkle Kiefernwälder Heil dir mein Brandenburger Land.

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Exploiting the Myth Soar aloft, O red eagle High over swamp and sand High over dark pine forests Hail to thee, my Brandenburg land.

These words have been heard ever since at public festivals and official events in the towns and villages around Berlin. A question posed in 2008 to Stolpe’s successor Matthias Platzeck as to whether this song was an appropriate anthem for a cosmopolitan and tolerant Brandenburg was answered evasively by the government spokesman: it was ‘not without reason’ that the song was not chosen as the official state anthem in the early 1990s, the spokesman admitted, but he insisted that the text was nevertheless ‘clear and not interpretable otherwise under other circumstances’. Moreover, the state government was of the opinion that the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany bestowed on Gustav Büchsenschütz in 1975 was a ‘sufficient’ indication ‘that already thirty years ago the historical figure’ of the composer had been ‘subject to a critical evaluation’. Brandenburg’s minister of the interior, Jörg Schönbohm, defended the song as well. A connection to National Socialism was ‘absurd’, he said.37

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13

Literary Enlightenment

Leftist intellectuals reacted to the National Socialist Wessel cult with irritable irony. The tone of these polemics was set by Walter Mehring – a writer famous for his satirical songs and cabaret pieces – in his article ‘Marriage! Horst Wessel. Alraune, née Ewers’, published on 10 January 1933 in Carl von Ossietzky’s weekly Die Weltbühne. The text was a montage of quotes from Hanns Heinz Ewers’s 1911 bestseller Alraune and his 1932 Wessel novel, denouncing the author as an opportunist while unmasking the Wessel cult as a fantastic, kitschy and sexually obscene modernday fairy tale: ‘Horst Wessel? Why, it’s just our little Alraune! Fashions change. But obscene or nationalist, it’s the same bloodlust of the weak and impotent.’1 The Wessel cult – redoubled in 1933 but fought by the radical Left from the very beginning, albeit with the ineffectual instrument of exposing the ‘real’, historical figure of Horst Wessel – prompted playwright Bertolt Brecht and writer Klaus Mann, among others, to take issue with Wessel and his stylization into a German hero. Klaus Mann, from his exile in France, worked on a lengthy manuscript called Horst Wessel from early August to late October 1933. He never found a publisher for it, and it is only available today in excerpts.2 Little is known about the origins of the text. Presumably the idea came from Mann’s friend Fritz Landshoff, the director of Querido publishing house in Amsterdam. On 28 July Klaus Mann signed a ‘Horst Wessel contract’ and received an initial advance from Landshoff. He immediately set to work, and began by reading the Wessel novel of Hanns Heinz Ewers. A ‘horrendously written book, beyond the pale of literature’, Mann wrote in his diary on 1 August 1933, and on the following day: ‘An almost unbearable read. But you have to know your enemies. What a guttersnipe, this Ewers – but perhaps he is typical of this Germany with his indescribable mediocrity, mendacity and meanness.’3

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Literary Enlightenment Less than three weeks later, Klaus Mann read the first passages aloud to Landshoff. It was greeted with no great storm of applause. ‘It’s a tricky business, parts of it work, but then again it’s not quite what it should be, too “lampooning” [pamphletisch],’ Mann wrote self-critically on 19 August.4 He finished his Wessel manuscript by the end of October – with flagging interest, judging by his ever-briefer diary entries. His publisher Landshoff cautiously informed him, presumably in December 1933, that he did not plan to publish it for the time being: You ask – rightly – about Horst. The answer is difficult. I do not find the book a failure. BUT… I can’t help thinking that it might not be right – today – in exile – to write such a ‘casual’ and ‘flippant’ book about Horsti. […] It is often funny – often earnest – always entertaining – but – dear, dear Klaus – is it REALLY the right thing?5

Landshoff sensed that the manuscript’s consistently rude and derisive tone might hinder the intended enlightening effect should the book be published. His very cautiously worded rejection, moreover, is an indication of how seriously Klaus Mann took the project. Mann was born in 1906, just one year before Horst Wessel. Hence writing about Wessel meant writing about his own generation. Like much of what Mann had written, the text was in part an attempt to grapple with his own increasingly tormented existence. The ambivalent figure of Wessel and a difficult father-son relationship reflected in many instances the problematic self-image of Klaus Mann.6 Indeed, the accusation that the young National Socialist was a degenerate ‘city slicker’ (Grossstadtpflanze) who was ‘ravenous for new sensations’ could have just as easily been levelled at Mann.7 The text is teeming with preconceived notions and unfounded assumptions. He attempted to use physiognomy, for instance, a decidedly dubious method even then, to explain the Hitler phenomenon. Hitler’s face, he said, tended toward the ‘vulgar-pathological, to primitive sexual degeneration’. In another passage he even talks about a ‘misbred face’ (übelrassige[s] Gesicht).8 He fancied that Hitler’s physical attributes could be used to deduce his character traits. Hence Hitler’s dogmatism had ‘physiological grounds’. It was ‘a kind of redirected sexual activity, of permanent self-gratification, the fanaticism of lasciviousness, the ecstasy of the masturbator’.9 Wessel came off slightly better, at least with regard to his physiognomy. The pastor’s son, ‘no ugly boy’, had nothing to be ashamed of in the ‘neoGermanic pantheon of degenerates’. True, he was an ‘insignificant person’ with no particular talent, and not much of a ‘personality’. But the political

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The Making of a Nazi Hero situation had helped him become a powerful figure, which only the downfall of the regime would bring to an end, as Mann correctly predicted.10 He related the brief life story of Wessel, for the most part chronologically, starting with his adolescence during the First World War and his subsequent membership in various right-wing youth leagues and organizations. Mann’s aim was to analyse the mental and spiritual climate the young Wessel grew up in. It was a ‘barbaric childhood’, he claimed, with no humanist culture but plenty of war games and field exercises – Wessel’s only purpose in life.11 Large swathes of Mann’s account followed Ewers’s Wessel novel and other contemporary works of propaganda. Perhaps he had read the hagiography published in 1933, which Ingeborg Wessel dedicated to her brother. Unlike this one-dimensional ‘heroic tale’, Mann’s text was larded with sarcastic comments and political observations. It also contained some far-sighted analysis, condensed into aphorisms. But Klaus Mann did not really get to the bottom of the bourgeois Sturmführer’s fanaticism. His rhetorical questions seem almost helpless: ‘Was the intellect of this pugnacious pastor’s son so utterly rotten, so hopelessly corrupt that he really failed to notice his Führer’s appalling lack of sophistication?’12 Wessel, it is safe to say, was not concerned with sophistication and intellect. Mann was quite certain that Horst’s father Ludwig Wessel was more than a little responsible for his son’s development: ‘There was a direct connection between Christianity as it was understood by the pastor of Saint Nicolai and the frame of mind that led his son to shoot at German workers.’ And a little further down, underlined for emphasis: ‘It is precisely this de-Christianized Protestantism that would form the spiritual basis of National Socialism.’13 Though convincingly portraying this development, Mann fell short in analysing Horst Wessel the individual, his attitudes and actions. Insufficient education, indolence, thoughtlessness – these repeated characterizations of Wessel did not touch the core of the problem, which is to say they did not offer a reasonable explanation as to why young men were attracted to Nazism. Mann ultimately failed to free himself from the clichés of Nazi propaganda texts, which served as his main source of information and ideas. To some extent he simply paraphrased the Ewers novel, albeit with contrary political motives. This was too little for a debunking analysis of the Fascist hero cult. The problem of tackling the Wessel case using the tool of language and in the spirit of anti-Fascist enlightenment would preoccupy him well beyond the Wessel manuscript. This is evident at the start of a second manuscript that Mann gave the title Myths of the Underworld in 1939: ‘We search in vain for words to describe the Nazi phenomenon and its exponents.’14

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Literary Enlightenment Such problems did not bother the more self-assured Bertolt Brecht, who wrote his essay ‘The Horst Wessel Legend’ between 1933 and 1935.15 When exactly he picked up this topic is unknown. Perhaps he got the idea from Klaus Mann, whom he met in Paris several times in the autumn of 1933. The latter might have told Brecht about his work on Wessel in a ‘long talk’ they had, which Mann mentioned in his diary.16 At any rate, Brecht began to work on it intensively in 1935, after learning about the executions of Sally Epstein and Hans Ziegler, who were convicted and sentenced to death in the second Wessel trial. He relied on various newspaper reports, the Ewers novel as well as the typescript of an unknown author whom the police apparently tried to implicate in the Wessel murder case.17 Brecht’s essay, polemical and sarcastic throughout, is pithy and precise compared to the expansive and often redundant narrative of Mann. Horst Wessel the individual, to whom Brecht attributed sex appeal and eloquence but also brutality and a ‘lack of knowledge’, formed the backdrop for his Marxist critique of the supposed alliance between the petite bourgeoisie and big industry in Fascist Germany. He starts his argument with some general deliberations on the hero cult. It is of central importance for every kind of propaganda, Brecht wrote, to choose a hero who is eminently easy to grasp, even for the poor in imagination, and who symbolizes the movement. He really has to fit […], so that when you think of him you immediately think of the movement, and when you think of the movement you think of him.

His profession was not irrelevant. Wessel’s occupation – and here Brecht was wholly indebted to the perspective of Communist propaganda – was a pimp, plain and simple: ‘Grosse Frankfurter Strasse knew, and anyone who wanted to could go there and find out, that Wessel, the student of jurisprudence, lived with Erna Jännicke [sic] at Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 18 [sic] and how much a girl like that cost.’ Wessel’s violent death was ‘work-related’: ‘The pimp was shot down by another pimp.’18 Brecht had alluded to Wessel-the-pimp before in his poem ‘The Song of the Class Enemy’, first published in 1934 in Paris in a collection co-edited by Hanns Eisler called Songs, Poems, Choruses: Und manchen von uns sah ich, Der ging ihnen auf den Strich. Und geschah ihm, was dir und mir geschah, Dann wunderte er sich.19

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The Making of a Nazi Hero And one of us I saw, He fell for their game. And happened to him what happened to you and me, Then he was surprised

Brecht consciously mixes two idioms here – ‘auf den Strich gehen’ (to walk the streets) and ‘auf den Leim gehen’ (to be tricked) – to suggest that Wessel has been taken in by the ‘class enemy’, i.e. duped by Nazi propaganda, and become their ‘political pimp’. Brecht, these quotes reveal, was familiar with the Wessel case from hearsay at best. Factual errors like the wrong house number or a wrong name were of no consequence to his line of argument, however. This is important, because the whole point of his discourse was that Wessel’s purported pimping was not accidental but was characteristic of the entire Nazi movement. Wessel was not just a garden-variety procurer but a ‘political pimp’ as well, just as the whole of National Socialism was a form of political pimping. The whoremonger of National Socialism treated ‘the proletariat like a prostitute of capital’.20 Wessel, Brecht concluded, was therefore quite rightly chosen as the symbol of völkisch dictatorship. Brecht tried to prove this theory with the aid of several examples and analogies. He ruled out any possibility that German workers could profit from the Nazi regime. In reality Hitler was playing the pimp, exploiting the German people. This out-of-the-ordinary pimp lent the union of capital and labour, ‘this heinous rape’, a semblance of legality: ‘Exploiting the sheer hunger of the unpropertied class and exploiting the greed for profit of the propertied class, the great parasite appears to rise above both, though serving unconditionally the business interests of the propertied class.’ The culmination of Brecht’s argument is that it is no longer important in Wessel’s case whether or not he was in fact a ‘common pimp’: ‘He was certainly a political pimp, and this is far worse. Did he “save” Erna Jännicke or was it Germany he “saved”? Did he live at the expense of Jännicke or at Germany’s expense? Which of the two was his whore?’21 Both texts, Mann’s and Brecht’s, addressed a German audience that was hard to reach from exile. Their pamphlets about Wessel were never published during Nazi rule, not even abroad. They polarized, inveighed, slandered and struggled. They were not without humour, and basically aimed to expose the contradictions and falsifications of Nazi hero worship. And yet both writers failed in their treatment of Wessel, being unable to free themselves from the inner logic of the propaganda they constantly – and inadvertently – referenced. What’s more, neither tried to debunk the

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Literary Enlightenment myth with genuinely political arguments, but sexualized it instead – in Brecht’s case for the most part metaphorically. In contrast to his 1934 essay Homosexuality and Fascism, Mann went so far in his first Wessel text to positing a link between Fascism and homosexuality. Homosexuality, Mann argued, was a pillar of the Nazi movement, ‘however compromising this may sound for homosexuals’.22 His observations were hardly original – what with the many jokes circulating in the Weimar Republic about the boys from the ‘Brown House’ (party headquarters) in Munich – but it was nonetheless a political hazard to openly make such claims. In the case of Klaus Mann, a homosexual himself, his anti-gay agitation against the Nazis clearly had strains of self-abasement.23 Brecht, for his part, compared the whole of Nazi politics with sexual exploitation. The effectiveness of educational works of a militantly anti-Fascist bent was also limited by another factor: the fact that even many former Nazi opponents in Germany were happy, in the mid-1930s, that the civil-war-like final years of the Weimar Republic were over, replaced, so it seemed, by the stability of the Hitler regime. Even sceptics were impressed by the economic achievements of the National Socialists between 1933 and 1938, leading many former SPD and KPD voters to feel ‘inwardly disarmed’, as Sebastian Haffner aptly noted.24 Parody and satire, no matter how good, were no match for the Nazis in the 1930s. No one knew this better than the brilliant satirist Kurt Tucholsky, who had virtually stopped publishing from exile in Sweden and took his own life in 1935.25 It was probably not a coincidence that Brecht’s famous parody of the Wessel song, ‘March of the Calves’, was first published in the United States, in 1944, and only appeared in print in Germany in 1947. By that time the song could no longer have its intended educational function. The calamity of the Second World War had already come to pass. The song’s refrain went as follows: Der Metzger ruft, die Augen fest geschlossen Das Kalb marschiert mit ruhig festem Tritt Die Kälber, deren Blut im Schlachthof schon geflossen Sie ziehn im Geist in seinen Reihen mit.26 The butcher calls, eyes closed tight The calf marches with firm steady tread The calves, whose blood flowed in the slaughterhouse They march in spirit within his ranks.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Alfred Döblin anticipated this disastrous development as early as 1929. His famous novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. The Story of Franz Biberkopf ends with a rather direct appeal to its readers to take their fate into their own hands before being felled by others. The new formations and their sinister tidings were already on the march. With a collage technique typical of Döblin, he obliquely alludes to the Wessel song, though not without some crucial changes: ‘Often they march past his window with flags and music and singing. […] Marching, marching. We tramp to war with iron tread, a hundred minstrels march ahead, red of night and red of day, deathward leads the way.’27

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Revenge of the Nazis

Von all unsern Kameraden war keiner so lieb und so gut wie unser Sturmführer Wessel; ein lustiges Hakenkreuzlerblut. Wir sassen so fröhlich beisammen, in mancher so stürmischen Nacht. Mit seinen Hitlerliedern, hat er uns so fröhlich gemacht. Da kam eine feindliche Kugel, von roter Mordbubenhand. Horst Wessel, du liessest dein Leben für Hitler und Vaterland. Darauf nahmen wir Hacke und Spaten und schaufelten ihm ein Grab, Berliner SA-Kameraden, die senkten ihn still hinab. Schlaf wohl, du Sturmführer Wessel, wir hatten dich alle so lieb, und kommt einst die Stunde der Rache, dann halten wir Gericht. Of all our comrades, none was so dear and so good as our Sturmführer Wessel; with his merry swastika-man blood. We sat so gaily together, one stormy night. With his Hitler songs he made us so gay. Then came a hostile bullet, from a murderer’s Red hand. Horst Wessel, you lost your life for Hitler and Fatherland. Whereupon we took pickaxe and spade and dug him a grave, Berlin SA comrades lowered him quietly. Sleep well, you Sturmführer Wessel, we all liked you so much, and if one day the hour of vengeance comes, then we will sit in judgement.

This National Socialist version of the Communists’ ‘The Song of the Little Bugler’ is listed under the title ‘Horst Wessel in Memoriam’ in a collection of songs from the year 1935, ‘Storm and Fight Songs’ of the SA.1 The hour of vengeance for Nazi thugs had come right after the burning of the Reichstag on the evening of 27 February 1933. Five days earlier, Göring had recruited some 50,000 auxiliary policemen from the ranks of

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The Making of a Nazi Hero the SA, SS, and Stahlhelm. In the following weeks and months, the SA, whose national membership had skyrocketed in 1933 from about 500,000 to nearly three million, acted as a second, virtually unchecked police force that was largely immune to criminal prosecution. The Nazis set up their first concentration camps, sometimes dubbed ‘wildcat prisons’ or ‘wildcat concentration camps’, in which they incarcerated, mistreated and murdered undesirables in all parts of the Reich. In Berlin alone there were said to be more than 150 underground torture chambers and torture apartments in 1933.2 From the very first, the Third Reich showed two faces. Behind the grandiose mass rallies and apparent bourgeois respectability, the Nazis were fast and ruthless in persecuting their political opponents. ‘He who will not be converted must be broken. Eradication of Marxism root and branch,’ Hitler demanded on 4 February 1933 in a confidential talk with his troop commanders. Fascination and force, temptation and destruction were closely intertwined in the first months. Large parts of society, however, especially the conservative middle class, viewed Nazi acts of violence as excesses. ‘Occasional severities’, on the other hand, a report of the Berlin chief of police noted, ‘would be understood by and large and in most cases felt to be necessary in the general interest of the nation’.3 The first major official concentration camp, with an initial inmate capacity of 5,000, went into operation on 21–22 March 1933 in Dachau, just north of Munich. It was around the same time that the first prisoners were taken to the SA-run concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin. The SA men sometimes forced their detainees to sing the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ on the way to the camps and special prisons, to publicly humiliate them. By April 1933 more than 50,000 people, most of them Communists, Social Democrats and unionists, had been put away in special camps. More recent scholarship estimates that more than 100,000 individuals were held in detention in 1933; at least 500 people, probably considerably more, were murdered by the Nazis that year. The Communists even claimed to have lost 2,600 followers. In Berlin alone between 1933 and 1935 the KPD counted 101 murdered party members.4 Nazi retribution in the case of Wessel shows how consistently and brutally the new potentates went about settling old scores. Goebbels had already vowed to deal harshly with the ‘murderers’ as Wessel lay critically wounded in the hospital. The necessary retaliation no longer needed to be justified with arguments, he wrote at the time in Der Angriff. The perpetrators had to be ‘beaten to a bloody pulp’.5 The Berlin SA did exactly this from 1933 on, soon with the backing of the Gestapo and the courts.

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Revenge of the Nazis The first victim of ‘revenge for Wessel’ was Else Cohn. It was she who led gunman Höhler and his men to the apartment of Elisabeth Salm on 14 January 1930 – and was reviled by the Nazis as the Jewish ringleader of a gang of killers, as the fanatic inciter of murder because of it. Her nerves were so weak at the trial of September 1930 that she fainted several times. She evaded her punishment by going underground after the sentence was passed. On 25 June 1931 her Berlin landlady informed the police authorities that she had ‘moved to an unknown address’. Allegedly she spent the intervening period in Stettin and Güstrow.6 In the night of 6 to 7 May 1933, Else Cohn was murdered on the side of the road between the villages of Gersdorf (Dąbie) and Plau (Pław), not far from the small town of Crossen (Krosno Odrzańskie) on the Oder River, in the former Prussian administrative district of Küstrin.7 The perpetrators were never found. Investigations conducted by the Department of Public Prosecution in Guben, the rural police and the Judicial Committee of the Crossen Local Court (Amtsgericht Crossen) did unearth many details of the crime, however. They established, first of all, that it was not a case of robbery with murder. Engagement ring, purse and watch were found on the body. Thanks to her personal documents, the dead woman was immediately identified as Else Cohn from Breslau (Wrocław), a woman ‘of Jewish extraction’. They further reconstructed that the victim must have been brought to the scene of the crime by car, as her shoes showed ‘no trace of dirt’ and were not even dusty. If she had been out walking, her shoes would not have been so clean. Although it did rain that night during the hours in question, the Crossener Tageblatt wrote, the ‘intolerable dust’ was scarcely lessened as a result.8 A report of the Frankfurter Oder-Zeitung from 11 May 1933 elaborated: The murder must have taken place on Saturday night around 11 p.m., because around this time a gendarme in a neighbouring village heard a series of shots followed, after a pause, by a single shot. This observation corresponds with the findings where the body turned up. A pool of blood and four cartridge cases next to it were found at the side of the road. This is where Else Cohn was shot six times, in her lower left arm, her upper left thigh and her back. Traces indicate that she was then dragged to the other side of the road, where another pool of blood and one cartridge case were found. It is assumed the murderer noticed at this point that the woman was still alive. So he fired another shot at her, this time in her temple.9

The Crossener Tageblatt reported similar details about the investigations of the public-prosecution office. The cartridges came from a 7.65 mm Mauser

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The Making of a Nazi Hero pistol. The local paper also reported that Fräulein Cohn had worked in town years before as a shop assistant. It was also ‘entirely possible’, the paper suggested cautiously, that ‘the whole affair has nothing at all to do with Crossen, that they came from much farther away’. The corpse of Else Cohn, discovered by a mushroom gatherer on Sunday afternoon, was lying about 25 metres away from the Crossen-Grünberg (Zielona Góra) highway, in a pine plantation opposite the so-called mountain. Following a forensic examination, the murder victim was given a quiet burial on 10 May 1933 at the Jewish cemetery in Crossen.10 Before being killed, Else Cohn was said to have been in Frankfurt an der Oder, where she may have been kidnapped by her murderer or murderers. Witnesses claim to have seen her being pulled into a dark sedan on Gubener Strasse in Frankfurt.11 A cyclist said just a few days after the murder that on the Saturday afternoon in question he was passed by a dark motor car several times whose licence plate had a ‘Y’ as its second letter and also contained a ‘2’ after that. He could make out two well-dressed men in the car who looked to be between 25 and 30 years old, as well as a girl. The young woman was wearing a red blouse or cardigan, just like the victim.12 Licence plates with a ‘Y’ as their second letter were reserved for cars from the Prussian administrative district of Schneidemühl (Piła), about three hours by car from Crossen.13 The potential automobile and its owner could have quickly been narrowed down with the help of local registration files. But the Crossener Tageblatt reported one day later that investigators had located beyond a shadow of a doubt the perpetrator’s car – a Chevrolet with Düsseldorf plates. All three individuals had supposedly been seen on 6 May on the market square of Crossen. The men were about five feet nine inches tall. One of them had combed-back black hair, the other had wavy hair. The murderers, it seemed, were about to be caught.14 Yet no one was arrested. Presumably the investigations were dropped on the orders of Hermann Göring – who was appointed Minister President of Prussia on 11 April 1933 – as happened with other cases in the months to come.15 The local papers never mentioned the case or subsequent investigations again. A handwritten note in a later memorandum to Hitler from Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner sheds some light on the political background of the crime. Of the convicted offenders in the first Wessel trial, the minister jotted down in the margin, ‘Höhler and Cohn were later shot.’ Every mention of the young woman’s existence should be blotted out, it said, which is why on 19 August 1933 the chief state prosecutor’s office in Berlin instructed the police and the registration office to delete the entry of Else Cohn from their lists.16

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Revenge of the Nazis The second victim of the Nazis’ ‘revenge for Wessel’ was Albrecht Höhler, the gunman and convicted principal offender. The inmate of Wohlau (Wołów) prison in Silesia must have had a sense of foreboding when in early August 1933 they transferred him with ‘special security measures’ to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin. Supposedly Höhler had indicated in Wohlau that he was willing to share some important information regarding the Wessel case.17 He was interrogated, and most likely tortured, by the Gestapo for weeks, beginning on 11 August. On 30 August 1933, Höhler submitted in writing a ‘vehement protest about the manner of my internment’. He demanded the same treatment that ‘every prisoner at all times is given’ and wanted to be returned to his old penitentiary at once.18 It was another three weeks, however, before Höhler, according to the Gestapo’s own official version, was supposed to go back to Silesia, on 20 September 1933. He never made it there. The convict Höhler was murdered by SA men and at least one leading Gestapo official in a wooded area between Berlin and Frankfurt an der Oder. The leading official was none other than the head of the newly founded Gestapo, the then just 32-year-old senior government councillor (Oberregierungsrat) and SS-Oberführer Rudolf Diels. In a letter of 23 September 1933 to Prussian Minister President Hermann Göring, he wrote about Höhler’s murder: Just outside Frankfurt an der Oder, the transport was stopped by eight men dressed in SA caps, field-grey coats with no insignia and high boots, and armed with carbines. The said persons discovered when searching the vehicle that the murderer of Horst Wessel was among the passengers and demanded he be turned over.

The officials, according to Diels, had no choice but to comply. The men dressed in SA uniforms then apparently drove off in the unmarked cars waiting there for them: ‘The officials were not able to take up the chase, as several of the party of soldiers who stayed behind threatened to use force of arms if they did not turn back. We have not yet determined where they took Höhler. His death seems meanwhile quite certain.’19 Diels lied several times in this letter. A kidnapping was out of the question, SA man Willi Schmidt reported later. Schmidt, who was directly involved in the incident, was a Sturmführer in SA-Trupp 51 in Berlin-Neukölln in 1933 and one of Göring’s new auxiliary police officers. He was commonly known as ‘Pig Face’ (Schweinebacke) because of his prominent harelip, and was considered a brutal thug, impervious to ‘any pedagogical influences’, but had

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The Making of a Nazi Hero

Left: Rudolf Diels, director of the Gestapo in 1933, who took part in the murder of Höhler. Right: Richard Fiedler, SA-Brigadeführer, Reichstag deputy as of November 1933

outstanding connections with Berlin SA-Gruppenführer Karl Ernst.20 During his interrogation by police 35 years after the incident, Schmidt convincingly told how on the day in question he got a call from Ernst at about seven a.m., summoning him at once to the police prison on Alexanderplatz. An auxiliary officer, Walter Pohlenz, was waiting there with discharge papers for Höhler, signed by Diels.21 Höhler was taken from prison and they headed east in a convoy of three vehicles. Other participants, according to Schmidt, apart from Ernst and Pohlenz, were: Kurt Wendt, the Gruppenführer’s driver; Walter von Mohrenschildt, Ernst’s second adjutant; Gestapo chief Diels; SA-Brigadeführer Richard Fiedler; Willi Markus, commander of SA-Standarte VI; and Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia. The group supposedly comprised a total of eight to twelve people, all of them – with the exception of Diels – wearing SA uniforms.22 If we believe the political ‘testament’ of Karl Ernst, all of these men were reliable and had been assigned special tasks before.23 What transpired on 20 September 1933 was described by Schmidt as follows: Arriving at the edge of the forest, Gruppenführer Ernst gave a short speech and declared Höhler to be the murderer of Horst Wessel. Pohlenz and I still had Höhler with his hands bound behind his back. Suddenly several shots

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Revenge of the Nazis were fired. The order to shoot was given by Ernst and, as far as I remember, Diels. […] After the shots were fired, Pohlenz and I immediately freed Höhler. He crumpled to the ground. Finally I shot at Höhler too, while he lay on the ground.24

Once the participants had returned to Berlin, Diels, who later was said to have bragged repeatedly about the murder of Höhler, declared at Gestapo headquarters: ‘Horst Wessel’s death is avenged.’25 The others involved in Höhler’s murder probably felt a similar sense of satisfaction. These were not randomly chosen SA men, but by and large the elite of the Berlin SA in 1933, many of whom had known Horst Wessel personally. The top tier of the Berlin Nazis in 1933 was essentially a product of the battle of the streets in the waning years of the Weimar Republic. The men knew each other personally and felt a common bond due to their shared experience of street fighting, marches, and prison sentences, as they never failed to emphasize years later, for instance, at meetings of the ‘Old Guard’. Personal motives – a look at the other participants in Höhler’s murder, apart from Diels and Schmidt, reveals – also played an important role in the acts of revenge carried out against Wessel’s assailants as of 1933. The martyr cult around Party Hero No. 1, which intensified after the Nazis’ seizure of power, was not only an instance of creating an interchangeable hero; it also served as a foil for Berlin SA men, strengthening their self-identity. Anyone who posed as a friend of the dead Horst Wessel, not least to advance his career, derived special rights from this claim, as well as obligations. For the leader of SA-Brigade 32 in Berlin-Mitte, Richard Fiedler, taking part in the murder of Wessel was at any rate a ‘matter of honour’.26 Born on 24 April 1908 into a working-class family in the north of Berlin, Fiedler was a close companion of his coeval Wessel in the late 1920s. According to a nurse who allegedly tended the mortally wounded Wessel in February 1930, Fiedler was there with Wessel’s mother and sister, sitting up at the sick bed in Wessel’s final hours.27 The two young men’s lives were similar. As of 1922, Fiedler, who had started an apprenticeship as a metalworker and locksmith, was a member of the Bismarck League and the Rossbach Freikorps, which as of 1921 operated under such dubious camouflage names as ‘savings association’ and ‘society for agricultural vocational training’. Notorious Nazi leaders like Kurt Daluege, the first Berliner SA commander and later SS Colonel General, Rudolf Höss, future commander of Auschwitz concentration camp, Karl Ernst and Martin Bormann, later the head of Hitler’s Chancellery of the Reich, formed a militant völkisch action group early on in this secret society.28

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The Making of a Nazi Hero In October 1925 Fiedler joined the SA, and on 9 April 1926 the NSDAP, obtaining membership number 33,777. He commanded an SA-Trupp as of 1927 and served as ‘propaganda administrator’ (Propagandawart) of NSDAPOrtsgruppe Berlin-Alexanderplatz. The police took him into custody on several occasions in 1929 because of his involvement in politically motivated brawls. That same year he was promoted to Sturmführer of SA-Sturm 1, perhaps on account of these ‘services’ to the movement.29 The Communist Die Rote Fahne, in its 6 March 1930 edition, labelled him a notorious ‘Nazi hoodlum’. They published a photo of Fiedler and threatened – not even a week after Wessel’s funeral – with reprisals ‘in days to come’. Fiedler, charged with jointly committed bodily harm, had been exonerated by the BerlinMitte Lay Assessors’ Court (Schöffengericht Berlin-Mitte) the day before. In a clash with Communists on 27 August 1929, or so the indictment read, he had allegedly fired at a group of people with an army pistol and beat up a man with a steel rod or rubber truncheon.30 After Wessel’s death, Fiedler carved out the kind of career that Wessel, too, could have had. He became a Sturmbannführer in 1931 and that same year, on 15 September, leader of SA-Standarte VI in Berlin-Brandenburg, which bore the honorary name ‘Horst Wessel’. In November 1931 Fiedler took part in a three-week training course at the Reich Leadership School (Reichsführerschule) of the NSDAP in Munich. ‘A smashing lad!’ Goebbels wrote appreciatively in his diary in 1932. Fiedler largely lived off the charity of his future in-laws until 1933. He claimed as well to have received some money from Goebbels’s Der Angriff before the Nazis came to power. Judging by the cases of Wessel and Fiedler, it would seem that the intensive political activities of young Berlin SA leaders were largely financed by family members.31 Immediately following the political sea change, this young man with glowing references was elected to the Reichstag, where technically he remained a representative of the NSDAP until 1945. At the same time, as of 1933, he held the office of city councillor in Duisburg and, later, in Halle an der Saale. There he was elected as a member of the Halle Scientific Society as well. In Berlin he was the namesake of the Richard Fiedler House on Parochialstrasse 29, which until 1933 had housed the Anti-War Museum founded by pacifist Ernst Friedrich. Fiedler survived the Night of the Long Knives, perhaps thanks to his seat in the Reichstag. As part of the elimination and disempowerment of hitherto leading SA men that took place over the next few months, he was, however, demoted from SA-Oberführer to Standartenführer in Duisburg. The official reason seems to have been a negative report by the general of the regional police force, Welke, issued on 17 July 1934. Welke accused him of behaving in a ‘proud, presumptuous and

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Revenge of the Nazis arrogant’ manner for some time past, and alleged that he had embezzled up to 40,000 reichsmarks. With the help of influential friends such as Kurt Daluege, then Lieutenant-General of the Berlin Regional Police, and SA Chief of Staff Lutze, Fiedler nevertheless succeeded in restoring his reputation as a ‘model political soldier’ and old-school SA leader.32 On 24 October 1936 Fiedler married his longtime girlfriend Ursula Flamm. Born on 31 December 1912 in Berlin, Flamm was the former BDM leader of Greater Berlin. The witnesses at the ceremony were Goebbels and the former chief of police of Berlin, Wolf-Heinrich Count von Helldorf. ‘Two Old Fighters wed. Deserving of happiness,’ the propaganda minister wrote in his diary.33 Fiedler was adept in turning his acquaintanceship with Wessel to his own advantage. He starred as himself without further ado in the 1933 propaganda film Hans Westmar, and was even mentioned as an ‘SA adviser’ in the opening credits. He spoke about Wessel at a rally of the National Socialist German Students’ League on 30 May 1933 in Berlin. And as late as 1939, in a long piece in the Mitteldeutsche National-Zeitung, he evoked Wessel as the ‘epitome of a National Socialist fighter and model political soldier’. One of the many illustrations accompanying the text was a group photo depicting a number of Berlin SA men in the late 1920s. The only one mentioned by name other than Wessel was Richard Fiedler himself.34 On 1 August 1939, shortly before the invasion of Poland, Fiedler joined the General SS, where he was promoted to the rank of SS-Brigadeführer on his very first day. From November 1941 on, the wearer of the Golden Party Badge also held the rank of SS-Obersturmführer in the Reserve Waffen-SS. From 1 October 1940 to the summer of the 1944 he was commander of SS-Abschnitt 43 in the Polish textile centre of Łódź. The German occupiers renamed the city Litzmannstadt, and between December 1939 and April 1940 set up one of the largest Jewish ghettos on Polish soil there, which at times had a population of more than 160,000. It remained until August 1944, longer than any other ghetto in Eastern Europe, because of its increasing armaments production for the Reich. One quarter of its inhabitants died of hunger, disease or ‘extermination through labour’ (Vernichtung durch Arbeit), or were killed as a result of the police terror carried out by the German occupiers. Most of the Jews from Łódź and the Warthegau were murdered in the nearby extermination camps of Kulmhof (Chełmno) and AuschwitzBirkenau. Of the 435,000 Jews living in the territory of the Warthegau in 1939, only 15,000 survived.35 Fiedler held the rank of major-general in Litzmannstadt and is said to have resided in the palace-like premises of Königsbacher Strasse 32 with his wife and two, later three, daughters.36 From there he was sent to the front

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The Making of a Nazi Hero several times, to the SS ‘Viking’ and ‘Death’s Head’ (Totenkopf) divisions as well as to the SS ‘Westland’ replacement battalion. He never seems to have been at the front line for more than a few weeks at a time, though. The head of the Main Personnel Office (SS-Personalhauptamt) of the Reichsführer SS complained profusely in early January 1943 that Fiedler, after only two weeks on duty in autumn 1942, had more or less on his own authority absented himself from the front and returned to Litzmannstadt. He placed himself and his merits as an ‘Old Fighter […] ostentatiously in the foreground’, was always feeling badly treated and was ‘in every way extremely fussy with regard to himself’. The conclusion was less than favourable: ‘I cannot help but have the impression that Fiedler does not take his call-up to the front very seriously.’ Complaints like this had no consequences for the time being. But Fiedler was ultimately transferred, ordered first to Denmark before being given a post as ‘SS and police leader’ in Montenegro in November 1944. In the Balkans he focused on ‘anti-partisan operations’. He returned after just a few weeks – allegedly wounded – to Germany, but was already giving orders in the SS high command of Mecklenburg and Pomerania by December.37 Another of Höhler’s executioners, Willi Markus, carved out a similar career for himself. Markus was born in Berlin on 13 August 1907, and knew Fiedler from their schooldays together.38 The trained furrier joined the SA on 1 September 1926, three months before Wessel. Two years later he became member No. 98,332 of the NSDAP. According to his SA reference of 1937, Markus was ‘a committed SA leader’ who ‘took part in almost all the brawls, marches and rallies in Berlin during the time of struggle [Kampfzeit], sometimes in a leadership capacity’. As the successor of his mate Richard Fiedler, he worked his way up to be the leader of Standarte VI in BerlinBrandenburg. After the war Markus testified that on 30 June 1934, during the Röhm Putsch, he had been arrested at his SA headquarters and brought to the barracks of Leibstandarte-SS ‘Adolf Hitler’ in Berlin-Lichterfelde, which today houses part of the German Federal Archives. He barely escaped being shot to death, and was immediately relieved of his duties as leader of SA-Standarte VI. Markus indicated in 1947 that after these events he had ‘no desire any more to do political work for National Socialism’. Yet judging by his subsequent career, it would seem that this feeling was not long-lasting. On 1 November 1934 he joined the Feldjägerkorps, the SA field police, in Berlin, where he soon attained the rank of captain. With the Anschluss in 1938 he was given the task of building up the political police unit of Klagenfurt. One year later, on 1 July 1939, he was commissioned as a Sturmbannführer SS.

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SA funeral procession for a Standartenführer, 1934; in the first row (f. t. l.): Richard Fiedler, Karl Ernst and August Wilhelm of Prussia

Renouncing his rights as a civil servant, Markus entered the full-time employ of the SS and was honourably discharged from the police on 31 March 1941. He took command of the 112th SS-Standarte in the Warthe Oberabschnitt, or corps area, and by 20 April 1941 had been promoted to Obersturmbannführer. From the summer months of 1941 to 27 January 1943 he served in the Waffen-SS. In the end he belonged to the ‘Hitler Youth’ Panzer Division.39 Kurt Wendt, another participant in the murder of Höhler, was by contrast only moderately successful in climbing the Nazi career ladder. Born on 5 December 1910 in Berlin, Wendt was Karl Ernst’s driver at the time of the incident, worked as a salesman for Daimler-Benz AG and Auto-Union AG from 1926 to 1939, and became member No. 515,707 of the NSDAP on 1 April 1931. On 13 March 1931, two weeks before joining, he was shot on his way to SA duty, presumably by Communists. He spent the next nine months laid up in hospital with a leg injury, and by his own account was promoted to ‘honorary SA-Truppführer’ that same year on account of the incident. The Nazi ‘Blood Order’ he received in 1938 was allegedly for the same reason.40 The Blood Order – officially the ‘Medal in Remembrance of 9 November 1923’ – was the highest honour bestowed by the NSDAP, being awarded about 6,000 times between 1934 and 1945. From 1933 Wendt belonged to the

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Motoring Department of the Reich Leadership of the German Labour Front. He rose in the ranks of the SA and was Obersturmführer by 1940. In the war he held the rank of non-commissioned officer before a field court martial sentenced him on 28 October 1940 to one year and two months’ imprisonment and the loss of his military rank for insubordination and assaulting a military sentry in the field.41 Likewise complicit in the murder of Höhler was ‘Nazi Prince’ August Wilhelm of Prussia, who just a few days before the incident had been appointed SA-Gruppenführer and Prussian privy councillor, for which he received a congratulatory telegram from Hitler. During the Kampfzeit the prince was active in SA recruiting and worked for the SA High Command in the rank of a Standartenführer.42 From April 1932 he also represented the NSDAP in the Prussian Landtag. August Wilhelm, or so the party leadership calculated, was to help the party gain sympathy, money and members from the better circles of society. ‘And so I was in the thick of things wherever the SA went, at marches, meetings, brawls, […] and this mainly in Berlin,’ the prince wrote in his party curriculum vitae in 1942. He claimed to have made up to 14 appearances a day as a speaker for the NSDAP. The esteem he was held in by the party, and presumably the proximity to young SA men as well, appealed to August Wilhelm enormously. He reputedly referred to himself as ‘the best horse in the Hohenzollern stable’.43 Up to now it was an open question as to whether August Wilhelm of Prussia was indeed a party to the murder of Wessel. His biographer, Lothar Machtan, in addressing the prince’s possible complicity, merely mentions ‘reports that cannot be entirely dismissed’ but are not necessarily true.44 But the files leave no room for doubt. In his detailed and often quite credible account of Wessel’s murder, ‘Pig Face’ Schmidt said that ‘Auwi’ joined the prisoner transport from Berlin in his own car, driven by his chauffeur.45 Without having heard Schmidt’s testimony, Kurt Wendt indicated during his 1969 interrogation that August Wilhelm joined the fatal outing in his own motor vehicle. According to Wendt, the prince’s driver stayed behind in the vehicle while ‘Auwi’ joined the others in carrying out the execution behind an embankment. It is certain, moreover, that the Hohenzollern participated in other acts of violence in 1933.46 Three years earlier, just after the attack on Wessel in early 1930, the prince had taken direct advantage of the burgeoning cult around the new martyr. August Wilhelm allegedly paid a brief visit to the critically wounded Wessel in the hospital. Just a few days after Wessel’s burial, he showed up at a ‘fellowship evening’ of the Horst Wessel Sturm to express his solidarity with ‘the dear SA’. In the following years he regularly honoured the dead

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Revenge of the Nazis Sturmführer on his birthday and the anniversary of his death. This was just the way Wessel would have wanted it – at least according to Nazi propaganda. In the Wessel novel of Hanns Heinz Ewers, the dying Sturmführer demands in a talk with Goebbels that Hitler admit August Wilhelm into the SA: ‘I tell you, doctor, they will find no better, more upright SA man than the Prussian prince August Wilhelm!’47 The novel anticipated what Hitler planned to enact in spectacular fashion on 21 March 1933, the ‘Day of Potsdam’– the reconciliation between himself, the simple man from the people who rose to become Reich Chancellor, and the old regime embodied in the person of geriatric Reich President Paul von Hindenburg.48 The new solidarity between the First World War corporal and the former chief of the Supreme Army Command was to symbolize the new national community, which had purportedly undergone a religious revival and succeeded in setting aside class differences in the face of a common objective. In his speech at the Garrison Church (Garnisonkirche) in Potsdam, Hindenburg reminded his listeners to ‘look back on old Prussia’, which once unified Germany. One should take Prussian virtues as a model in the present day and age, he continued. ‘Jealousy and party squabbles’ had to be overcome to achieve ‘national self-determination’ and ‘spiritual renewal’.49 The ‘warm, firm’ handshake between Hindenburg and Hitler sealed the pact between new and old Germany. The close link between young Sturmführer Wessel and the Hohenzollern Prince August Wilhelm propagated in Ewers’s novel was to have a similar function. August Wilhelm of Prussia did in fact join the NSDAP on 1 April 1930. His membership number was 24, a ridiculously low number, normally reserved for ‘Old Fighters’ of the first hour.50 The rhetorical pathos of the Ewers novel and the ‘Day of Potsdam’ are all the more repugnant when we bear in mind the crimes of their ‘heroes’. Höhler’s bullet-riddled body, buried a good half a metre deep by three to four men, was discovered on 7 August 1934 in the vast woodlands of Müncheberg.51 A mushroom gatherer had stumbled across a skeletal hand sticking out of the ground. The news spread fast. Despite daily terror in the nearby capital, a genuine crime in the peaceful little village of Müncheberg was quite a sensation. The investigations were therefore painstaking. The police report went as follows: Once the corpse was removed from the woods and the sand adhering to it brushed off, it become apparent that it was dressed in brown dungarees, jacket and trousers of the sort worn by prison inmates. […] The articles of clothing […] had […] two stamps inside, 7 x 3 ½ cm, with the following designation: St.A.W. The left sock was labelled number 200.52

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The Making of a Nazi Hero One day later the police were certain. The prison commissioners at the Berlin Supreme Court (Berliner Kammergericht) informed them that the acronym in the dead man’s clothing stood for ‘Strafanstalt Wohlau’ – the Wohlau Penitentiary in Silesia. A ‘strictly confidential inquiry’ with its director revealed that uniform no. 200 had been issued to Albrecht Höhler. The director seems to have been quite an orthodox man. Perhaps he was deluded about the new ways and morals in distant Berlin. He had learnt, contrary to the truth, in the autumn of 1933 that Höhler had died while in custody in Berlin. Now the dead man had resurfaced – shot to death in a prisoner’s uniform. The prison director assumed there had been some sort of crime, at least according to the standards that applied until early 1933. He then proceeded to tell the two lawmen the names of the men who had picked up Höhler from his institution: Gestapo officers 183, 181 and 236, detective sergeants Mechow and Marowsky, and the auxiliary policeman Pohlenz.53 The reports on file are quite revealing about the cause of death. A 7.65 mm bullet – the same calibre as in the murder of Else Cohn – was still lodged in the body of the corpse, just above the waistband. Four ‘hazelnut-sized’ bullet holes were discovered in the head. The back of the skull was shattered. The doctors performing the autopsy determined that the bone at the back of

Willi Schmidt, SA-Sturmführer from Berlin-Neukölln, a.k.a. ‘Pig Face’

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Revenge of the Nazis the head felt ‘soft and smashed in’. The entire face of the corpse was stained dark-brown from dried-up blood. The doctors found bullet entry wounds in the left and right shoulders. The dead man’s thorax was cracked at the ninth and tenth ribs, his larynx smashed. The skull, the report continued, was apparently smashed by a blunt object. He had also been strangled – the cause of the injured larynx. The dry conclusion of the medical examiners: ‘A natural death could not be determined by the autopsy.’54 The local police passed the case on to the Gestapo after just a few days, on the instructions of the homicide squad at police headquarters in Berlin. Again no investigations were conducted here, for obvious reasons.55 As in the case of Cohn, the new rulers made sure from the very start that their crimes remained in the dark. Already on 15 February 1933 Göring, in his capacity as Reich commissioner for the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, issued a decree stating that ‘any and all kinds of police surveillance of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and its associated organizations […] shall henceforth be prohibited.’56 Höhler was not the only prisoner to become the victim of an illegal murder by the SA and Gestapo in 1933. ‘The murderous combing of prisons’, wrote Hans Bernd Gisevius, a former Gestapo employee, in 1946, became a ‘favourite sport of the Gestapo’.57 Throughout the Reich several hundred people died in prison awaiting trial, many as a result of torture, others through targeted killings. The following examples from the capital should suffice. On 7 April 1933 the body of well-known clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen, born Hermann Steinschneider, was found in an advanced state of decay near Zossen, just south of Berlin. Hanussen had been apprehended by SA men in late March and was presumably shot on 24 March, after being held in the concentration camp of SA field police at the barracks on General-Pape-Strasse, on the border between the Berlin municipal districts of Schöneberg and Tempelhof. In the 1960s, a former Gestapo employee stated for the record that he had once heard it was ‘Pig Face’ Schmidt who had shot the famous clairvoyant.58 The case was never solved, as investigations were terminated on 1 June 1933 at the behest of the Prussian Ministry of Justice. Presumably the death of Hanussen, who had close contacts with leading Berlin Nazis, had something to do with his predicting the Reichstag fire. Several National Socialists, among them the future chief of police, Count von Helldorf, owed money to Hanussen as well.59 Former SA man Adolf Rall, who had been serving time in Neuruppin prison since 1932 and, like Höhler, was picked up ‘for interrogations in Berlin’ a few days before his death, was supposedly killed by SA men as well on account of his inside knowledge of the Reichstag fire. The body of 28-year-old

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Rall was found on 2 November 1933 near Strausberg, just east of Berlin. He was naked and had a bullet hole in his forehead. His head was smashed by blows from a shovel. The medical examiner from Berlin, Müller-Hess, determined: ‘The entire left half of the skull is caved in, forming a hollow. Just above the left eyebrow is a 7½ cm long, 2 cm wide gaping wound. […] Palpating the head, one feels several fractures in the cranium.’ Only by means of fingerprints was the identity of the corpse established two days later. The dead man’s mother was informed that her son had escaped from custody, before receiving the news of his death a few days later. By this point in time the remains of Rall had already been buried in the Berlin-Marzahn cemetery.60 These cases show how, already in 1933, SA and Gestapo worked hand in hand when it came to performing executions and preventing their crimes from being cleared up. In the cellars of General-Pape-Strasse alone more than 2,000 people were detained in the course of 1933. At least 15 prisoners died there. The result of these acts of extreme violence, according to Gisevius, was a ‘general brutalization and desensitization of all legal concepts’.61 Investigations by the public-prosecution office were rare, and if they occurred at all were soon put to an end by the higher authorities. The case of Höhler was no different. In a confidential report from 23 September 1933, the head of the Gestapo, Diels, suggested to Prussian Minister President Göring that they issue a decree – penned by Diels himself – ordering the justice minister to stop any potential trial. The official search for the ‘kidnappers’ was abortive in the end, but Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner knew better. He later noted in his diary: ‘Files do not indicate that investigations were conducted.’62 The initiative of the Gestapo chief – tantamount to the legalization of political assassination in Germany, at least if committed by the Nazis – was rather opportune for Göring. On 29 November 1930 he ordered the ‘quashing of any pending judicial inquiry against persons unknown’ in the case of Höhler. Already on 4 November he had decreed the ‘immediate quashing’ of preliminary proceedings in the case of Rall. These were not isolated cases. One man alone in 1933, Roland Freisler – state secretary in the Ministry of Justice by appointment of Göring, NSDAP member since 1925, SA officer, and the man responsible for thousands of death sentences between 1942 and 1945 as the presiding judge of the ‘People’s Court’ (Volksgerichtshof) – supposedly ordered investigations to be dropped in about 50 cases concerning acts of violence presumably committed by SA men.63 Göring relied on the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933 as the formal basis for his decisions. As early as 3 March he had announced at a rally of the NSDAP that, while making use of existing state institutions and instruments

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Revenge of the Nazis of power in the ‘death struggle’ against Communism, by no means would he respect the limits of the law: Fellow Germans, my measures will not be afflicted by any legal scruples. My measures will not be afflicted by any bureaucracy. It is not my job to be just or fair here, but only to destroy and exterminate, nothing more! This struggle, fellow Germans, will be a struggle against chaos, and I do not wage a struggle like this with instruments of police power. A bourgeois state might have done that. Certainly, my dear Communists, I will use the instruments of police and state power to the extreme so you do not draw the wrong conclusions here, but the death struggle, my iron heel upon your neck, I will wage with those below, the brownshirts!64

Göring valued the ideologically reliable SA in 1933 as a quick and easy-tomobilize terror squad, which underlined through drastic measures the party’s absolute claim to power while instilling fear in the political opponent. When national comrades gathered together for their first Third Reich Christmas, the neutrality of police and courts, already disputed in the Weimar Republic, lay once and for all in ruins.

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Sally Epstein (top, August 1933) and Hans Ziegler (bottom, 1934) were sentenced to death in the second Wessel trial and decapitated on 10 April 1935 in Berlin-Plötzensee

15

Judicial Murder: The Second Horst Wessel Trial (1934)

In June 1933 the police received reports that boatman Peter Stoll, born on 9 October 1902 in Saarburg near Trier and a member of the Communist stormtroopers in Berlin-Mitte in 1930, was involved in the killing of Wessel. Der Angriff reported on 22 November 1933 that the authorities had stumbled upon the putative perpetrator by chance. Stoll, according to the Nazi paper, had been quarrelling with his wife in the street in Berlin, totally intoxicated. One word gave rise to another and soon some curious onlookers had gathered. The situation escalated. Frau Stoll finally shouted at her husband that ‘he seems to want to do to her what he did back then to Horst Wessel’. Witnesses reported the incident to the police and the latter promptly began to investigate. On 11 June 1933 Peter Stoll was arrested in his flat at Wassmannstrasse 11 and brought to the police prison on Alexanderplatz.1 With that the situation had come to pass that lawyer Felix Halle had expressly warned about in his 1924 guidebook How Does the Proletarian Defend Himself Before Police, Public Prosecution and Court in Criminal Matters of a Political Nature?: ‘A political worker who cannot control himself and give up drink is a danger not only to himself but also to his comrades.’ Stoll was taken into custody and attempted suicide, but failed. He soon betrayed his comrades, according to Willi Jambrowski, who was convicted in the first Horst Wessel trial of 1930.2 Stoll began by incriminating a second alleged participant in the attack on Wessel who had not been investigated up to that point: the painter Sally Epstein, born on 3 February 1907 in Jastrow (today Jastrowie, Poland). Epstein had joined the KPD and Red Front Fighters’ League in 1928. His comrades called him Max, his second given name. Epstein said he was no longer a member of either organization at the time of the attack. The state prosecutor later claimed that he was responsible for propaganda and agitation in the Berlin-Mitte stormtroopers. The police arrested Epstein on

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 24 August 1933. Six months later, on 12 February 1934, the hairdresser Hans Ziegler, born on 15 June 1901 in Köslin (Koszalin) and employed as a part-time waiter at the Baer tavern since January 1930, was taken into custody as well.3 Perhaps the accused really were involved in the ‘proletarian drubbing’, but it is possible that Epstein and Ziegler just had bad luck, being among those associated with the Communist stormtroopers of Berlin-Mitte whom Stoll happened to remember by name. Both were allegedly in the Baer tavern on Dragonerstrasse 48 when Wessel’s landlady showed up on the evening of 14 January 1930. Epstein said he was only marginally involved in the ensuing discussion and did not join the group of nine to ten people who set out for Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62. This is contradicted by a statement made by Walter Jambrowski on 25 April 1930, who said that Epstein and Hans Ziegler were both part of the group.4 Stoll, too, was closely connected to the Communist stormtroopers in January 1930. One day after the attack on Wessel, the police raided the tavern of Wilhelm Schulz on Elisabethstrasse 30 and broke up a meeting of the organization’s First Division, identifying all of those present. Among the 41 individuals were Hermann Kupferstein, Max and Willi Jambrowski, as well as Peter Stoll. It is likely the ‘tallish young man named Peter’, who, according to Willi Jambrowski, also took part in the cell meeting at Baer’s on 14 January 1930, was the same Peter Stoll, but there is no way of knowing for sure.5 The criminal police, at any rate, did not investigate the identity of this Peter at the time. Stoll indicated in a curriculum vitae of 1950 that Berlin was his ‘hometown and battleground’ from 1929 on. In Berlin he not only took part in various strikes but was also a member of the illegal Mitte stormtroopers, he wrote. He had joined the KPD back in 1922, and served in the following years as treasurer of Red Aid as well as being active in the Red Front Fighters’ League.6 Stoll, Epstein and Ziegler were neither defendants nor witnesses in the first trial. But the situation changed dramatically three years later. The police force, meanwhile ‘refreshed’ with Nazi personnel, did everything it could to find other potential perpetrators in the Wessel case. The investigations, various newspapers agreed, were ‘vigorously pursued’.7 Stoll, already in custody, gave investigators the name of Epstein in the summer of 1933, presumably in the hope of at least saving his own neck in a desperate situation. On 17 November 1933, the chief state prosecutor moved for a preliminary investigation of homicide. He also remarked that ‘a conviction is only possible with the mutually incriminating testimonies of Stoll and Eppstein [sic]’. Both were accused of aiding the crime by acting as lookouts ‘according to a previously devised plan’.8 Ziegler, with his thirteen prior convictions, had

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Judicial Murder not yet become a target of investigators. The investigation files of 1930 had apparently not been examined very thoroughly. The plea of the party leadership, represented by Ministerial Director Wilhelm Crohne, to punish the principal offenders from the first trial more harshly and retry the case of Höhler and his comrades, was rejected by Chief State Prosecutor Thomas. Reopening the case would be unlawful, he said, as the verdict of 1930 was unobjectionable from a legal standpoint: ‘The verdict […] draws all the conclusions it is possible to draw from the facts of the case that were known at the time and have since been confirmed by new and in-depth investigations.’9 This slap in the face from a state prosecutor generally known for advocating the harsh and swift punishment of all guilty parties by no means allayed the Nazis’ desire for revenge. If the courts were not going to play along, they would have to resort to other means. Severer punishment of those condemned in the first trial – the murders of Cohn and Höhler had shown – could be meted out by SA and Gestapo without the consent of the courts. This course of action had one crucial disadvantage, however. The killings would have to be done illegally and could not receive too much attention. They could not replace a public act of vengeance for the murder of Horst Wessel, exploitable for propaganda purposes. But the Nazis were intent on setting an example, putting on a show of resoluteness for their followers and intimidating the political enemy even more. So there had to be a second trial, no matter if the accused were minor figures or even wholly innocent. The second Horst Wessel trial opened on 12 June 1934. Sally Epstein, Peter Stoll and Hans Ziegler stood trial before the Jury Court of Berlin (Berliner Schwurgericht), accused of being involved in the murder of Wessel. Three days were scheduled for the main proceedings, which took place in the courthouse on Turmstrasse, second floor, room 406. The criminal police had identified Ziegler just a few months before the trial began. It is impossible to reconstruct from the surviving files who actually blew the whistle on him. During pretrial detention he allegedly confessed to joining the group of Communist stormtroopers on 14 January 1930, as they set out for Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62. But he claimed to have left the scene of the crime before Höhler, Rückert, and the others ascended the stairs to the flat of Salm and fired the fatal shot.10 The defendant was not accused of aiding and abetting homicide – as in the summons for Peter Stoll on 2 June 1934 – but of jointly committed murder.11 This was entirely incongruous with the verdict of September 1930, which concluded that the ‘proletarian drubbing’ of January 1930 was not about murder at all. Besides which, the three defendants were guilty at

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The Making of a Nazi Hero most of acting as lookouts. Willi Jambrowski wrote in his curriculum vitae of 1945 that he knew for sure that Ziegler and Epstein did not take part in the incident. He recalled after the war that, when summoned to the court as a witness in 1934, the presiding judge had dismissed his objection with the words: ‘Detainee Jambrowski, keep your mouth shut. Be happy you’ve served your sentence already, otherwise you’d be sitting here where these defendants are sitting.’ Hermann Kupferstein, too, wrote from Paris exile in 1934 that to his knowledge the accused had ‘nothing at all to do with this affair’. Admittedly, he did not seem particularly knowledgeable in the matter. He referred to Sally Epstein as Salli Eppstein, and did not mention Hans Ziegler, the third defendant, at all. He went on to claim that, although both Stoll and Epstein were members of the Berlin-Mitte stormtroopers in those days, Stoll was not even in Berlin at the time of the incident, and Epstein, who had a heart condition and was periodically bedridden, was merely a ‘passive member’. ‘These are two innocent men here about to be condemned.’12 The state prosecutor offered a vastly different version of the events. In his view Stoll, Epstein and Ziegler voluntarily joined the group around Höhler, Rückert and the Jambrowskis, knowing very well that they were planning an ‘act of violence’ against Horst Wessel. Arriving at Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62, the defendants took up their posts as assigned by Max Jambrowski – Epstein at the entrance of the building, Stoll at the corner of Grosse Frankfurter and Wassmannstrasse. Ziegler, who originally wanted to go up to Salm’s flat with the others, was to stay behind in the stairwell and make sure the coast was clear.13 The defendants in custody initially denied any involvement in the crime at all. They later testified that they had at least accompanied Höhler and the others to Grosse Frankfurter Strasse. There is no way of knowing for certain what motivated these subsequent self-incriminations or to what extent they were made under duress.14 When questioned by the judge, Epstein said that his previous statements had been recorded incorrectly. The officers interrogating him had also ‘used unlawful force against him’ – tortured him, in other words. After repeated interrogations, he stated while in custody that he had been given the task of ‘watching out for Nazis’ in front of the building and giving a long whistle if he should see one. Ziegler, too, was to give the same warning in case of approaching Nazis. Were these significant contributions to the crime made by co-perpetrators? A plausible conjecture was offered by Heinz Knobloch: that the defendants had initially followed the ringleaders, but had then become a nuisance to them when things got serious, and were therefore kept busy in a more or less useful way.15

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Judicial Murder Despite months of examination, the prosecution was unable to conclusively prove the individual guilt of any of the defendants. State prosecutor Herbert Ebert was hence all the more aggressive in his tirades against the Communist stormtroopers and the ‘pimp lie’ of the KPD. He was out to intimidate the jury, too: there would be no scandalous verdict like the one in the first trial of 1930. The prosecutor found that the justice system in those days was in a downright pathological state and had abandoned itself to ‘a less than honorable softening of the bones caused by liberalist thinking’.16 Remarks in the investigation files indicate that some other, entirely different considerations also played a role. Ziegler, with his multiple previous convictions, was an ‘antisocial character’, a ‘professional criminal’, the chief state prosecutor wrote. Epstein’s case, another passage read, was ‘aggravated by his Jewish descent’.17 The Nazis got the verdict they wanted: the maximum penalty for Ziegler and Epstein. On 15 June 1934, the court sentenced them to death and permanently deprived them of their civil rights as co-perpetrators in a perfidious and ‘beastly act’ of ‘low-mindedness’. Peter Stoll, the third defendant, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison and the ten-year loss of his civil rights as an accomplice.18 These punishments were out of all proportion compared to the sentences of 1930. The court came to the conclusion this time that it was by no means a planned ‘proletarian drubbing’ that had simply got out of hand, but that Wessel’s death was wilfully planned by all of the participants. An authorization to carry out the murder had even been granted by the KPD leadership in Karl Liebknecht House, the court concluded. The defendants Epstein and Ziegler had willed the act ‘as their own’, and even Stoll, who left the scene of the crime when Höhler, Rückert and the others climbed the stairs to Salm’s flat, was considered a perpetrator under criminal law for not attempting to hinder the deed. Allowances were made in Stoll’s case for his not having joined the Communist stormtroopers until October 1929, which is why his intention to ‘eliminate the Sturmführer Wessel’, whom he allegedly did not even know by name, was deemed less wilful.19 This saved his life. It is possible too that the Nazi system of justice was rewarding Stoll for incriminating Epstein and Ziegler. The appeal lodged by the two men sentenced to death was quickly dismissed. The Second Criminal Division of the Reich Supreme Court in Leipzig ruled on 5 November 1934 that the verdict in the first Wessel trial of 1930 could have ‘no effect in terms of procedural or substantive law’ on the judgement passed in the second trial. The new verdict, in other words, was legally sound. The decisive factor in this ruling was the Reich Supreme Court’s confirmation that the Berlin jury court had determined ‘without

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The Making of a Nazi Hero legal error’ the intention to kill on the part of all the Communists involved. The fact that Epstein, Stoll and Ziegler had set out with the others to Grosse Frankfurter Strasse and stood guard for them there was sufficient reason for the highest German court to assume their complicity in the crime. Having weighed all the circumstances, they must have expected that Wessel could be shot if attacked. Hence they had acted with deliberation and endorsed this possible outcome.20 For all the attempts of the Nazi judiciary to justify its actions, there was no disguising the fact that condemning Ziegler and Epstein to death and carrying out the sentence was a clear case of judicial murder. ‘The most elementary sense of justice can only rebel against such a death sentence dictated solely by political passions,’ the liberal Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote, as helpless as it was indignant, after the sentence was announced. The paper continued: ‘Eppstein [sic] is a Jew, which does not make his situation any easier in the present proceedings. The defendants received the verdict with tears and broke down. Frau Ziegler went into a fit of screaming and had to be carried out of the courtroom.’21 The German-language Pariser Tageblatt, founded a year before by émigrés under the direction of Georg Bernhard, former editor-in-chief of the Vossische Zeitung, was just as severe in its judgement. ‘The law’ in Nazi Germany was being ‘trampled underfoot […] and is dictated only by political motives’. The state prosecutor was well aware of these views, and tried to mock them during the trial. He defended the actions of the court and spoke in his final speech about a ‘purified sense of German justice’ that the ‘international literati’ might fail to appreciate.22 The extent to which the draconian sentences of the second Wessel trial were the result of political pressure can be seen in several memoranda that the chief state prosecution at the Berlin Supreme Court and the Berlin Regional Court sent to both the Reich and the Prussian Ministry of Justice after the sentences were passed. It requested amnesty for the convicted and the commutation of their sentences to life imprisonment. The jury in its entirety even concurred with this request.23 The remarks of State Prosecutor Thomas are particularly informative regarding the motives behind these petitions. Though having ‘no reservations in any respect’ about Epstein and Ziegler’s conviction for murder from a legal standpoint, he wrote to the Reich Justice Minister, it would nonetheless be ‘dissatisfying from a human point of view and would have to be perceived as unjust to let Epstein and Ziegler suffer what the principal offenders deserved.’ The sentence, in 1935, would neither act as a deterrent – at a time when the Communist murder of National Socialists was a thing of the past – nor would it evoke a ‘sense of just

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Judicial Murder punishment’. The danger, rather, was that executing the condemned men would be perceived as ‘belated and unsatisfactory revenge’. Alfred Apfel, the most prominent defence attorney in the first Wessel trial, wrote a personal letter to Göring from exile in Paris. He asked for ‘purely human reasons’ that the two men be pardoned: ‘I am convinced that many members of the National Socialist Party would sympathize with this.’24 All these pleas came to nothing, however. Adolf Hitler, who from February 1935 had sole discretion to pardon those on death row, refused to commute the sentences of Ziegler and Epstein, deciding instead – as the cynical formula went, even in the Weimar Republic – ‘to let justice take its course’. The decree of pardon already drawn up by the Ministry of Justice was destroyed in the Presidential Chancellery.25 Just a few days earlier, on 17 March 1935, Franz Gürtner, justice minister for both Prussia and the Reich, and State Secretary Roland Freisler had expressly recommended enforcing the death penalty in a memorandum to Hitler. The minister’s statement took issue with the argument that the death penalty was unduly severe. The considerable incongruity between the sentences meted out in the first trial and those handed down at the second, he explained, could ‘essentially be seen as balanced out’ by the killing of Ali Höhler and Else Cohn, as well as by the preventive detention prescribed for the other principal offenders. With that, the Reich Justice Minister was basically legalizing the political murders committed by the Nazis in 1933. With such an understanding of the law it is no wonder that Gürtner did not share the state prosecution’s opinion that the verdict of 1930 was correct. A ‘faulty verdict from 1930’ was not sufficient grounds, the justice minister cynically wrote, ‘to keep the convicts Epstein and Ziegler from receiving the capital punishment they deserve’.26 A number of Nazis at the grass-roots level repeatedly urged for the severest punishment of the ‘Wessel killers’. A certain Gerhard Jackel, who presented himself as the volunteer head of the Nazi prison-welfare service at Wohlau penitentiary – Höhler’s former prison – wrote several letters appealing to the authorities and ultimately to Adolf Hitler personally. The ‘incredible judicial error’ of 1930, he said indignantly, had to be rectified; all of the ‘killers’ had to be executed. If need be an exceptional law should be passed for this purpose that could be used to reopen all the murder cases since 9 November 1918, he suggested. ‘Every killer should be done away with, the accomplices too,’ one Frank Schmied from Munich wrote in a similar vein to Göring. And in January 1935 a certain Walter Zühlsdorf from Berlin-Friedenau even applied for the job of executioner – interestingly enough to the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and not to the relevant authority, the Ministry of Justice. The 40-year-old trained gunsmith explained in his

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The Making of a Nazi Hero letter of motivation that it was a ‘matter of honour’ for him ‘to make good on the promise to our comrade Horst Wessel and execute the two surviving murderers’.27 With Hitler’s refusal to pardon Epstein and Ziegler, the executions were to be carried out ‘as speedily as possible’.28 On 10 April, at Berlin-Plötzensee prison, the two men were beheaded with an axe, the standard form of execution in Prussia at the time. Epstein, whose execution the following morning was announced on the evening of 9 April, was ‘emotionally agitated and physically broken’. His request to speak to his foster mother one last time was rejected by the officials of the public-prosecution office, because, they argued, ‘the visit would only be a torment for him as well as his family members’. The request of SA-Brigadeführer Fiedler, SA-Standartenführer Markus and SA-Truppführer Friedrich to attend the execution as erstwhile ‘good friends and comrades-in-arms of Horst Wessel’ was likewise turned down.29 This refusal was only consistent. The Third Reich, unlike the Weimar Republic, did not issue admission tickets to state executions.30 The bureaucratic machine made no exceptions, not even for high-ranking party officials. Thus, illegal executions like the ones carried out on Cohn and Höhler had their advantages, satisfying the ‘honour of thieves’ and – as seen above – allowing the unhindered participation of men like Fiedler and Markus. At 5.58 in the morning on 10 April 1935, the Magdeburg executioner Carl Gröpler, representatives of the public-prosecution office, the regional court and the prison administration, as well as a clergyman and Epstein’s lawyer entered the execution room. Epstein, hands tied behind his back, was the first of the two condemned men to be led in, at six o’clock sharp. The record of proceedings drawn up for the justice minister noted: The condemned man gave the impression of being broken when the sentence was pronounced and said twice ‘I’m innocent!’ After the pronouncement, the executioner Gröpler was given orders to proceed. […] Epstein’s demeanour was calm and composed. He was led by the executioner to the bench and, his shoulders bared, was laid down on it without resistance. His head, pressed over the block, was at once severed from the body with a single stroke of the executioner’s axe. The corpse was immediately laid in the hitherto concealed coffin by the executioner’s assistants and thereupon given to the representative of the Anatomical-Biological Institute of Berlin University. The whole procedure lasted: a) from bringing the convict forward to the end of the pronouncement 55 seconds, b) from handing the convict over to the executioner to carrying out the sentence 10 seconds.

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Judicial Murder Ziegler was beheaded next. His final words – perhaps because he really had turned to National Socialism in the intervening years – were ‘Heil, mein Führer!’ According to the record, Ziegler was ‘quite calm and composed’. A crucifix and two burning candles were set up during the procedure. One stroke was enough to take care of him as well. By 6.06 both executions were over.31 Just a few hours later, Hermann Göring got married with pomp and splendour to ‘Prussian state actress’ Emmy Sonnemann. The civil ceremony took place in the Red City Hall – just a few kilometres from the execution grounds – and the church ceremony in Berlin Cathedral. ‘Radiant sunshine bathes the city,’ a jubilant Völkischer Beobachter reported. And on the front page: ‘Atonement for Horst Wessel’s murder!’32 Three years later there was nearly a third Horst Wessel trial. On 14 July 1937, a certain Rudolf Klose in Görlitz told the authorities that he knew another person involved in the murder. He was referring to a man named Bruno Natusch, who had told Klose himself that he had been posted on the street as a lookout during the attack. He claimed to have known Ali Höhler and Else Cohn personally. Natusch, born on 6 March 1894 in Zaborowo, Poland, and a merchant by trade, was subsequently arrested by the police in Werminghoff, near Hoyerswerda. The suspect denied all of the charges, merely admitting that at the time of the incident he had been a KPD sympathizer and lived in Berlin. But he was guilty as far as the Görlitz criminal police was concerned and an identity parade was set for Monday, 19 July 1937. It never got that far, however. Bruno Natusch hanged himself the night before with his belt from the window of his cell in the police prison of Hoyerswerda.33

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Time of Suffering

Like Else Cohn and Albrecht Höhler, the others convicted in the first Wessel trial were relentlessly persecuted by the Nazis. The new powers-that-be put the supposed Wessel murderers who had served their sentences by the spring of 1933 back into ‘protective custody’. The ‘legal basis’ for these measures was the ‘Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State’ of 28 February 1933, which in effect abolished the basic rights guaranteed in the Weimar Constitution. In addition to this, on 12 April 1934 Prussian Minister President Hermann Göring issued a directive on the ‘imposition and execution of protective custody’. The directive made arrest possible without a court order ‘if the detainee through his behaviour, in particular through activities hostile to the state, poses a direct threat to public safety and order’. Thus, any citizen the regime considered objectionable could be sent to a concentration camp for an indefinite period.1 Those complicit in the Wessel murder were held for years in various concentration camps where detainees were subject to constant physical violence. Thousands of regime opponents died as a result of the inhumane conditions, and many were tortured. The persecution was coordinated by the Gestapo, which in 1939 was incorporated into the newly founded Reich Security Main Office under Reinhard Heydrich. Moreover, the relatively independent SA was responsible for many acts of violence in 1933, the year the Nazis seized power, as shown by the murder of Höhler. Finally, the goings-on surrounding the show trial of 1934 and the executions the following year make plain that the Ministry of Justice also had a hand in persecution. Little is known about the subsequent fates of those condemned in 1930, or of Peter Stoll. These were not prominent people. With the exception of Viktor Drewnitzki, they were low-ranking functionaries of the KPD, ordinary people who were stigmatized as ‘Communists’ and ‘criminals’ and who disappeared from the public eye of an increasingly Nazified society after

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Time of Suffering their conviction. The ones who survived this persecution were silent about it later, saying nothing about the conditions of detention or the reasons for their being held. We have little more than a bare outline of the facts – their stations of imprisonment. But it is worth taking a closer look at these individual fates, because however prominent the case of Wessel’s killers may be, they are nonetheless representative of the fates of thousands of others, people who have been completely forgotten and who survive at most as a name and a number in laboriously researched commemorative volumes and death registers. A first group of victims comprises those who received the longest sentences in 1930 and who were still serving time in regular prisons when the Nazis seized power: Erwin Rückert and Josef Kandulski, who had stood outside Wessel’s door with the gunman Höhler, and Max Jambrowski, the putative commander of the Second Squad of the Berlin-Mitte Communist stormtroopers. Josef Kandulski, who had been in Brandenburg-Görden prison since 1931, was put into strict solitary confinement in 1933. Under normal circumstances his sentence of five years and one month, reduced by an amnesty, the Impunity Law (Straffreiheitsgesetz) of 20 December 1932, would have been up by the end of 1934 at the latest.2 But the conditions of imprisonment radically changed on 30 January 1933. This is evident in Kandulski’s personal file. The prisoner had requested a seven-day parole in late 1932. ‘As such’, the prison warden in Brandenburg-Görden, Rudolf Schwerdtfeger, wrote, there were no fundamental objections to a temporary furlough. But the request was ultimately rejected in Kandulski’s own interests, ‘in order to first let the dust settle from the political commotion […] in Berlin right now’. On 21 April, the relevant authorities in Berlin decided that temporary parole was out of the question for a ‘convinced Communist’ like Kandulski.3 In 1934 the prisoner was transferred to the main police prison in Berlin. On 8 May 1935 the 13th Grand Criminal Court (Grosse Strafkammer) of the Berlin Regional Court ordered the subsequent preventive detention of Kandulski. The prisoner was a ‘dangerous habitual criminal’ with a ‘deep inclination to crime’. The national community, the court argued, had to be protected from Kandulski for an indefinite period. Finally, on 26 November 1942 – according to a handwritten note on the cover of his prison file – Kandulski was handed over to the Gestapo, who put him in a concentration camp.4 He died on 7 January 1943 in Gusen, a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz. Many inmates there were worked to death by forced labour in the surrounding quarries or fell victim to sadistic acts of violence by camp leaders and their henchmen. From 1942 on, prisoners were murdered in mobile gas vans and at the nearby Hartheim euthanasia centre. An estimated 35,000

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The Making of a Nazi Hero

Left: Peter Stoll, sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in the second Horst Wessel trial in 1934. Right: Erwin Rückert, 1930, sentenced to six years and one month in prison in the first trial in 1930, died in Mauthausen concentration camp in 1943.

people died in Gusen between 1940 and 1945. Prisoners sardonically dubbed the camp Mordhausen, or ‘murder houses’, because of this high mortality rate. The camp death register lists ‘suppurating pleurisy’ as the cause of Kandulski’s death. The corpse was cremated on 10 January 1943.5 Erwin Rückert, who was sentenced along with Höhler to six years and one month in prison, served time at first, like Kandulski, in Brandenburg. In his case the prison warden agreed to his request for a brief furlough in late 1932. It never came to that, however. On 17 February 1934, Rückert was transferred to Neusustrum concentration camp near Papenburg an der Ems, where camp inmates – according to the verdict against camp leader Emil Faust reached in 1950 – were treated ‘worse than cattle’. He was assigned to a ‘moor detachment’ as a forced labourer. Neusustrum was one of 15 separate camps referred to collectively today as the Emsland, or moorland camps, and which, like the other camps in Prussia, were subordinate from 1933 to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, and later, from 1 April 1934, to the Ministry of Justice. The inmates in the Emsland camps, among them a high number of political prisoners – the best known of which, in camp Esterwegen, was 1936 Nobel Peace Prize winner Carl von Ossietzky – were to help colonize a structurally weak and sparsely populated region. Thousands died from the hard physical labour, digging ditches all day with heavy shovels while up to their knees in water.6

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Time of Suffering There is no indication of how long Rückert spent in Neusustrum concentration camp. In 1936, having just served his sentence of 1930, the authorities ordered his subsequent preventive detention on the grounds that he was a ‘dangerous habitual criminal’. Erwin Rückert died six weeks after Josef Kandulski, also in Gusen. The official date of death in the Mauthausen death register is 21 February 1943. The commander of the Mauthausen, however, had informed Rückert’s wife Hildegard on 5 February that her husband had died of ‘purulent colitis’ on 21 January. This is also the date recorded in the Gusen death register, number 1,152. His corpse was allegedly cremated four days later in Gusen. A death certificate, the camp commander informed Rückert’s wife, could be requested from the registrar’s office of Mauthausen II for a fee of 72 reichsmarks. Frau Rückert paid. She also had an urn with his – supposed – mortal remains sent to Berlin, which she then had interred in the ‘concentration-camp cemetery on Humboldtstrasse’, by which she presumably meant the municipal cemetery in Reinickendorf.7 Max Jambrowski, who had finished serving his two-year sentence on 13 April 1933, was immediately taken into ‘protective custody’. He was initially put into Sonnenburg concentration camp, and then, in 1934, was moved to Lichtenburg concentration camp. His arrest was ordered on 13 February 1933, two weeks after Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor but still before

Left: Max Jambrowski, sentenced to two years in prison in 1930, held in ‘protective custody’ by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945. Right: Willi Jambrowski, sentenced to one and a half years in prison in 1930, detained in various concentration camps from 1933 to 1945.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero the Reichstag fire.8 On 7 August 1937, Max Jambrowski was transferred to Buchenwald as a ‘political detainee’. Former prisoners later claimed that Max Jambrowski had a bad reputation among his fellow inmates. He supposedly acted as an informer for the camp directors, denouncing fellow inmates, and was willing, ‘literally, to do any dirty deed’. He allegedly betrayed to the Gestapo workmates of his in the Buchenwald carpenter’s shop. He was also prepared to reveal more about the attack on Wessel to improve his situation in the camp. A former inmate called him a ‘despicable stinker’ and said he was widely unpopular.9 On 27 November 1937, Max Jambrowski was brought to the Gestapo in Berlin. From there he was presumably sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 11 February 1938, where he remained with a brief interruption until 19 April 1944. He later said he worked as a ‘foreman’ in the camps as well as acting as an ‘assistant kapo’. Similar to the block elders, the kapos were ‘prisoner functionaries’ who supported the SS in camp administration and received certain privileges in return, but could also, thanks to their elevated status, help lighten the load of other prisoners.10 In the final months of the Third Reich, Max Jambrowski was held in the men’s sector of Ravensbrück concentration camp. A few years after the end of the war, a new workmate of Max Jambrowski reported him as having said he’d been better off ‘as a concentration camp foreman’ than now, in the Soviet zone of occupation. Jambrowski defended himself by pointing out that he had lived in the camps with the constant fear of being killed. He also emphasized that he would not have survived the camps without the unfailing support of political prisoners from his party.11 Walter and Willi Jambrowski, the brothers of Max, were among the condemned who had served their full sentences before 30 January 1933 but soon found themselves back in the Nazi crosshairs. By his own account, Willi Jambrowski had been arrested and interrogated multiple times by February 1934 in the course of new investigations into the murder of Wessel.12 On 17 February 1934 he was fetched from his flat at Linienstrasse 66 in downtown Berlin and put into permanent ‘protective custody’, first in the ‘Columbia House’ Gestapo prison, then in Moabit field-police barracks and finally at Sonnenburg concentration camp. In August 1934, after the second Wessel trial, Willi Jambrowksi was brought to the Lichtenburg camp. When this was closed in August 1937 he was brought to Buchenwald, where he was reunited with his brothers Walter and Max. The three Jambrowskis, Willi later wrote, not without a sense of pride, were known in the camp as the ‘notorious Horst Wessel murderers’ and were treated especially badly because of it by order of the camp commander. Willi

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Time of Suffering Jambrowski had to work two years in the quarries, where SS men supposedly knocked out all of his teeth: ‘I never got artificial ones; a Horst Wessel murderer has no right to artificial teeth.’ His brother Walter, unable to withstand the abusive guards, committed suicide in Buchenwald. According to Willi Jambrowski, he hanged himself on the night of 15 August 1937. The special registry office in Bad Arolsen gives 27 August, five a.m., as the time of death. In 1939, the camp commander diagnosed Willi Jambrowski with tuberculosis, the result of hard labour and miserable hygienic conditions. The ‘protective-custody prisoner’ was transferred to the sick ward and then, in 1940, to Dachau concentration camp, where he spent the last years of the Third Reich as detainee number 20,985. American troops liberated the camp on 29 April 1945. Willi Jambrowski was kept in quarantine until 17 June 1945 before returning to Berlin on foot.13 Wilhelm Sander, who together with Theodor Will had hid Höhler and Rückert in 1930 and helped one of them escape abroad, also survived the Nazi dictatorship. On 4 March 1933, just a few days after the Reichstag fire, the new rulers interned ‘KPD financier’ Sander in the Lichtenburg camp. His ‘hearing’ was concluded on 25 July 1933, but he was kept in protective custody ‘until further notice’.14 Where and how Sander spent the ensuing years is unknown. All that was known after the war was that he spent ‘many years in the camps’ together with Ottomar Geschke. In November 1945 Sander was officially recognized as a ‘Victim of Fascism’ of the first category (‘fighters’). Theodor Will was interned in Oranienburg concentration camp, presumably as of 1933. There is no indication of whether he survived Nazi persecution – in 1945 he would have been 66 years old. Little is known in the case of Walter Junek, either. He was sentenced to one year in prison in 1930 and taken into ‘protective custody’ in 1934. Deeply marked by his imprisonment, he was released in the spring of 1936 and died on 5 August 1943 from the after-effects of his internment and abuse.15 By comparison, quite a bit is known about the subsequent fate of party secretary Viktor Drewnitzki, who was sentenced to four months in prison in September 1930 for aiding and organizing Höhler’s escape to Prague. Drewnitzki was among the opponents of the regime arrested after the Reichstag fire. The police took him to the remand prison at Alexanderplatz, but he was released after just a few days. Drewnitzki, by his own account, was again arrested on 3 July 1933 by ‘the Gestapo and an SA squadron [Hundertschaft]’ and taken to the SA prison on General-Pape-Strasse.16 A fellow inmate, Emil Priemer, testified that Drewnitzki was ‘repeatedly and severely maltreated’, being beaten and kicked in cellar room 4/5. The inhumane

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The Making of a Nazi Hero conditions in this SA prison were described by a former inmate after the Second World War: We were locked in a room with blood and clumps of hair on the walls. From the neighbouring bunker we could hear the screams of mistreated prisoners. […] In the evening they would lead us out to the courtyard, supposedly for a walk. Darkness had fallen, and our walk was escorted by truncheon-wielding SA men. It was only a couple of seconds before a random bludgeoning ensued. This happened every evening.17

Priemer also said about Drewnitzki that he was locked up once with ‘SA men imprisoned for criminal offences’. These men had been given orders from the guards to beat the KPD functionary to death. Priemer assumed in 1946 that Drewnitzki had died in a concentration camp. But the former inmate was wrong. Drewnitzki was transferred from the SA prison on General-Pape-Strasse, which was shut down in late 1933, to the remand prison at police headquarters on Alexanderstrasse. In June 1934, after the second Horst Wessel trial, he was taken to Oranienburg concentration camp, where he stayed until August 1934. After that, from August 1934 to August 1937, he was interned in Lichtenburg concentration camp and finally, from August 1937 to April 1945, Buchenwald, with a brief three-month interruption for reasons unknown in the summer of 1939, which he spent in the Gestapo prison on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. In Buchenwald, Drewnitzki, by his own account, was employed in the quarries and as a medical assistant in the hospital ward. From 1939 to 1940 he also served as block elder. In this capacity he was directly subordinate to the SS block leader, to whom he was accountable. Numerous block elders took advantage of their elevated status to get privileges such as additional food rations, clothing, and better medical care. Their chances of survival were disproportionately high.18 With the help of people like Drewnitzki, the KPD had increasingly succeeded by early 1941 in gaining control of the prison community in Buchenwald, putting their own people in important positions, the so-called ‘Red kapos’. The party was extremely successful as a community of likeminded survivors under conditions of Nazi terror, albeit at a high price. KPD functionaries repeatedly used ‘victim swapping’ – the exchange of names on SS prisoner lists, for example – to send non-Communist prisoners to their certain deaths in order to spare party members. There is no evidence of Drewnitzki taking part in such activities. But he was considered a troublemaker in the camp who was only concerned about his own welfare. Viktor Drewnitzki was liberated on 11 April 1945, when American troops reached

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Time of Suffering the concentration camp where the remaining inmates had seized power from fleeing SS men only hours before.19 Just days earlier, Wessel’s former landlady Elisabeth Salm had died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She had served her sentence from the Wessel trial between August 1931 and 18 February 1933 at the women’s prison on Barnimstrasse in Berlin. After just four weeks of freedom she was taken into ‘protective custody’ again on 14 March 1933, being interned in the Moringen women’s concentration camp near Hanover. She was soon brought to Berlin, however, presumably in connection with the new investigations into the Wessel case. A woman imprisoned with Elisabeth Salm who testified to the authorities in 1934 seriously incriminated the former landlady. According to her, Frau Salm had told in prison how she had let the head of the critically wounded Wessel hang down off the edge of the bed so he would bleed to death and no longer be able to bear witness to what happened. Presumably such accusations were little more than backbiting or malicious rumours, but they hardly improved Salm’s situation. Despite being a candidate for discharge, according to a court memorandum of 15 September 1934, she found herself back in Moringen in 1935. From 13 December 1935, Frau Salm was held in Landshut prison for almost two years. The Gestapo ordered her release on 8 November 1937, and just a few days later, on the morning of 12 November 1937, she was allowed to leave the prison. Prohibited from returning to the capital, she moved to Mainz instead, close to her hometown of Bensheim on the Bergstrasse. There she ran an umbrella-repair shop in the following years, but also received support from the municipal welfare office.20 The Nazi persecution of Elisabeth Salm could have ended here, but Wessel’s former landlady, embittered by life, made another crucial error on 20 September 1940. During a train journey from Mainz to Frankfurt she began talking to an unknown man. The conversation, another person present at the time later revealed, soon became political. She vented her frustration. ‘Our ack-ack is crap. I heard that our anti-aircraft men ran away from their stations when the English bombers came,’ Salm is alleged to have said. And on Hitler’s planned conquests, she added: ‘Now he wants Switzerland, too’. According to the informer’s statement, she was evidently happy ‘to have found someone she could finally speak her mind to’. The discussion did not last long. The regime-loyal passenger hastened to alert the police and Elisabeth Salm was arrested on the train.21 On 15 January 1941, the Darmstadt Special Court sentenced Elisabeth Salm to one year in prison for insulting the Wehrmacht (Article 134a of the Reich Criminal Code) as well as for violating Article 2 of the Malicious Practices

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Act, which made ‘openly malicious, inflammatory or low-minded comments about leading figures of the State or the NSDAP’ punishable by law. The National Socialist judiciary used this paragraph to suppress disagreeable opinions and to terrorize dissenters, particularly in the late phase of the Third Reich. ‘The Reich Minister of Justice has ordered criminal prosecution so that punishment must follow,’ the court tellingly concluded in the case of Elisabeth Salm. Her sentence was extended by two months a short while later, when she was convicted in another trial at the Wiesbaden Local Court (Amtsgericht Wiesbaden). Two months of pretrial detention were deducted from the sentence, but she served the rest in full at Mainz prison. On 15 January 1942, she was released, at least according to her prison certificate.22 Elisabeth Salm was, in fact, arrested once again in the spring of 1942 and worked in the tailor’s shop of Ravensbrück concentration camp. How long she remained there and the reason for her rearrest are unclear. What is certain is that she was eventually transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she died under unexplained circumstances in March 1945, just a few weeks before the collapse of the Third Reich.23 Of those condemned in the first Wessel trial, apart from the ones who were still in prison on 30 January 1933 or would soon be arrested again, there was another group who escaped Nazi persecution by going into exile in the Soviet Union. That they were anything but safe there can be seen from the cases of Hermann Kupferstein and the Schmidt family. Red Aid functionary Hermann Schmidt, who was not directly involved in the attack on Wessel but who helped Rückert and Höhler go underground and flee, succeeded in dodging Nazi henchmen. He was able to escape with his wife to the Soviet Union, where their daughter Käthe was working as a shorthand typist for the Comintern, the Communist International. In 1936 the Gestapo put him on their wanted list. Working as a ‘specialist’ in the Soviet Union, Hermann Schmidt was arrested a year later – not by the Nazis but by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in the course of a targeted wave of arrests among German political émigrés on account of alleged Trotskyist activities. The series of NKVD ‘purges’ under Stalin resulted in the arrest of 70 per cent of the German political émigrés in the Soviet Union by April 1938. Many of them were deported, sentenced to forced labour, or executed. Hermann Schmidt and his wife Luise were expelled from the KPD, and their daughter was in a Moscow prison in 1938. Their subsequent fate is unknown. It is unlikely that the Schmidts survived Stalinist persecution.24 More is known about the final years of the former commander of the Mitte stormtroopers, Hermann Kupferstein, alias Selig Graubart. Having barely weathered the proceedings for his expulsion from the party while in Paris

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Time of Suffering exile, he emigrated to the Soviet Union in December 1934 and was arrested there on 3 April 1935. On 22 May 1936, the Stalinist judiciary sentenced him in a special session to five years in prison. In October 1937, while Kupferstein was serving his sentence, the Reich stripped him of his German citizenship. One month later, on 25 November, Hermann Kupferstein was sentenced to death by the Soviet authorities; he was shot on 8 December.25 A special case is the story of Peter Stoll, who was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison at the second Wessel trial of 1934 for his alleged complicity. Stoll was imprisoned first in the Berlin-Plötzensee penitentiary and then, from 5 November 1934, in Brandenburg-Görden prison. In 1939 he was sent for one year to a labour camp in Abbendorf an der Elbe (near Bad Wilsnack), after which, until 1941, he did convict labour in a field unit at Plauer Hof, a state farm near the city of Brandenburg. On 19 February 1941, according to a memorandum of the Ministry of Justice, his wife Marthe Stoll pleaded once again for his release. On 6 July 1941, after serving his full sentence of seven and a half years, Stoll was in fact released from prison. No preventive detention was ordered. Whether it was the efforts of his wife that tipped the balance or Stoll’s cooperativeness in the second Horst Wessel trial that paid off here is a matter of speculation.26 Taken together, these individual fates show the full extent of Nazi vengeance. Of the 16 people who were conclusively convicted by German courts for their purported roles in the killing of Wessel, at least eight of them died an unnatural death during the years of Nazi dictatorship. Two were murdered in 1933, two were executed in 1935, and four were killed in Nazi concentration camps. If we include Hermann Kupferstein and the Schmidt family, who were not killed by the Nazis but were driven into exile, where they eventually became victims of Stalinist terror, the death toll is even higher. Some of the victims would have presumably landed in the claws of Nazi criminal justice anyway, regardless of their involvement in the Wessel murder, whereas others were clearly imprisoned and killed as acts of pure political revenge. Only about a third of the condemned were around to witness the end of the war in 1945. These were predominantly former KPD functionaries, who presumably profited from the relatively well organized community of political prisoners. Viktor Drewnitzki, Max and Willi Jambrowski, and Peter Stoll all returned to Berlin in the early summer of 1945, where in the ensuing months and years they sought recognition for their years of suffering and in some cases took on positions in the newly formed KPD, as of 1946 the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany).27 Particularly successful in this respect was Viktor Drewnitzki, who was held in special regard by the KPD for his leadership role in Buchenwald, and

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The Making of a Nazi Hero who by the summer of 1945 had already become a ‘political leader’ of the KPD in Spandau. Two years later he moved to Magdeburg, where he managed the Rothensee shipyard, later renamed the Edgar André shipyard. In 1952 Drewnitzki retired for health reasons, but was still active for some time in the SED in the regional committee of Magdeburg-Nord. He remained a staunch Communist for the rest of his life. Drewnitzki, bearer of the Patriotic Order of Merit in Silver and a member, aside from the SED, of the Society for German–Soviet Friendship, died of natural causes on 15 October 1963 in Tambach-Dietharz in the Gotha district at the age of 76.28 Willi Jambrowski was initially taken in by his sister in Berlin-Tempelhof. He described his material circumstances and health as extremely precarious in July 1945. All he owned, he said, was an SS coat he had received upon his release from Dachau – which by order of the Allies could no longer be worn. Embittered, he voiced his frustration that former Nazi Party members had ‘lost nothing’ by comparison, and even still had radio sets. The spirit of 1930 was evident in his conclusion: ‘It would be advisable to clean up a little in Neu-Tempelhof.’ Willi Jambrowski was acknowledged as a ‘fighter’ and ‘Victim of Fascism’ on 22 October 1945. This status in the immediate post-war years accorded him the right to an apartment, free health insurance, tax allowances, a job and – in the case of disability – a pension. And yet very few of those entitled to these benefits really managed to move up socially, neither in the Federal Republic nor – despite the extensive change of elites – in the GDR.29 In accordance with the General Law on the Consequences of the War (Allgemeines Kriegsfolgengesetz), Willi Jambrowski received compensation payments from the early 1950s for the years he spent in concentration camps. An ‘initial instalment’ of 3,000 deutschmarks was paid to him by the Compensation Office of West Berlin in the autumn of 1951, with another 5,000 deutschmarks in the offing. Jambrowksi urgently requested payment of the second instalment, appealing multiple times to the authorities and eventually in a letter to the mayor of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter: Good Lord, when you’ve been in a concentration camp for twelve years you can count on your five fingers that you’re totally broke and I had to buy for myself and my wife linens and clothing and whatnot to start with. What are 3,000 when everything is getting more expensive by the day?

By 1954 Jambrowski had received total compensation of 25,482 deutschmarks, as well as 250 deutschmarks a month in disability benefits as of 1953. Some

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Time of Suffering of the money he used to buy property in Lichtenrade in the south of Berlin, where he spent the summer months.30 On 18 May 1951, Willi Jambrowski petitioned to have the verdict of September 1930 reversed. He argued that it had not only cost him a jail sentence but also more than a decade of ‘protective custody’. The West Berlin judiciary turned down his request. A reversal was only possible, it ruled, for verdicts pronounced between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945. And there were no indications in the existing files, the court held, that his ‘protective custody’ was a result of the conviction of 1930. Nor did they give any indication of the actual prison term he served, the court said. Jambrowski was also not classified as a victim of political, racial or religious persecution according to the Law on the Politically and Racially Persecuted (PrV-Gesetz) of West Berlin during the Cold War, since – according to a file memo – he ‘fights against the democratic form of government [as] the adherent of a totalitarian system’.31 In the mid-1950s the Compensation Office of West Berlin had considerable doubts as to whether Jambrowski should have been entitled to compensation at all. The previously convicted and ‘undoubtedly antisocial applicant’, a memorandum of 16 June 1954 said, had ultimately brought persecution on himself. His ‘aiding and abetting homicide’ (the verdict of September 1930) was, after all, a ‘political act of terror’. A ‘basic ethical attitude’, which the bureau had decided was a prerequisite to receiving compensation payments as of 1953, could not be discerned in the case of Nazi-opponent Jambrowski. His uninterrupted imprisonment between 1933 and 1945, the bureau concluded quite ludicrously, meant that Jambrowski had had no opportunity during all these years ‘to exhibit, through reputable acts of resistance, a political opposition to National Socialism founded on ethical principles’. The compensation payments made had therefore been wrongfully granted, but could not be demanded back.32 Such conclusions were not a rarity in the Federal Republic of the 1950s. Indeed, ‘criminals’, ‘antisocials’, homosexuals, victims of forced sterilization, Sinti and Roma, conscientious objectors and Communists were deliberately excluded from the category of those entitled to compensation as victims of Nazi dictatorship.33 Willi Jambrowski lived his last years on a meagre pension. He died on 25 June 1978 in Berlin-Tempelhof. Willi Jambrowski’s brother Max was likewise recognized as a ‘Victim of Fascism’, on 14 January 1946. But former prisoners soon raised some serious objections. They said he denounced other Communists who had taken part in attacks on SA men and their taverns before 1933. Some of these men were put on trial and executed as a result, they claimed. On 27 July 1948, Max Jambrowski was deprived of his status as a ‘Victim of Fascism’ due to these

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The Making of a Nazi Hero accusations made by former fellow prisoners. This, too, was no exception. The relevant central committee on issues of classifying and depriving ‘Victim of Fascism’ status focused on values such as honesty, integrity and the will to work in making their decisions. Previously convicted criminals and ‘antisocials’ were in many cases found unworthy of bearing the honorary title ‘persecutees of the Nazi regime’. Social prejudices had evidently survived the political watershed of 1945. On 16 February 1950, Max Jambrowski was also expelled from the SED following a protracted three-year process. The planned legal proceedings against him for crimes against humanity, pursuant to Allied Control Council Law No. 10 of 20 December 1945, were dropped by the senior public prosecution of Greater Berlin in 1951, among other reasons because the chief witness for the prosecution had died in 1947.34 Peter Stoll, upon being released from prison in 1941, went underground for fear of being arrested again by the Gestapo. He later indicated that he had spent the remaining years of the war working as a boatman for a female barge-owner from the Niederbarnim district until her transport barge was blown up on the Mittelland Canal by Wehrmacht soldiers on 7 April 1945, shortly before the Germans surrendered. Peter Stoll was recognized as a ‘Victim of Fascism,’ ‘fighter’ class, on 3 October 1945 in Berlin. The municipal authorities paid him a one-time ‘honorarium’ of 450 marks and supplied him with a token amount of new clothing. Stoll found work with the river police in the Plötzensee district and later with the Waterways Bureau of BerlinMitte. In June 1946 he married a second time and went to live with his wife in the town of Brettin, Saxony-Anhalt, where he spent the following years working at the Persil factory and occasionally acting as head of the SED’s local group. He was also a member of the local committee of the National Front, the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), the Free German Youth (FDJ) and the Peasants’ Mutual Aid Association (VdgB). Peter Stoll was not noticeably sceptical about the ‘historical mission of the working class’, but he did become increasingly embittered over developments in his immediate surroundings. In late 1950 he wrote: ‘Despite all the obstacles put in my way in the district of Jerichow II during the last year, I will not rest, for a parting of the ways is sure to come in the battle of decision for our Socialist system.’ Peter Stoll died of cancer on 27 September 1961.35 All four survivors were officially recognized (at first) by the authorities as ‘Victims of Fascism.’ Their classification as ‘fighters’ might lead one to believe that their participation in the killing of Wessel was no longer viewed as a stigma but actually considered an honour. In the immediate post-war period the survivors did in fact try to capitalize, materially or symbolically, on their involvement or suspected involvement in the crime. In June 1945

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Time of Suffering Viktor Drewnitzki candidly admitted to being convicted in the Horst Wessel trial. Peter Stoll, too, with the assurance that his actions before 1933 would now meet with official approval, wrote in his handwritten curriculum vitae of 13 June 1945 that he had been convicted for aiding and abetting the murder of ‘bandit and arch-crook Horst Wessel’. The ‘Victims of Fascism’ board of examiners in Genthin cited as an official reason for Stoll’s classification as a fighter in 1951 his ‘complicity in the murder of Horst Wessel’. But the former prisoners would soon learn that even in the Soviet zone of occupation and subsequent GDR it was better to stick to the general fact of having suffered in concentration camps. Viktor Drewnitzki made no mention at all of the Wessel murder in his later curricula vitae, merely referring in a more general way to the persecution suffered on account of his work as a Communist functionary.36 An indication of the SED’s stance on this issue is offered by the case of Hildegard Rückert, who requested posthumous recognition of her husband as a ‘Victim of Fascism’ and was refused. The examining committee at the regional office of Berlin-Mitte initially supported her petition of 16 December 1946, but explicitly pointed out that the recognition would not be for his conviction in the Wessel trial but because of his renewed arrest in 1936, which put the family into dire economic straits. On 19 April 1947, however, the request of Hildegard Rückert was declined after the criminal records of her deceased husband were consulted. They showed that between 1920 and 1928 Erwin Rückert had been convicted a total of twelve times: for grand larceny, embezzlement, receiving stolen goods, and aggravated robbery with grievous bodily harm. The main reason for the rejection, though, was not his previous convictions; rather, it was due to political considerations: ‘Just as the KPD could not view the murderer of Wessel[,] Ali Höhler[,] as their own, we too cannot recognize the trial participants as politically motivated criminals.’37 The putative class judiciary of 1930 had come to a different conclusion.

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17

Post-war Justice

Even after the unconditional surrender of the German Reich, Horst Wessel and his song remained present in the minds of Germans. Everything reminiscent of the hero cult and the historical figure of the Sturmführer was quickly done away with, however. A resolution of the Berlin Senate of 30 June 1945 turned the administrative district of Horst Wessel back into Friedrichshain.1 The Wessel monuments disappeared more or less overnight at the behest of the Allies. The Soviet Military Administration ordered Wessel’s grave in Nicolai Cemetery – a well-known Nazi shrine – to be levelled. Russian soldiers destroyed the gravestone, but did leave the inscription commemorating Wessel’s father. For a number of years now the cemetery on Prenzlauer Allee has been regularly visited by neo-Nazis in search of the ‘hero’s grave’ – whose lease officially expired in 1955 – and who occasionally leave behind propaganda material.2 Two petitions have even been filed since 1989 by private individuals wanting to put the gravestone back in place, both of which were rejected by the cemetery office.3 It was the post-war justice system that had to deal with the aftermath of the cult and the crimes committed in the name of ‘revenge for Wessel’. Whereas the perpetrators in the murder of Else Cohn were so successful in covering their tracks that no state prosecutor took up the case after 1933, investigations into ‘crimes against humanity’ were launched in 1948 in the case of Albrecht Höhler.4 The investigatory work of authorities in the Soviet zone of occupation focused first on the auxiliary police officer Walter Pohlenz. Born on 31 July 1902 in Kiel, Pohlenz had made multiple trips with his police vehicles on behalf of the SA and Gestapo in 1933, including the supposed return transport of Höhler to Wohlau penitentiary. It was mainly on account of other crimes, though, that the police wanted to apprehend him. Pohlenz was one of the most notorious Gestapo torturers, and was supposedly responsible for unspeakable cruelties against Communists embroiled in

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The Making of a Nazi Hero the Felseneck affair – on 19 January 1932 two people were killed and several wounded in clashes between Nazis and Communists at the Felseneck allotment gardens in Reinickendorf, a neighbourhood of Berlin – even torturing some of them to death.5 The Nazi orgies of violence in 1933 would not have been possible without people like Pohlenz. He stands for the many nameless who ‘served their masters’ by actively supporting the National Socialist policy of persecution. In exchange they were rewarded with modest social advancement.6 The trained mechanic Pohlenz, who had run a taxi business in Berlin-Niederschönhausen since 1926, joined the Nazi movement in the early 1930s but supposedly did not become a party member until 1 May 1933.7 He had good connections with local SA leaders and worked for Office III of the Gestapo, where he took part in the abuse of prisoners. Statements made by witnesses paint the picture of an unscrupulous sadist. Pohlenz was allegedly involved when naked detainees were lashed with leather whips or had their genitals beaten with steel rods. He himself ordered prisoners to lick up their own urine from the floor. He was also said to have ‘burned away’ tattoos with cigarettes.8 That many witnesses could still – more than ten years later – offer detailed testimonies of acts committed in the early 1930s was attributable to the fact that the cruelties inflicted on political foes were often ‘to a certain extent intentionally publicized’ in order to humiliate the victims and intimidate those who had thus far been spared.9 An entirely different picture is offered by the ‘laundry slips’ (Persilscheine) Pohlenz later presented in his defence. According to these de-Nazification documents he was always an ‘unselfish, obliging friend’ who even aided the escape of Jews and paid their entire travel costs ‘of several thousand marks […] out of his own pocket, selflessly and for reasons of humanity’. A woman had appointed him the guardian and trustee of her two children. Pohlenz, according to these testimonies, was a ‘great anti-Fascist. Not even a Hitler portrait’, the telltale wording in one of them went, ‘had a place in his home,’ as if this mere fact alone would qualify him as a regime opponent.10 Pohlenz was registered after the war as a resident of Berlin-Adlershof, where he again worked in the car business. There were some changes in his private life, though. The former SA chauffeur had a young sweetheart, who in 1948 was pregnant with their child.11 On 19 June 1948, Pohlenz was taken into custody in Potsdam.12 A few weeks later, on 25 July, the authorities made an announcement in the press requesting anyone to come forward who had witnessed Pohlenz’s participation in the torture of Felseneck victims or the murder of Höhler. The police received at least two tips from people who had read the recent

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Post-war Justice book by former Gestapo employee Gisevius with its detailed description of the murder of Höhler.13 That Gisevius did not mention Pohlenz by name in no way cleared him in the eyes of police investigators. It was also apparent that Pohlenz had not spoken the entire truth in his previous statements.14 The suspect remained in custody. One year later, on 22 July 1949, Pohlenz managed to flee from a guarded sickbay in Potsdam-Babelsberg Municipal Hospital. He had been transferred there just days before for treatment of syphilis.15 Between six and seven in the evening on 22 July, the People’s Police (Volkspolizei) reported, the officer assigned to him, Emil Kunzack, went into town to shop with another prisoner. Pohlenz, who according to a nurse had bribed the officer with cigarettes and food, was left alone and disappeared. Kunzack ran off as well when he learnt of his prisoner’s escape. The dragnet operation immediately launched under the code name ‘Tiger’ failed to capture him.16 Circumstances suggest that Pohlenz had planned his escape long beforehand, possibly with the help of old friends in the police and the justice department. He had already instructed a girlfriend of his young beloved to provide the young woman with the necessary ‘guidance’ (Führung). The putative torturer and murderer attached particular importance to ‘kindness, integrity and steadfastness’.17 Pohlenz absconded to West Germany, where he again came into conflict with the law. In 1950 he was back in custody, this time in Lüneburg. On 27 September 1950, he was sentenced by the local Regional Court (Landgericht) to two years and two months in prison for theft, fraud and forging documents.18 An agreement between the East German state prosecutor’s office and the (West German) Lüneburg state prosecutor about the imposition of a global sentence according to Articles 79 and 74 of the Criminal Code, or about Pohlenz’s extradition to the GDR after serving his term in Celle, came to nothing. Why the West German authorities did not cooperate at this point with the East German state prosecutor’s office, despite the fact that the latter, in an effort to strengthen its case, had sent copies of witness depositions seriously incriminating Pohlenz, cannot be determined from the existing files.19 In other cases there had been an exchange of suspects at the zonal borders, as of 1949 between the two new German states, and this practice continued until 1951. The authorities in the GDR even considered handing over the case to Lüneburg, which ‘under normal conditions’ would have been the most expedient thing to do. But in the post-war period there was no such thing as ‘normal conditions’ in either part of Germany, and so the Brandenburg chief state prosecutor wrote, probably rather aptly, that at present they could not expect a ‘just sentence in the western zone’.20

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The Making of a Nazi Hero The state prosecutor’s office in Potsdam saw no choice but to proceed against Pohlenz in his absence, especially considering that the chief state prosecutor had sent several reminders to open the trial. The proceedings were to be conducted at all costs now that the investigations had been announced and numerous victims of the Gestapo had come forward. And so the main proceedings were opened on 1 March 1951 in the absence of the accused, even though it could not be proved, as the Potsdam State Prosecutor’s Office and the People’s Police had both concluded in internal reports beforehand, that Pohlenz was involved in the murder of Höhler.21 The indictment was for ‘crimes against humanity’ according to Allied Control Council Law No. 10 of 20 December 1945. Pohlenz was accused of persecuting and torturing people for political, religious or racial reasons ‘in a number of independent actions’ in his function as a Gestapo officer in Berlin and its environs between 1933 and 1936. The sentence demanded was 15 years in prison. The trial was adjourned until further notice, however, on 4 April 1951.22 The order to stay proceedings stated that if the Germany-wide manhunt were successful and the ‘perpetrator is discovered in West Germany’, extradition proceedings should be initiated. Since the East German authorities knew that Pohlenz was being held in Lüneburg, this resolution can only be interpreted as the attempt of political leaders in the GDR to postpone – against the wishes of the chief state prosecutor of the state of Brandenburg – the main proceedings against the accused in order to exercise political and also, in the eyes of the critical public, moral pressure on the Federal Republic. Perhaps the East Germans planned to use Pohlenz in a show trial. There were plenty of highly motivated witnesses willing to testify to the acts of cruelty he had committed. As cynical as it sounds, the legally feasible conviction of Pohlenz was hindered in both German states for the sake of gaining a moral advantage in the context of the Cold War and to foil the investigations of the respective other side.23 The Federal Republic refused to extradite Pohlenz to the GDR, citing an impending trial of its own in West Berlin, whereupon on 7 February 1953 the proceedings in the GDR were put on hold.24 This individual case was indicative of a general trend in the GDR in which the number of people condemned for Nazi crimes rapidly decreased during the following years. Whereas 85 individuals were convicted in 1953, there were a mere 35 convictions one year later, and between 1955 and 1959 a grand total of 31. Subsequent convictions in the GDR were virtually the sole reserve of the Ministry for State Security, which had set up an extensive archive on National Socialism.25 Walter Pohlenz, in other words, had profited in a

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Post-war Justice concrete way from inter-German entanglements. Though the East German authorities regularly renewed their search for him, most recently in 1974, he was never convicted for the crimes he committed in the 1930s.26 Pohlenz spent his final years in Wehringen near Augsburg, and later in Bobingen, in the rural district of Schwabmünchen, where he died at the age of 76 on 15 September 1978.27 The West German judiciary tracked down Pohlenz in 1968, in the course of its investigations into the murder of Höhler, and questioned him at length. His case had more or less turned up by chance when the ‘Central Office of the Judicial Authorities for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes’ in Ludwigsburg had issued a reminder in 1960 to investigate violent crimes committed by the SA in 1933 before the last of these offences fell under the statute of limitations.28 The Institute of Contemporary History in Munich supplied relevant information to the Berlin Chief State Prosecutor’s Office. There was nothing really new in these writings. The historians found circumstantial evidence for the murder of Höhler and a lead to Pohlenz’s possible involvement in two books that had been available for years: Lucifer ante portas by the first head of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, and To the Bitter End, first published in Switzerland in 1946 and written by Diels’s former employee, and later opponent, Hans Bernd Gisevius, who was in on the planned coup d’état of 20 July 1944.29 That West German investigations only began in the early 1960s was typical of the Vergangenheitsbewältigung of the Federal Republic, its process of ‘coming to terms with’ or ‘mastering the past’. Only in this decade did a phase of ‘tribunalization’ of the Nazi past, in which perpetrators of the second and third rank increasingly became the focus of attention of an ever more critical public, overcome the far-reaching social taboo on the topic of Nazi crimes. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the prime concern of politicians and the church was the reintegration of perpetrators, and not victims, into the newly forming post-war society.30 The von Bodelschwingh Institution, for example, took in Himmler’s wife Margarethe and their daughter Gudrun, as well as Marie von Tschammer und Osten, the widow of the former ‘Reich Sports Leader’ (Reichssportführer), who headed the National Socialist League of the Reich for Physical Education.31 The consistorial councillor responsible for this, Rudolf Hardt, described it as an ‘exemplary act of Christian charity’, which everyone was entitled to, regardless of politics and ideology: ‘Our daily prayer is that we, our people, finally find the way back to the spirit of love and forgiveness from an atmosphere of hate and denunciation.’ The punishment of Nazis who committed violent crimes, moreover, had certain inherent dangers: ‘What will become of our

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The Making of a Nazi Hero people if the thought of revenge and hatred, albeit the other way around, continues to prevail?’32 Such opinions were common not only in the Protestant milieu of Wessel’s hometown. Already in the late 1940s there were an increasing number of voices in German society demanding a general amnesty, the ‘official erasure of memories of conflict in the interests of social cohesion’, for almost all actions during the Third Reich.33 Thus, from a legal perspective, Germany’s ‘coming to terms with’ or ‘working through’ its Nazi crimes was ‘[t]oo late, too little, too lenient’.34 Whereas inquiries into Nazi perpetrators were the exception in the Federal Republic in the early 1950s, a gradual change of consciousness set in towards the end of the decade, prompted by the debate about an impending statute of limitations for even the gravest crimes committed under National Socialist rule.35 Nevertheless, the judicial inquiry into the case of Höhler dragged on for years. Although they did succeed in identifying some of the main suspects, among them SA man Willi Schmidt, many had meanwhile passed away or had to be regarded as untraceable. Berlin SA commander Karl Ernst and his crony Walter von Mohrenschildt had already been liquidated on 1 July 1934, in the course of putting down the so-called ‘Röhm Putsch’. August Wilhelm of Prussia died of natural causes in Stuttgart in 1949, Rudolf Diels in a ‘hunting accident’ in 1957. With the exception of Schmidt, the other participants who were still alive and were able to be apprehended all refused to speak. To make matters worse, the most important investigation files on the murder of Höhler, from the year 1933, were in the GDR’s possession. East German authorities decided not to hand over the documents to state prosecutors in the Federal Republic and West Berlin.36 The whereabouts of ‘Pig Face’ Schmidt were not discovered until 1968, although he went by his real name and was living in West Berlin. ‘My name need not be kept a secret from historians and writers,’ he stated for the record, quite self-assured and seemingly proud of his ‘historical’ deeds as a National Socialist, when questioned by police on 8 February 1968.37 He openly acknowledged having shot at Höhler in 1933 along with other SA men. And yet the proceedings against him and all the other accused were dropped on 2 October 1969.38 Schmidt insisted that he was ‘acting under orders’; he only shot when prompted by Karl Ernst, by which time Höhler was dead already. A slightly different version, indirectly confirming Schmidt’s subordinate role, was offered by Gisevius in 1946. According to this account, Diels complained about Schmidt with regard to Wessel’s murder: ‘But when you give a notorious scoundrel like “Pig Face” orders to aim well, the sissy misses twice on purpose. Pig Face was literally in tears afterwards.’39

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Post-war Justice The state prosecutor at the Berlin Supreme Court, Hartwig Stamer, did not see ‘sufficient evidence’ that Schmidt, who actually confessed to the deed, was a participant in the murder of Höhler. He argued as follows: Rather, the sequence of events tends to suggest that he did not commit a crime himself but tried to support the crime of others. […] While it is true that Schmidt was one of the most notorious SA roughnecks in Berlin, there are no indications in the present case that he intended to kill an opponent of the new Nazi regime with fanatic zeal and the mutual consent of his superiors.40

Stamer, who at the time was the only state prosecutor in West Berlin investigating Nazi crimes that were not associated with the Reich Security Main Office, was following the ‘extremely subjective theory of complicity’ developed by the Reich Supreme Court. This theory was deemed fair and reasonable by many West German courts at the time in cases where the accused were acting under orders – the assumed situation in most Nazi crimes. In practice it meant that defendants who, in the court’s opinion, did not act ‘cruelly’ and with the ‘desire to kill’ were merely seen as accessories, even if they personally took part in executions.41 As of 8 May 1960, however, prosecution as an accessory to a crime committed before December 1939 was statute-barred. In this way the West German courts succeeded in eliminating 95 per cent of all cases filed against Nazi perpetrators without them ever going to trial. In the very limited number of cases where it actually came to court hearings, the judges generally showed an ‘exceptional understanding’ for the defendants.42 That investigations into ‘Pig Face’ were dropped was not unusual. State Prosecutor Stamer, who forty years later counted the murder of Höhler among the ‘exceptional trials’ of his career, saw no chance of a conviction. He based his order to stay the proceedings in part on the apparently successful re-socialization of a defendant with multiple previous convictions in the 1930s.43 Thirty-five years later Schmidt was married to a nurse, had six children and was self-employed – as the director of a private nursing home in Berlin-Heiligensee ‘with 20 inmates from the Bonhoeffer sanatorium’, as he put it. He had also been designated the guardian of a granddaughter by the Local Court of Berlin-Wedding.44 According to a former neighbour, the Schmidt home housed up to 15 elderly ladies, ‘all on psychiatric drugs’. The same source claims that Schmidt gave up his nursing home in 1975 and went to live with a daughter in the Black Forest.45 Thanks to Schmidt’s detailed statements, the West Berlin courts were able to track down three other living people – Kurt Wendt, Willi Markus

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The Making of a Nazi Hero and Richard Fiedler – who took part in Höhler’s killing. They, too, were examined, but – for the same reasons that saved Schmidt and Pohlenz from prosecution – never charged. There was no more than a suspicion, the state prosecutor wrote in his order to stay proceedings, that the men ‘went to the scene of the crime in awareness of the intention to kill and were present at the execution’.46 Here, as in many other cases, it was supposedly only the ones who were no longer alive at the time of investigations who had done the actual killing. But the order to stay proceedings – a third-class acquittal, as it were – cannot be the final word. ‘Can the legal definition of a murderer, accessory to murder or killer be the same as the historical definition of a Nazi perpetrator?’ historian Michael Wildt recently challenged. He rightly pointed out that the limits of the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure cannot determine the scope of historical inquiry.47 In concrete terms, it is not only the question of individually attributable and hence prosecutable guilt, but also of historical context – of West Germany’s ‘politics of the past’ (Vergangenheitspolitik) between closing the books and starting over. One look at the post-war biographies of the three presumed murderers Kurt Wendt, Richard Fiedler and Willi Markus is illustrative of the overall disinterest, evident in wide sections of politics, the judiciary and society, in a systematic process of accounting for Nazi crimes. This attitude was consistent with the lack of any sense of guilt or wrongdoing on the part of all three men, all of whom can be classified as offenders by conviction. The post-war career of Kurt Wendt exhibits this particularly clearly. At the time of his interrogation in the late 1960s he was living in Detroit, Michigan, where he worked as an office and filing clerk at the German Consulate General.48 How did a one-time Nazi chauffeur and suspected murderer end up in an outpost of the German Foreign Office? After his release from American captivity on 19 June 1945, Wendt lived in Freiburg im Breisgau, where for the next two years he worked for the CARE relief organization (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe) in the French zone of occupation, and afterwards, from 1948 to 1950, as executive director of the West German section of Norwegian Relief for Europe.49 Since Wendt worked exclusively for foreign employers during this period, he never had to undergo the de-Nazification process.50 In 1952 he emigrated to Canada, where that same year he began working as a driver for the German consul general, Adolph Reifferscheidt, in Montreal. Wendt told his employers that all of his documents and papers pertaining to his activities before 1939 had been destroyed in the war. He signed an affidavit to this effect in 1958.51 In 1955 Wendt followed his boss Reifferscheidt to the German Consulate in New York.

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Post-war Justice In the late 1950s, the German Foreign Office, two-thirds of whose staff at that time were former Nazi Party members, became aware of Wendt’s past.52 The agency determined in a ‘general screening’ that the driver had concealed his membership in the SA as well as his decoration with the ‘Blood Order’, and had even expressly denied having belonged to the NSDAP. He was therefore faced with ‘dismissal without notice for important reasons’, in particular the fact that he had lied to get the job.53 In a detailed statement on 4 February 1959, Wendt admitted to giving false information, but at the same time endeavoured to depict himself as a victim of the Nazi dictatorship. He had not been on ‘active duty in the SA’ since 1932 on account of an injury. He claimed to have been arrested by the Gestapo in Bremen on 30 June 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, ‘because it was well known that I was closely associated with the opposition group around Captain Stennes and belonged to a group sharply at odds with the SS and even with Hitler’. He also portrayed his conviction by court martial in 1940 as an act of political resistance. The lies he told to be employed in Montreal were necessary in order to deal with the difficult economic situation his family was in, but they were also morally defensible: It seemed unfair to me that a position that literally meant my deliverance from great hardship should fail because of circumstances that to my mind did not have the significance they outwardly seemed to. Inwardly I had wholly broken with National Socialism much earlier and considered my involvement in it an indiscretion of youth.54

Wendt essentially absolved himself, and his current and former superiors discreetly played down the affair. Georg Federer, consul general of the Federal Republic of Germany in New York at the time, and his predecessor Adolph Reifferscheidt both indicated that they had the ‘best possible impression’ of Herr Wendt. Never had they noticed even the ‘slightest trace of a National Socialist past’ in him.55 Reifferscheidt knew what it was like having to justify incomplete or false statements about one’s past. He, too, had to answer on several occasions between 1952 and 1960 to charges brought against him by his employer that he had concealed his membership in the NSDAP when applying for the position – and he, too, was never sanctioned for it.56 Georg Federer, who from the outbreak of the Second World War was responsible for military and armament issues as well as national defence in the Political Department of the Foreign Office, was even more persistent than Reifferscheidt in keeping Wendt on in the agency.57 On 26 March 1959,

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Legation Councillor Steinbach informed him from Bonn of a ‘very benevolent decision’: You can imagine that this whole affair has given us plenty of headaches. We have had to terminate employment in similar cases to date. But I can inform you that Assistant Secretary Hopmann, when presented with the case, decided that an exception would be made this time for social reasons and that Herr Wendt will not be dismissed.58

He added, however, in a handwritten note, that Wendt should be called back to headquarters in Bonn at the next opportunity because ‘keeping an “old PC” [party comrade] in New York could cause problems’.59 Wendt returned to Germany in the autumn of 1959 as instructed. He spent the ensuing years working for the Foreign Office in Bonn, handling light office chores to start with. By 1960 he had become a salaried employee, and was promoted several times with corresponding pay rises. In Berlin, where he went in 1964, he headed the filing department.60 In late 1967 Wendt requested a post in North America in order to look after his daughter living there. His transfer to Detroit was ordered on 9 January 1968.61 He died there of a heart attack on 13 July 1970. The Foreign Office ran an obituary in the Bonner Generalanzeiger informing readers that they had lost ‘a dutiful and well-liked colleague’ whose memory they would always cherish.62 For Willi Markus, holder of the Golden Party Badge of the NSDAP, the post-war years turned out to be more difficult. By his own account he was made a prisoner of war by the Americans on 7 May 1945 close to Linz.63 He was immediately interned, first in the former SS camp of Linz-Kleinmünchen, which previously housed forced labourers from Eastern Europe, and from 1946 in Fallingbostel, Lower Saxony. One year later the Benefeld-Bomlitz deNazification court (Spruchkammer) charged him with having been a member of the SS from 1 September 1939 and later the Waffen-SS as well, ‘although he knew that this organization was used for committing acts that have been declared criminal by Article VI of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal’.64 His individual guilt for specific acts did not need to be proved in order to convict him. Markus repeatedly denied having been involved in any crimes committed by his SS and Waffen-SS units or even having knowledge of such crimes. The prosecution did not believe him, but the judges did. On 25 February 1948 they sentenced Markus to a fine of 3,000 reichsmarks or a corresponding prison term of 100 days. His pretrial detention was credited in full, meaning he had already served his sentence by the time the verdict was handed

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Post-war Justice down. The reasoning of the verdict shows that the court had largely adopted Markus’s viewpoint – a convenient decision for this married father of three: In assessing the penalty it had to be taken into account that, although the defendant had actively supported the political cause of the NSDAP as of September 1928, he had terminated his party work after the Röhm Putsch of 1934 and from that point on only served the police in a professional capacity. […] Finally, allowances had to be made for the fact that the defendant’s knowledge of the criminal activities of his organization was very limited. In view of these circumstances, the court believed it could refrain from a prison sentence for the defendant, despite his relatively high rank, and deemed a fine sufficient punishment.65

Thus, despite his conviction, Willi Markus left the courtroom a free man. On 28 February he was sent to a refugee camp in Uelzen. From there, on 9 March, he went to Oldenburg, where he was taken in for the time being at an emergency shelter of the German Red Cross.66 The de-Nazification committee in Jever-Oldenburg classified him as a Mitläufer, or fellow traveller. A 1954 memorandum from the Berlin senator for internal affairs indicates that Markus, who returned to Berlin in the early 1950s, applied for re-employment as a civil servant. He was rejected for obvious reasons and lodged an appeal that was reviewed by the Berlin Administrative Court (Berliner Verwaltungsgericht) in 1954.67 It is unknown whether Markus was reinstated as a civil servant pursuant to Article 131 of the Basic Law. His previous conviction from the year 1948, at any rate, was erased from his record in 1956 in accordance with Article 20 of the Impunity Law of 17 July 1954.68 Markus spent the last years of his life working as a doorman in his hometown of Berlin. Richard Fiedler also survived the end of the war, contrary to the speculations of an otherwise well-informed Heinz Knobloch in his book Der arme Epstein.69 In 1945 he was captured by the British but was able, by his own admission, to flee the very next day. He went into hiding and lived for years, undisturbed, as Richard F. Giebeler, import-export agent, in Munich. In order to keep a low profile, his wife and children resettled at first to Oberstaufen in the Allgäu, where they didn’t officially register as residents.70 From 1950 or 1951 the family lived together in Munich. Fiedler dared once again to go by his real name. He worked as the sales representative of a shirt company before founding his own agency with a partner in 1957. The company, later renamed ‘Richard Fiedler OHG’, was originally registered under the names of the two men’s wives, presumably for caution’s sake here as well. Richard

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Fiedler supposedly told friends on multiple occasions, most likely due to the investigations launched by the Central Office in Ludwigsburg, that he lived in constant fear of being called to account for his deeds.71 The Munich State Prosecutor’s Office did in fact initiate inquiries into Fiedler in 1962 after one of his business partners, who by his own account had been a political prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps between 1938 and 1945, reported him to the police. The business partner said that he had learnt from a former trading partner of theirs that Fiedler had been involved in the persecution of Jews in the Polish city of Łódź. He indicated, moreover, that Fiedler was in possession of documents seriously incriminating him as a Nazi perpetrator.72 The investigations launched by the state prosecutor’s office in response were conducted lackadaisically, judging by the files. Though a number of people acquainted with Fiedler corroborated some of these accusations when questioned, the examinations did not yield any evidence that would hold up in court. Fiedler, when interrogated, roundly denied ‘having been involved in violent measures against the Jewish population’. His statement is so revealing as to merit being quoted in detail: My tasks as a leader of the General SS in Lodz were to look after the ethnic Germans from Bessarabia, provided they were SS men, pre-military training, and securing the economic existence of ethnic-German SS members. This alone proves that for reasons of competence alone I could not have been entrusted with other measures. I make a point of noting that at no point in time was I a member of the Security Service and Gestapo. It is true that in 1938 I was leader of SA-Brigade 38 in Halle an der Saale. I was not involved in the Jewish pogrom [9–10 November 1938, the Night of Broken Glass] at that time. I do not know if people from my brigade took part in this operation. I did not find out until later, when I was called on the phone, that the Jewish synagogue was set on fire. I do not particularly remember that a Jew was killed in the operations back then in Halle. Finally, I would like to draw attention to the fact that I never at any point persecuted political opponents from the earlier time of struggle [Kampfzeit]. Unfortunately that is all I can say about the matter.73

Fiedler lied here on several counts – about the persecution of political opponents, for instance, which he was in fact heavily involved in, contrary to his statements. He did, however, admit to holding a key leadership position in the German occupying regime in the Warthegau. In such a capacity he must have known about and played an active role in the mass murder of

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Post-war Justice Jews and the oppression, disenfranchisement and expulsion of the Polish population. The prosecutors arrived at a similar conclusion in 1947 in the case of Willi Markus, who had lived in Litzmannstadt between 1941 and 1945. Markus could ‘not have avoided the terrorization and inhumane treatment of Polish civilians in the Warthegau’.74 This was all the more so for SS-Brigadegeneral Fiedler. Fiedler even indirectly admitted to committing economic crimes. What he called ‘securing the economic existence of ethnic-German SS members’ would more appropriately be described as the ordering and execution of expropriations, thus robbery and extortion. That he was involved in the genocide of the Jews, and had even made suggestions about how to do it, is substantiated by an internal report of Fiedler unearthed a few years ago in a Polish archive by historian Michael Alberti. In a report to his superiors from 20 September 1941, Fiedler advocated dissolving the smaller Jewish ghettos and deporting all of the Jews in the Warthegau to a few, centrally located ghettos. Local conditions seemed everywhere to support the idea that ‘workwise’ the Jews were indispensable where they were. ‘But this’, Fiedler argued, leads to overestimating the work of Jews and making them essential. Not to mention the fact that usually only part of them is exploited for productive work and that the district administrators and commissioners, instead of looking for other people, make their own work easier by doing so and impede the development process thanks to this way of thinking.75

This ‘development process’ that, according to Fiedler, was not to be slowed down by the self-interest of certain departments and local commanders, was the expulsion and murder of the Jews in the Warthegau. Other people could be found, he argued, for the work that needed to be done. The aim of making the new eastern province of the German Reich ‘Jew-free’ (judenrein) as soon as possible had to be attained at all costs, if necessary to the detriment of the war economy. These were not the words of a neutral party or fellow traveller. Fiedler – like the majority of leaders of the German Einsatzgruppen, the mass-execution squads active in Poland as of 1939 – was an ideologically motivated offender who participated in the mass murder of Polish Jews for racist reasons.76 Yet the prosecutors at Regional Court I in Munich ended their investigation of Fiedler just three weeks after his examination in autumn 1963, explaining their decision as follows: ‘The fact that Fiedler was a high-ranking SS leader in Poland during the war is not sufficient grounds […] to establish suspicion of criminal activity, especially considering that there is no concrete evidence

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The Making of a Nazi Hero of his involvement in crimes.’77 A conviction based on Article 10 of the Allied Control Council Law, punishing Fiedler for the simple fact of his membership in criminal organizations such as the SS and the Waffen-SS, was no longer possible at this point in time. Fiedler was never convicted for his participation in the murder of Höhler, either. He refused to testify by the time Berlin law enforcement agencies had finally found his whereabouts in the late 1960s. Fiedler’s lawyer, who later rose to prominence as vice-president of the German Federal Bar Association (Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer), noted tersely on 8 October 1968 that ‘my client, for his part, considers the overall complex of the Third Reich a closed case and would like to spare himself matters of this sort if possible. Although he is innocent of the charges levelled against him, he would nonetheless prefer not to comment.’78 Apparently the courts were fine with that. Richard Fiedler died a free man on 14 December 1974 in Gräfelfing near Munich.79

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18

‘Burden Sharing’

Although Horst Wessel’s mother and sister profited as best they could from the Nazi hero cult, they were not involved in capital crimes. No investigative journalists or state prosecutors took an interest in them in West Germany, but the family’s subsequent development is nonetheless insightful, showing how with a mixture of lies, impudence and obstinacy even former figureheads of the Nazi regime could craft their own personal success stories. The post-war story of the Wessels actually began in the final years of the war. With the Allied bombing of Berlin steadily increasing as of 1942, Inge Sanders took her children and left the capital. The young family spent the ensuing period with Inge’s mother in Krummhübel in the Giant Mountains, where she had also evacuated parts of her household goods and art objects, allegedly valued at 65,000 reichsmarks.1 According to West German journalist Johannes Lübeck, who managed to locate and interview the almost 80-year-old sister of Horst Wessel in the late 1980s, the two Wessel women fled with the children from there to Dresden in early 1945. But Dresden, too, was heavily bombed on the night of 13–14 February 1945, claiming the lives of at least 15,000 people. Wessel’s mother and the Sanders family, who allegedly lost all of the personal belongings they had brought with them from Silesia, continued their westward trek.2 They went to Hanover, to Margarete Wessel’s sister, but could not find shelter there either, because Gertrud Richter had been bombed out. There was nowhere left to go but their native Weser Uplands. After all, Margarete Wessel was an honorary citizen of Hamelin, even if the Third Reich lay in ruins. The family finally found a place to stay in Hajen, a village on the Weser River, south of Hamelin. Dr Sanders worked on behalf of the city from at least December 1946 to April 1947, providing medical care for refugees living in the rural district.3 Starting in the summer of 1947, she worked on the North Sea island of Norderney, where she was employed as director and physician

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The Making of a Nazi Hero in a children’s home at Benekestrasse 44, which supposedly belonged to the Society of German Convalescent Homes for Children and Young People (Deutsche Erholungsheime für Kinder und Jugendliche e.V.), founded in 1929 in Berlin. The society had bought the property in October 1936 from the Zion Lodge of Hanover – which had run a Jewish children’s home there since 1911 – for the price of 63,000 reichsmarks, well below its actual value. Today the home is named after the English humanist Thomas More, and houses the Youth and Family Promotional Association, a charitable society backed by the diocese of Münster, which has operated a family-oriented disease-prevention and rehabilitation centre there since 1958.4 There is no way of knowing for sure how Inge Sanders managed to become the director of a children’s home after the war. She herself said that she convinced the British occupying authorities that the ‘Society of German Convalescent Homes for Children and Young People’, to which she belonged since 1932, later in an executive capacity, had never been formally abolished. The society therefore still owned the property and the home was to be restored to it by the occupying authorities.5 The military government issued a document to this effect on 17 June 1947. Just over one week later, on 26 June 1947, Inge Sanders turned up on the island in the company of Major Nicholis from ‘Property Control’ and Major Unwin from British headquarters in Hanover to take possession of the home.6 This incident was unique in the area. What lay behind it remains a mystery. The director of the competent Aurich branch of the ‘Lower Saxon State Office for the Oversight of Blocked Property’ wrote in May 1949 that ‘Dr Sanders […] entertains the very best connections with the highest English circles.’ The Property Commanding Officer (PCO) had allegedly ordered the property to be handed over in 1947, explaining the move in a memo to the ‘Education Branch Land Niedersachsen [State of Lower Saxony]’ as follows: ‘The importance of this case being given priority over all other matters is emphasised because it is already under observation of interested personages in ENGLAND.’7 This is also alluded to in the correspondence of the British occupying authorities. Thus, for example, a telegram from the British Military Authority in Aurich to British headquarters in Hanover from 29 August 1947 noted that handing over the children’s home to Wessel’s sister was only made possible through ‘the interest at a high level in the UK’.8 There are no indications in the files, though, who these important ‘personages’ could have been and why they interposed on behalf of Inge Sanders, of all people.9 On 8 August 1949, Wessel’s sister was ‘de-Nazified’. The ‘De-Nazification Central Committee for Special Professions’ in Hanover put Frau Sanders in the category of ‘supporters of National Socialism’. She was deprived of her

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‘Burden Sharing’ eligibility to run for political office and was also ordered to pay the court fees of 500 marks. The committee largely misjudged the facts, uncritically siding with Inge Sanders. Thus, it concluded: In public she kept a low political profile and did not let the party turn her into a celebrity for propaganda purposes, which, had she consented, would have been very easy in her case. […] For these reasons and in view of her general attitude towards the party, established above, the committee has come to the conviction that the individual concerned had neither the intention nor the awareness of making a fundamental contribution to National Socialism by virtue of her literary activities.10

The prosecution appealed, but the appeal was dismissed on 27 June 1950. The doctor couple, Herr and Frau Sanders, paid the State of Lower Saxony all of 50 marks. By the time the bailiff tried to enforce the unpaid sum in June 1951, Inge Sanders was no longer to be found in Hajen.11 She had moved away from Norderney, too, on 23 May 1950, after having to give up her position as director of the children’s home in the autumn of 1949. The Sanders family moved to the Lower Rhine region, to Alt-Homberg, a western suburb of Duisburg. Ewald Sanders spent the subsequent years working as a specialist for internal medicine in the neighbouring city of Moers; his wife later had her own practice as an ear, nose and throat specialist in Duisburg.12 Both of them prospered, allowing Ewald Sanders to have not one but two houses built for his family at Schillerstrasse 28 and 30 in Moers. Their construction was partly financed from compensation payments from the ‘burden-sharing fund’ (Lastenausgleichsfond) requested by his mother-inlaw for the villa she lost in Silesian Krummhübel. Between 20 July 1957 and 15 August 1968 the ‘displaced person’ Margarete Wessel received a total of 23,178.80 marks in several instalments.13 The former hero’s mother had a regular income in West Germany from October 1945, with a social-security pension from the Hildesheim Pension Office as well as monthly ‘emergency assistance payments’ from the Ostpfarrerversorgung, the provision fund for pastors from the Eastern territories, initially paid by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover and later by the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland. The correspondence in her pension files contains no mention of the role Margarete Wessel played in the Third Reich. She even disavowed her three children, posing as a lonely old widow wholly dependent on the alms of church, as the state was shirking its obligation to provide for the welfare of its people. It is clear, though, that Margarete Wessel had by no means broken off contact with her daughter,

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The Making of a Nazi Hero her son-in-law having prescribed her several stays at health spas. The church was eager to pay her extra benefits, without recognizing – or wanting to recognize – the family connection to Dr Ewald Sanders, who signed the referrals, or, for that matter, Margarete Wessel’s role in the Third Reich. Horst Wessel’s mother spent her twilight years free of material cares. The pastor’s widow seemed not to have stopped and thought for a second about her own behaviour. It was always the others who were guilty. On 5 November 1951 she wrote, wallowing in self-pity: ‘The State has money for everything; only we surviving dependants of the clergy from the Russianoccupied zone are left outside [draussen vor der Tür]’. Her wording picks up the title of Wolfgang Borchert’s 1947 drama of the Kriegsheimkehrer, or post-war soldier, Draussen vor der Tür (The Man Outside), which apparently had already become a figure of speech. Another of her numerous petitions to the church leadership of Hanover ended with the following characteristic words: ‘As a pastor’s widow I would like to see myself in a position commensurate to my late husband’s standing and be able to lead my life in relative harmony with the present-day.’14 Margarete Wessel died on 12 April 1970 at the Catholic St Laurentius Hospital in the small community of Uedem in the Kleve district. Inge Sanders, née Wessel, passed away on 13 June 1993 in Rheinberg near Moers.15 Their son, named after his uncle, lives today in a university town in Lower Saxony. Born in 1942, the retired mechanical engineer and nephew of Horst Wessel refuses to talk about his family history. He has ‘always declined to comment in the past’ and will continue to do so in the future.16

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19

Belated Justice

On 18 May 1998, the German Bundestag passed a bill that took effect on 25 August of that same year: the ‘Law to Reverse Unjust National Socialist Verdicts in the Administration of Criminal Justice and Sterilization Decisions of the Former Hereditary Health Courts’ (Gesetz zur Aufhebung nationalsozialistischer Unrechtsurteile in der Strafrechtspflege und von Sterilisationsentscheidungen der ehemaligen Erbgesundheitsgerichte). This was preceded by efforts of the Ministry of Justice and, in particular, the SPD and Alliance ’90 / The Greens to finally reach a national ruling on ‘reparations’ (Wiedergutmachung), 50 years after the end of Nazi dictatorship, to at least symbolically compensate the last living victims of the Nazi judiciary.1 The Bundestag’s Committee on Legal Affairs was largely in agreement, beyond party lines, that it was an untenable situation that, for one thing, very few of the perpetrators of Nazi injustices were punished after 1945 and, for another, most of the verdicts pronounced by criminal and special courts in the Third Reich were still valid. When court decisions made ‘after 30 January 1933 were passed for the purpose of enforcing or upholding the National Socialist regime of injustice [Unrechtsregime] for political, military, racial, religious or ideological reasons’ and at the same time contradicted ‘elementary ideas of justice’, the new law reads, they shall henceforce be deemed repealed and invalid. When in doubt, the local state prosecutor’s office where the verdict was pronounced should rule on the matter. The law came rather belatedly – that is to say, only after most of those able to profit from it had died. Sally Epstein and Hans Ziegler, both of whom were sentenced to death in the second Horst Wessel trial of 1934 and executed in 1935, had been dead for 70 years already. Peter Stoll died in 1961. But it is not too late to rehabilitate them, even if only symbolically, especially considering that their case is still of relevance for contemporary history, and the law – as

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Bundestag representative Nobert Geis pointed out – was anyway intended to benefit the less well-known convicted individuals who ‘were not really in the spotlight but were nonetheless victims of Nazi injustice’. Not to be forgotten, future Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin pointed out on the same occasion, with reference to SPD politician Adolf Arndt and his famous speech during a Bundestag debate on Nazi crimes in 1965, is that injustice also disgraces those who ‘do injustice and in whose name it is committed’. It is not only important to underline the fundamental difference between the Federal German and Nazi justice systems, but ‘for morally minded people to make amends for themselves’.2 With these considerations in mind, I submitted a petition to the Berlin State Prosecutor’s Office on 2 March 2008 to rescind the verdict against Epstein, Ziegler and Stoll. I argued in the petition that the decision, with its effect as a deterrent, served the purpose of ‘upholding the National Socialist regime of injustice’ and that a reversal in accordance with Article 1 of the aforementioned law was therefore justified. A separate ruling was necessary in this instance, as a conviction for murder during the Third Reich was generally still valid even after the passing of the new law. If sufficient public interest has been demonstrated and no relatives of the person in question can be located, the relevant state prosecutor’s office is authorized to repeal the verdict ex officio. I could not find any descendants of Hans Ziegler. There were traces of the parents and siblings of Sally Epstein, but no living descendants could be tracked down. The many-membered Jewish family seems to have been wholly wiped out in the mass murder of European Jewry. Sally’s sister Zerline died on 4 October 1941 at the age of 38, and his brother Walter ‘was probably deported to the East’, where he died. Another brother, Arthur Epstein, died in 1939 under mysterious circumstances in the West Prussian town of Jastrow. He was 36 years old. The parents, tobacco worker Jakob Epstein and his wife Jenny, née Jakobsweg, were deported by the Nazis to Theresienstadt concentration camp with an ‘old-age transport’ on 15 December 1942. Jenny Epstein died there a few weeks later, on 22 January 1943. The date of her husband’s death is unknown.3 On 9 February 2009 the Berlin State Prosecutor’s Office ruled that the conviction of Hans Ziegler, Sally Epstein and Peter Stoll for the murder of Horst Wessel was invalid. The conclusion of the Berlin Regional Court of 1934 that the killing of Wessel was murder and not manslaughter – as was ruled in the first trial of 1930 – had been reached in ‘an inexplicable manner’, Senior State Prosecutor Jörg Raupach argued in his decision. Their ‘willingness to commit the crime’, in particular, had merely been imputed, and not verified with ‘supporting evidence’. It is clear from the overall tone of the verdict,

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Belated Justice he continued, that the accused were meant to be a ‘political warning and example’ for others. The verdict had served the ‘obviously political function’ of ‘enforcing National Socialist injustice’.4 Three-quarters of a century after their conviction, and 74 years after their execution, Epstein and Ziegler finally received the justice they deserved, albeit posthumously. In Peter Stoll’s case, the decision also came too late. And yet the reversal of the verdict is an important symbolic act, showing as it does that even in the early years of the Nazi state the law was bent for political purposes, by ordinary courts and without the help of special legislation. The reversal of 2009 also shows that the present-day German judiciary is not only willing to take a critical view of its own past but is also in a position to actually correct earlier judicial errors. At least the legal side of the case of Horst Wessel might now be considered closed.

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Notes

Preface 1 2 3

4

5 6 7

8

Gregor Ziemer, Education for Death. The Making of the Nazi, New York 1941, pp. 140ff. Victor Klemperer, LTI. Notizbuch eines Philologen, Leipzig 2005, p. 13. On the state of research see Oertel, Horst Wessel; Lübeck, Horst Wessel; Knobloch, Der arme Epstein; Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden; Luckey, Personifizierte Ideologie; Lazar, Der Fall Horst Wessel; Baird, To Die for Germany, pp. 73–107; Gailus, ‘Vom Feldgeistlichen des Ersten Weltkriegs zum politischen Prediger des Bürgerkriegs’; Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde. See Christoph Ruf / Olaf Sundermeyer, In der NPD. Reisen in die National Befreite Zone, Munich 2009, esp. pp. 148, 151, 215–21; Maica Vierkant, Märtyrer und Mythen. Horst Wessel und Rudolf Hess: Nationalsozialistische Symbolfiguren und neonazistische Mobilisierung, Marburg 2008. See Franz Fühmann, ‘Das mythische Element in der Literatur’, in: idem, Erfahrungen und Widersprüche. Versuche über Literatur, Frankfurt am Main 1976, pp. 147–219. See Paul Veyne, Geschichtsschreibung – und was sie nicht ist, Frankfurt am Main 1990, as well as the more polemical discussion in Evans, Fakten und Fiktionen. For more detail see Achim Saupe, Der Historiker als Detektiv – Der Detektiv als Historiker. Historik, Kriminalistik und der Nationalsozialismus als Kriminalroman, Bielefeld 2009; Carlo Ginzburg, Spurensicherung. Die Wissenschaft auf der Suche nach sich selbst, Berlin 1995. On the relationship between biographical writing and historiography see HansErich Bödeker, ‘Biographie. Annäherungen an den gegenwärtigen Forschungs- und Diskus­sionsstand’, in: idem (ed.), Biographie schreiben, Göttingen 2003, pp. 9–63. The term ‘national conservatism’ refers to a belief in the historical mission of a Prussian-dominated German Empire and a rejection of the democratic reforms that had gained momentum in Germany since the late nineteenth century.

1. Murder in Friedrichshain 1 2

‘Horst Wessel. Bielefelds bester Sohn’, Westfälische Neueste Nachrichten, 235, 7 October 1933. Uffa Jensen, Eintrag ‘Horst-Wessel-Koog’, in: Benz / Graml / Weiss (eds), Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, p. 520.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 3

LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 17. The common assumption that Erna Jaenichen was only 18 years old and therefore a minor as far as the laws of the day were concerned is incorrect. According to the investigation files of 1930, her birth in Wormlitz near Halle an der Saale actually occurred on 14 October 1905. The civil register office in Halle confirmed an entry with this date in the birth register but did not have any information concerning her date and place of death. 4 Cf. Knobloch, Der arme Epstein, p. 19; Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 442; Engelbrecht, In den Spuren des Verbrechertums, p. 102f.; Leo Heller, Rund um den Alex, Bilder und Skizzen aus dem Polizei- und Verbrecherleben, Berlin 1924, p. 17. For a comprehensive look at the area between Alexanderplatz and Schlesischer Bahnhof see Elder, Murder Scenes. 5 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 9; Inquit [i.e. Moritz Goldstein], ‘Die Braut des Studenten Wessel. Dritter Tag des Kommunisten-Prozesses’, Vossische Zeitung, 229, 25 September 1930; ‘Gericht über Horst Wessels Tod’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 447, 22 September 1930; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 17. 6 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 18. 7 ‘Der Ali-Mord an Wessel’, Der Abend. Spätausgabe des ‘Vorwärts’, 444, 22 September 1930. 8 See the letter from Hans-Hermann Röttger to Heinz Knobloch dated 26 March 1991, in: SBB PK, literary estate 353: Heinz Knobloch, box ‘Der arme Epstein 2’. 9 See Moritz Liepmann, Krieg und Kriminalität in Deutschland, Stuttgart 1930. 10 StAD, G 27 Darmstadt, vol. 887, pp. 1–9; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8310, pp. 41–44 (BStU pagination). 11 See Irmgard von Schubert, ‘In welchem Zustande befindet sich der Jugendliche bei der Aufnahme in die Fürsorgeerziehung? Das Mädchen’, in: Neue Nachbarschaft. Akademisch-soziale Monatsschrift xiii/2/4 (February–April 1930), pp. 28–33, here p. 31; Inquit [i.e. Moritz Goldstein], ‘Die Braut des Studenten Wessel’, Vossische Zeitung, 229, 25 September 1930. See also Ewers, Horst Wessel, p. 144; BArch/B, NS 26/1370a. Erna Jaenichen, too, always used the word ‘fiancé’ in her statements to the police. 12 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 18; copy of the verdict of the Berlin Landgericht (Regional Court) of 26 September 1930, in: BArch/B, Dok/k 42 (DZ-Kartei), p. 3. 13 See ‘Sturmszenen vor dem Kriminalgericht’, Der Tag, 228, 24 September 1930; ‘Der Mord an Wessel’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 442, 22 September 1930; verdict of Schwurgericht II (Jury Court II) at the Berlin Landgericht against Peter Stoll, Sally Epstein, and Hans Ziegler of 15 June 1934, in: LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #11. 14 Erwin Geschonneck, Meine unruhigen Jahre, edited by Günter Agde, Berlin 1993, p. 38. 15 LAB, A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, #21680, pp. 370–82, here p. 371. On the successor organizations of the Rotfrontkämpferbund see Finker, Geschichte des Roten Frontkämpferbundes; Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?, pp. 88–110; Kurt Georg Paul Schuster, Der Rote Frontkämpferbund 1924–1929. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Organisation eines politischen Kampfbundes, Düsseldorf 1975, pp. 225–38. 16 BArch/B, SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/93, p. 242. 17 Ibid., p. 241; Inquit [i.e. Moritz Goldstein], ‘Wer ist schuld an Wessels Tod?’, Vossische Zeitung, 227, 23 September 1930; Verdict of Schwurgericht II at the Berlin Landgericht against Peter Stoll, Sally Epstein and Hans Ziegler of 15 June 1934, in: LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #11. 18 Unfortunately no original of the pamphlet has survived. The only reproduction I know of is in Engelbrechten / Volz, Wir wandern durch das nationalsozialistische Berlin. It is not inconceivable that the Nazis themselves made the pamphlet after the fact to use for propaganda purposes. 19 Copy of the verdict of the Berlin Landgericht of 26 September 1930, in: BArch/B, Dok/k 42 (DZ-Kartei), p. 5f. 20 See BStU, MfS archive ASt 527/51, pp. 53–102, here p. 56.

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Notes 21

See LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 126; GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 84a Justiz­ministerium, #51633, pp. 19–28, here p. 27. For a detailed account of the shooting of Ross: GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 84a Justizministerium, #51633. 22 BArch/B, SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/93, p. 237. 23 LAB, C Rep. 118–01 #2755, pp. 45ff., here p. 45; BStU, MfS archive ASt 527/51, pp. 34–39. 24 LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2756, p. 11f.; ‘Der Mord an Wessel. Was ist eine “proletarische Abreibung”?’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 443, 23 September 1930; ‘Proletarische Abreibung’, Vorwärts. Berliner Volksblatt, 445, 23 September 1930; ITS T/D files, 310470. 25 After the ban on the Rotfrontkämpferbund and the Rote Jungfront (Young Red Front), the Kommunistischer Jugendverband raised the minimum age for its members from 23 to 25. See GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Titel 4043, #415, p. 449f.; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8308, p. 39 (BStU pagination). 26 See LAB, A-Rep. 358–01, #2165, pp. 4ff., p. 37. 27 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8305, pp. 78–86 (BStU pagination), here p. 81; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8303, vol. 1, p. 107. 28 See Inquit [i.e. Moritz Goldstein], ‘Die Braut des Studenten Wessel’, Vossische Zeitung, 229, 25 September 1930. 29 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8308, p. 180f. (BStU pagination). 30 See LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 126 (BStU pagination). Even Höhler’s companion Rückert would not confirm this version. See LAB, A Rep. 358–01, 8305, pp. 78–86 (BStU pagination), esp. p. 83. 31 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8308, pp. 85ff., esp. p. 86. 32 BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 34–56, here p. 41; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8308, pp. 109ff. (BStU pagination); LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8303, vol. 1, p. 106; Inquit [i.e. Moritz Goldstein], ‘Die Braut des Studenten Wessel’, Vossische Zeitung, 229, 25 September 1930. 33 BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 141–46, here p. 143. 34 Copy of the verdict of the Berlin Landgericht of 26 September 1930, in: BArch/B, Dok/k 42 (DZ-Kartei), pp. 6–12; ‘Proletarische Abreibung’, Vorwärts. Berliner Volksblatt, 445, 23 September 1930; ‘Der Mord an Wessel. Was ist eine “proletarische Abreibung”?’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 443, 23 September 1930. 35 Inquit [i.e. Moritz Goldstein], ‘Die Braut des Studenten Wessel’, Vossische Zeitung, 229, 25 September 1930. 36 ‘Heute Plädoyers im Prozess Wessel’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 447, 25 September 1930. 37 Oertel, Horst Wessel, p. 86, fn. 248; ‘Wie Horst Wessel starb (Aufzeichnungen aus dem Journal des SS-Gruppenarztes Dr Conti)’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 24 February 1933. 38 See Schuster, Die SA in der nationalsozialistischen ‘Machtergreifung’, p. 114; Knobloch, Der arme Epstein, pp. 49ff.; ‘Der Ali-Mord an Wessel’, Der Abend. Spätausgabe des ‘Vorwärts’, 444, 22 September 1930. 39 ‘Die Hauptbelastungszeugin im Wessel-Prozess’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 451, 24 September 1930. 40 Oertel, Horst Wessel, p. 86; ‘Der Ali-Mord an Wessel’, Der Abend. Spätausgabe des ‘Vorwärts’, 444, 22 September 1930; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 27. 41 Oertel, Horst Wessel, p. 86f., fn. 248. 42 Engelbrechten, Eine braune Armee entsteht, p. 114; idem. / Hans Volz, Wir wandern durch das nationalsozialistische Berlin, p. 97. 43 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, pp. 5ff. 44 Cited in Engelbrechten / Volz, Wir wandern durch das nationalsozialistische Berlin, p. 97. 45 See Leyh, ‘Gesundheitsführung’, ‘Volksschicksal’, ‘Wehrkraft’; Robert Jay Lifton, Ärzte im Dritten Reich, Stuttgart 1988, pp. 70ff., 80f.; Kempner, Ankläger einer Epoche, pp. 28, 30.

253

The Making of a Nazi Hero ‘Der Mord an Wessel. Was ist eine “proletarische Abreibung”?’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 443, 23 September 1930. 47 A seminal work here is: Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? 48 Der Rote Führer (Summer 1931), p. 6, cited in Finker, Geschichte des Roten Frontkämpferbundes, p. 225. 49 According to Apfel, Les dessous de la justice allemande, p. 199; Weimann, Diagnose Mord, p. 168. 50 Cited in Wagner, Hitlers Kriminalisten, pp. 25–42. 51 See the rather sensational account of Peter Feraru, Muskel Adolf & Co. Die ‘Ringvereine’ und das organisierte Verbrechen in Berlin, Berlin 1995. 52 See Evans, Das Dritte Reich, vol. 1: Aufstieg, p. 366; Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?, p. 124f.; Swett, Neighbors and Enemies, pp. 239–43. 53 See BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 4, pp. 3ff.; BArch/B, SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/93, pp. 237–49, here p. 237. On the illegal actions of the Red Front Fighters’ League after the ban see Finker, Geschichte des Roten Frontkämpferbundes, pp. 203–13. 54 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 4, pp. 3ff. Kurt Finker, on the other hand, writes that the stormtrooper Berlin-Mitte only comprised three squads. See Finker, Geschichte des Roten Frontkämpferbundes, p. 212. 55 LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2755, p. 54; Engelbrecht, In den Spuren des Verbrechertums, pp. 94–113. 56 BArch/B, SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/93, p. 241; ‘Ali Höhler gesteht’, Der Abend. Spätausgabe des ‘Vorwärts’, 446, 23 September 1930; BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 4, pp. 3ff.; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8307, pp. 292–95 (BStU pagination), here p. 292. 57 ‘SA.-Führer aus Eifersucht umgelegt’, Die Rote Fahne, 13, 16 January 1930; ‘Schlagt die Faschisten, wo Ihr sie trefft!’, Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung, 3, 19 January 1930; ‘Kampf um Berlin: Die Bluttat an dem Sturmführer Wessel’, Der Angriff, 6, 19 January 1930: Joseph Goebbels and Dax [i.e. Dagobert Dürr], ‘Kampf um Berlin: Horst Wessel und die Giftbrut im Liebknecht-Haus’, Der Angriff, 7, 23 January 1930. 58 LAB, A. Rep. 358–01, vol. 695, p. 2f. 59 ‘Wer war Horst Wessel? Ein kleiner Beitrag zum “Heroenkult”’, 8 Uhr Abendblatt, 23 January 1933, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Biographisches (Hanns Heinz Ewers und der NS)’. 60 ‘Ali Hoehler schildert Wessels Tod’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 445, 24 September 1930; ‘Ali Höhler gesteht’, Der Abend. Spätausgabe des ‘Vorwärts’, 446, 23 September 1930; Inquit [i.e. Moritz Goldstein], ‘Die Braut des Studenten Wessel’, Vossische Zeitung, 229, 25 September 1930. 61 According to ‘Der Ali-Mord an Wessel’, Der Abend. Spätausgabe des ‘Vorwärts’, 444, 22 September 1930. 62 See Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/I, p. 66; Joseph Goebbels and Dax [i.e. Dagobert Dürr], ‘Kampf um Berlin: Horst Wessel und die Giftbrut im LiebknechtHaus’, Der Angriff, 7, 23 January 1930. 63 Peter Engelmann, ‘Ein erschütterndes Dokument. Ein Bericht des Direktors und einer Schwester des Horst-Wessel-Krankenhauses’, Völkischer Beobachter, 280, 7 October 1933. 64 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8308, pp. 128–35 (BStU pagination). 65 Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/I, p. 94. 66 See LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8303, vol. 1, p. 27; Ewers, Horst Wessel, pp. 243–54. 67 See Oertel, Horst Wessel, pp. 101ff.; Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen, pp. 44, 77f.; E.W. Friedrich, ‘Als Horst Wessel starb. Ein Tatsachenbericht über die Beerdigung unseres Helden’, Westdeutscher Beobachter (Cologne), 27 February 1935, in: BArch/B, NS 23, #224. 68 Sauer, ‘Goebbels’ “Rabauken”’, p. 123. 46

254

Notes 69 Hanfstaengl, The Unknown Hitler, p. 160; Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/I, p. 99. 70 Only a few sequences of these shoots have been preserved, in the 1932 Nazi propaganda film Blutendes Deutschland (Bleeding Germany), directed by Johannes Häussler. 71 Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/I, p. 100; E.W. Friedrich, ‘Als Horst Wessel starb. Ein Tatsachenbericht über die Beerdigung unseres Helden’, Westdeutscher Beobachter (Cologne), 27 February 1935, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224. 72 Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/I, p. 100; Balister, Gewalt und Ordnung, p. 163. 73 E.W. Friedrich, ‘Als Horst Wessel starb. Ein Tatsachenbericht über die Beerdigung unseres Helden’, Westdeutscher Beobachter (Cologne), 27 February 1935, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224. 74 See Engelbrechten, Eine braune Armee entsteht, p. 115f.; Wilfrid Bade, Die S.A. erobert Berlin. Ein Tatsachenbericht, Munich 1934, p. 200f.

2. Father and Son 1

2

3

4

5

6

See Kijowska, Marta: ‘Zerstört, versteckt, verschleppt, gefunden. Der deutschpolnische Dauerstreit um die “Beutekunst”’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 10 September 2007, , accessed on 27 June 2008; Zdzisław Pietrzyk, ‘Zbiory bylej Pruskiej Biblioteki Panstwowej w BJ’, in: Alma Mater, February 2008, , accessed on 27 June 2008; Horst Wessel, Politika, in: SBB PK, Cod. Simul. 190 (originally MS Germ 762). To my knowledge, W. Ralf Georg Reuth was the first to locate the alleged ‘diary’ of Wessel in Cracow. It was from him that the revisionist and Holocaust-denying British historian and journalist David Irving obtained a copy, citing from it repeatedly in his 1996 study Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich. Johannes Lübeck from Bünde was the first to point out to me that the two manuscripts were in Cracow. My thanks to him for this information. On the concept of generation/‘generationality’, first introduced in the 1920s, see Andreas Schulz / Ursula Grebner: ‘Generation und Geschichte. Zur Renaissance eines umstrittenen Forschungskonzepts’, in: idem (eds), Generationswechsel und historischer Wandel, Munich 2003, pp. 1–23. On the mentality of this ‘youth generation’ see Ulrich Herbert, ‘Drei politische Generationen im 20. Jahrhundert’, in: Jürgen Reulecke (ed.), Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, Munich 2003, pp. 95–114; Rusinek, ‘Krieg als Sehnsucht’; Helmut Schelsky, Die skeptische Generation. Eine Soziologie der deutschen Jugend, Düsseldorf 1957, pp. 66–84. Christiane Lahusen, ‘Zur autobiographischen Interpretation von Diskontinuitäten: Methodische Anmerkungen’, in: Potsdamer Bulletin für Zeithistorische Forschung, 42, July 2008, pp. 22–26, here p. 24f. A seminal work on this topic is Volker Depkat, ‘Autobiographie und die soziale Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit’, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29 (2003), pp. 441–76. On the autobiographical fashion of the 1920s see Peter Sloterdijk, Literatur und Organisation von Lebenserfahrung. Autobiographien der Zwanziger Jahre, Munich 1978; Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Die Autobiographie als neubürgerliche Kunstform’, in: idem, Das Ornament der Masse, Frankfurt am Main 1977, pp. 75–80. See Max Hoelz, Vom ‘Weissen Kreuz zur Roten Fahne. Jugend-, Kampf- und Zuchthauserlebnisse, Berlin 1929. Wessel mentions Hoelz, but not his book, in Politika. See Wessel, Politika, p. 68.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 7

Wolfgang Hardtwig, ‘Die Krise des Geschichtsbewusstseins in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik und der Aufstieg des Nationalsozialismus’, in: idem, Hochkultur des bürgerlichen Zeitalters, Göttingen 2005, pp. 77–102, here p. 101; Bärsch, Die religiöse Dimension der NS-Ideologie, p. 329f. 8 Paetel, ‘Die Struktur der nationalen Jugend’, p. 25f. For an overview of the scholarly work on political recruiting organizations in the Weimar Republic see Krabbe, Die gescheiterte Zukunft der Ersten Republik. On the continuities between bündisch youth and National Socialism see Jürgen Reulecke, ‘“Hat die Jugendbewegung den Nationalsozialismus vorbereitet?” Zum Umgang mit einer falschen Frage’, in: Wolfgang R. Krabbe (ed.), Politische Jugend in der Weimarer Republik, Bochum 1993, pp. 222–43; Irmtraut Götz von Olenhusen, Jugendreich, Gottesreich, Deutsches Reich. Junge Generation, Religion und Politik 1928–1933, Cologne 1987, pp. 225ff. 9 Wessel left out his mother and sister entirely, in keeping with the tradition of rightwing extremist writers of the interwar period. See Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 1, p. 35f. 10 Or so Wessel claimed in his curriculum vitae written at the end of secondary school, cited in Lübeck, Horst Wessel, p. 9. 11 Klaus Mann, ‘Die Mythen der Unterwelt’, p. 105. 12 For a detailed treatment see Frank-Michael Kuhlemann, Bürgerlichkeit und Religion. Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der evangelischen Pfarrer in Baden 1860–1914, Göttingen 2001, pp. 189–203, 285ff. 13 On the distinction between ‘völkisch’ und ‘nationalist’ see Stefan Breuer, Die Völkischen in Deutschland. Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik, Darmstadt 2008, pp. 7–22. On the variety of different völkisch groups and the semantics of the day see Uwe Puschner, ‘Völkisch. Plädoyer für einen “engen” Begriff’, in: Paul Ciupke et al. (eds), ‘Die Erziehung zum deutschen Menschen’. Völkische und nationalkonservative Erwachsenenbildung in der Weimarer Republik, Essen 2007, pp. 53–66; Armin Mohler / Karlheinz Weissmann, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918–1932. Ein Handbuch, Graz 2005, pp. 99–114. 14 On the influence of Erlangen Protestant theology see Björn Mensing, Pfarrer und Nationalsozialismus. Geschichte einer Verstrickung am Beispiel der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Bayern, Göttingen 1998, pp. 43–69; Hamm, Schuld und Verstrickung der Kirche. 15 For a detailed account see Gailus, ‘Vom Feldgeistlichen’, p. 774f.; personal-information form and handwritten curriculum vitae of Ludwig Wessel in: ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/24675. 16 StA MH, newspaper-clipping collection, article ‘Kennen Sie das alte Mülheim?’, Vaterstädtische Blätter (supplement to the Mülheimer Generalanzeiger), 6 November 1932; ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/24675, p. 540. 17 On National Protestantism and its connection to National Socialism see Kurz, Nationalprotestantisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik; Gailus / Lehmann (eds), Nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten; Puschner, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich. 18 See Max Friedrich Jensen, ‘…ein Feuer und Wahrzeichen für den Weg in eine neue Zeit. Hilligenlei – ein aufsehenerregendes Buch in der historischen Kontroverse’, in: Kay Dohnke / Dietrich Stein (eds), Gustav Frenssen in seiner Zeit. Von der Massenliteratur im Kaiserreich zur Massenideologie im NS-Staat, Heide 1997, pp. 285–315, here p. 293. 19 Cited in Uwe Puschner, ‘Weltanschauung und Religion – Religion und Weltanschauung. Ideologie und Formen völkischer Religion’, in: zeitenblicke v/1 (April 2006), , section 21, accessed on 5 August 2008. On the relationship between Bonus and Frenssen see Andreas Crystall, Gustav Frenssen. Sein Weg vom Kulturprotestantismus zum Nationalsozialismus, Gütersloh 2002, pp. 87–90.

256

Notes 20

See Günter Brakelmann, ‘Der Kriegsprotestantismus 1870/71 und 1914–1918. Einige Anmerkungen’, in: Gailus / Lehmann (eds), Nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten, pp. 103–14, esp. p. 108f.; Dahm, Pfarrer und Politik, pp. 165–84. 21 StA MH, newspaper-clipping collection, article ‘Pfarrer Dr Ludwig Wessel, der Vater unseres unvergesslichen Horst’, National-Zeitung (regional edition C: Mülheim), undated (c.1933). 22 See esp. ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/24675, pp. 396ff. 23 Minutes of the Nicolai parish meeting on 7 July 1913, in: ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/3333. 24 See BArch/Bay, ZLA1/5822815, pp. 4–7. 25 ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/24675, p. 432. 26 Bieber, Bürgertum in der Revolution, p. 426, fn. 214; ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/24675, pp. 154, 442. 27 Ludwig Wessel, Von der Maas bis an die Memel, p. 4; Gailus, ‘Vom Feldgeistlichen’, p. 776f. 28 Pyta, Hindenburg, pp. 188–93; Ingeborg Wessel, Horst Wessel. Sein Lebensweg, p. 27. 29 Ludwig Wessel, ‘Sei getreu’, in: idem, Kriegsnot und Gottesnähe. Evangelische Feldpredigten, gehalten im Hauptquartiere Ob.-Ost, Berlin 1916, pp. 86–91, here pp. 87f. 30 Gailus, ‘Vom Feldgeistlichen’, p. 782. 31 The term ‘Blutpumpe’ (blood pump) originally described the plan by German general Erich von Falkenhayn to annihilate the French forces at the Battle of Verdun in 1916, but is sometimes used to refer generally to the sheer scale of attrition and carnage on the Western Front. 32 Ludwig Wessel, Von der Maas bis an die Memel, pp. 157–59; Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern. Ein Kriegstagebuch, Hamburg 1933, p. 7. For a detailed treatment of the distorted German image of Belgian workers during the First World War see Jens Thiel, ‘Menschenbassin Belgien’. Anwerbung, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg, Essen 2007, pp. 89–102. 33 Gailus, ‘Das Lied, das aus dem Pfarrhaus kam’; Ludwig Wessel, Von der Maas bis an die Memel, pp. 161, 167, 174. 34 See ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/24675, pp. 458–65. It is not unlikely that anti-Semitic prejudices influenced Ludwig Wessel’s actions; there is no evidence of this, however. 35 ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/24675, p. 484; letter from Wessel to the Protestant consistory of the Mark Brandenburg dated 8 November 1919, in: ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/3333. 36 Wilhelm Pressel, Die Kriegspredigt 1914–1918 in der evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands, Göttingen 1967, p. 50; ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/24675, p. 500; Gailus, ‘Vom Feldgeistlichen’, p. 781; Wessel, Politika, p. 4. 37 Prolingheuer, Kleine politische Kirchengeschichte, p. 14; Bieber, Bürgertum in der Revolution, pp. 78–81. 38 See Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933, pp. 56–60. 39 Bieber, Bürgertum in der Revolution, pp. 239–45, 267, 495. 40 From 1919 onwards, Wessel repeatedly told his superiors that he suffered from a serious war wound, without giving any particulars. The reports on file give no indication of the exact cause of death. See ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/24675, pp. 518ff. National Socialist circles adopted Wessel’s own assessment when they claimed he died as a result of a war wound. See for instance Czech-Jochberg, Das Jugendbuch von Horst Wessel, p. 10. On his stint as an editor see Kugel, Alles schob man ihm zu, p. 312f. 41 ‘Der bekannte Berliner Pfarrer Dr Ludwig Wessel †’, Die Grosse Berliner Illustrierte. Aktuelle Halbwochenschrift, 38, 13 May 1922. 42 ‘Die Beisetzung Pfarrer Wessels’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 225, 14 May 1922. On the veneration of Hindenburg by young people in the Weimar Republic see Pyta, Hindenburg, p. 455f.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 43

Wessel was no exception in this respect. Many war orphans felt called to ‘patriotic defence of the fatherland’ to compensate for the loss of their fathers. See Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, p. 378. 44 BArch/Bay, ZLA1/5822815, pp. 4–7; letter from Margarete Wessel to the Protestant Church of Hanover dated 8 October 1951, in: AEKR, Ostpfarrerversorgung files, #350. 45 See also Klaus-Michael Mallmann / Gerhard Paul, ‘Sozialisation, Milieu und Gewalt. Fortschritte und Probleme der neueren Täterforschung’, in: idem (eds.), Karrieren der Gewalt. Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien, Darmstadt 2004, pp. 1–32, here p. 7; Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, p. 378f. On the alleged penury of Wessel see the report of Chief Inspector Teichmann of 6 June 1931, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1370a. 46 See Ulrich Herbert, ‘“Generation der Sachlichkeit”. Die völkische Studentenbewegung der frühen zwanziger Jahre in Deutschland’, in: Frank Bajohr / Werner Lohe / Uwe Lohalm (eds), Zivilisation und Barbarei. Die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne. Detlef Peukert zum Gedenken, Hamburg 1991, pp. 115–44, here p. 119. See also idem, Best, pp. 88–100. 47 Klaus Mann, Horst Wessel (unpublished manuscript), chapter 2, p. 6, in: Monacensia, KM 561; Ingeborg Wessel (ed.). Horst Wessel. Sein Lebensweg, p. 6f. 48 See Andrew Donson, ‘Models for young nationalists and militarists. German youth literature in the First World War’, in: German Studies Review xxvii/3 (2004), pp. 579–98; Reichardt, ‘Gewalt, Körper, Politik’, pp. 223ff.; Max Schach (ed.), Das Kind und der Krieg. Kinderaussprüche, Aufsätze, Schilderungen und Zeichnungen, Berlin 1916, p. 26. 49 Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen, p. 38f. 50 Ingeborg Wessel, ‘Mein Bruder Horst!’, in: Rote Erde (Dortmund), 23 February 1935, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224; ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/24675, p. 538. 51 Willi Stiewe, ‘Erinnerungen an den Vater unseres Freiheitskämpfers Horst Wessel’, in: Ingeborg Wessel (ed.), Das neue Buch für Mädels, Stuttgart 1940, pp. 119–24, here p. 119. 52 On ‘war education’ in the First World War see Donson, ‘Why did German youth become fascists?’ 53 ‘Horst-Wessel-Feier im Köllnischen Gymnasium zu Berlin’, in: Deutsches PhilologenBlatt. Korrespondenz-Blatt für den akademisch gebildeten Lehrerstand 41 (1933), p. 455f. 54 See Lazar, Der Fall Horst Wessel, p. 42; Oertel, Horst Wessel, pp. 20ff. 55 On the Bismarckbund and Bismarckjugend until 1930 see Krabbe, Die gescheiterte Zukunft der Ersten Republik, pp. 171–92; idem, ‘Die Bismarckjugend der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei’, in: German Studies Review xvii/1 (1994), pp. 9–32. On the relationship between Protestantism and the DNVP see Norbert Friedrich, ‘Die christlich-soziale Fahne empor!’ Reinhard Mumm und die christlich-soziale Bewegung, Stuttgart 1997, pp. 177–260. 56 See ‘Sonderbares Gerechtigkeitsgefühl’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 220, 11 May 1922; Donson, ‘Why did German youth become fascists?’, p. 352. 57 Wessel, Politika, p. 7f. The ‘Ehrhardt March’, composed in 1920, was a popular Freikorps song. 58 See Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, pp. 674–78, 689f. 59 Wessel, Politika, pp. 8, 10. The ministry of the interior in Berlin also came to the conclusion that ‘clubbiness [Vereinsmeierei] is in full bloom’ in the right-wing camp (cited in Herbert, Best, p. 88). 60 See Krabbe, Die gescheiterte Zukunft der Ersten Republik, p. 172. 61 Wessel, Politika, p. 19f. 62 Cited in Paetel, ‘Die Struktur der nationalen Jugend’, p. 26. See also ‘Stellung und Aufgaben der Hitler-Jugend innerhalb der Jugendbewegung’, in: Hitler-Jugend: Kampfblatt schaffender Jugend iv/12 (July–December 1927), p. 100.

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Notes 63

Baldur von Schirach, ‘Die nationalsozialistische Jugendbewegung’, in: Wilhelm Kube (ed.), Almanach der nationalsozialistischen Revolution, Berlin 1934, pp. 72–81, here p. 72. 64 Paetel, ‘Die Struktur der nationalen Jugend’, p. 26; Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2004, p. 16. 65 See Krabbe, Die gescheiterte Zukunft der Ersten Republik, p. 176; Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, pp. 15f., 21. 66 Cited in Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 22. On the acts of violence of rightwing radical youths in this period see Kruppa, Rechtsradikalismus in Berlin, pp. 195–98. 67 See Lars Koch, ‘Der Erste Weltkrieg als kulturelle Katharsis. Anmerkungen zu den Werken von Walter Flex’, in: Jahrbuch des Archivs der deutschen Jugendbewegung 20 (2005), pp. 178–95; Justus H. Ulbricht, ‘Der Mythos vom Heldentod. Entstehung und Wirkungen von Walter Flex’ “Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten”’, in: Jahrbuch des Archivs der deutschen Jugendbewegung 16 (1988), pp. 111–56. 68 Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, pp. 27ff. 69 LAB, A Rep. 020–11, vol. 31, pp. 49. 70 Memorandum of headmaster Paul Hildebrandt to the municipal authorities of the city of Berlin, 3 January 1925, in: LAB, A Rep. 020–11, vol. 1; Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 32f. 71 See Martin Sabrow, Die verdrängte Verschwörung. Der Rathenau-Mord und die deutsche Gegenrevolution, Frankfurt am Main 1999; Gabriele Krüger, Die Brigade Ehrhardt, Hamburg 1971, pp. 73–99; Gumbel, Verschwörer, p. 77. For a detailed account of antiSemitic violence in the 1920s: Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt. 72 Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany, p. 173; Gumbel, Verschwörer, p. 78f. 73 Wessel, Politika, p. 29f. 74 See Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany, pp. 107ff.; GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 84a Justizministerium, #54969, pp. 41–53, here p. 46. 75 Cited in Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 43. 76 See Wessel, Politika, p. 45f.; Olenhusen, ‘Vom Jungstahlhelm zur SA’; on Vehmic killings see Ulrike Claudia Hofmann, ‘Verräter verfallen der Feme’. Fememorde in Bayern in den zwanziger Jahren, Cologne 2000. 77 Wessel, Politika, p. 32; Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 41. 78 Wessel, Politika, pp. 31ff.; Jun Nakata, Der Grenz- und Landesschutz in der Weimarer Republik 1918–1933. Die geheime Aufrüstung und die deutsche Gesellschaft, Freiburg im Breisgau 2002, pp. 168–75. On the ‘Schwarze Reichswehr’ (‘Black Reichswehr’) see also Bernhard Sauer, Schwarze Reichswehr und Fememorde. Eine Milieustudie zum Rechtsradikalismus in der Weimarer Republik, Berlin 2004; Kruppa, Rechtsradikalismus in Berlin, pp. 259–311. 79 GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 84a Justizministerium, #54969, pp. 41–53, here p. 47. 80 See Wessel, Politika, p. 43f.; Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen, Stuttgart 1951, p. 186f. 81 See Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, pp. 379–84. 82 See Bernd Kruppa, ‘Rechtsextreme Wehrverbände in der Weimarer Republik. Die Entwicklung seit 1918 und ihre Rolle in den politischen Entscheidungen des Jahres 1932’, in: Diethart Kerbs / Henrick Stahr (eds), Berlin 1932. Das letzte Jahr der ersten deutschen Republik. Politik, Symbole, Medien, Berlin 1932, pp. 115–30, here p. 123; LAB, B Rep. 058, #2271, vol. 2, p. 81; GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 84a Justizministerium, #55212, pp. 5–8, here p. 5; Wessel, Politika, p. 23. On Maikowski see Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, pp. 494ff. 83 Letter from Horst Wessel dated 27 November 1924, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1280; Wessel, Politika, p. 51. 84 Kruppa, Rechtsradikalismus in Berlin, pp. 284f., 311–26, 331f. 85 ‘Unbekannter Brief Horst Wessels’, Mainzer-Anzeiger, 45, 23 February 1938, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224. On the drift towards the NSDAP see also Olenhusen, ‘Vom Jungstahlhelm zur SA’, pp. 146–82; Krabbe, Die gescheiterte Zukunft der Ersten Republik, pp. 185ff.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 86 Of the nearly 30 million votes cast the SPD won 7.9 million (26.0 per cent) and the KPD 2.7 million (8.9 per cent). See Statistisches Reichsamt (ed.), Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich 1926, Berlin 1926, p. 448f.

3. The Young National Socialist Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 63; Engelbrechten, Eine braune Armee entsteht, p. 39. On the rise of the NSDAP in the capital see Schmiechen-Ackermann, Nationalsozialismus und Arbeitermilieus, pp. 166–212. 2 Cited in Longerich, Geschichte der SA, p. 68. See also GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Titel 4043, #119, p. 59. 3 Horst Wessel, Politika, p. 52; Ingeborg Wessel (ed.), Horst Wessel. Sein Lebensweg, p. 41. Wessel left no trace as a student in Berlin. On the political views of students at Berlin University during the Weimar Republic see Christan Saehrendt, ‘Studentischer Extremismus und politische Gewalt an der Berliner Universität 1918–1933’, in: Winfried Müller (ed.), Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte, vol. 9: Die Universitäten des Alten Reiches in der Frühen Neuzeit, Stuttgart 2006, pp. 213–33; on the department of law, in particular, prior to 1933 see Anna-Maria Gräfin von Lösch, Der nackte Geist. Die juristische Fakultät der Berliner Universität im Umbruch von 1933, Tübingen 1999. 4 Wessel’s name is on the corps membership lists submitted to the university directorate on 30 June 1926 and 1 December 1928 (HU/UA, ‘Rektor und Senat’ collection, 574). See also Gerhard Schäfer, ‘Studentische Korporationen im Übergang von der Weimarer Republik zum deutschen Faschismus’, in: 1999. Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 3 (1988), 1, pp. 104–29, here p. 114. 5 See Roegels, Der Marsch auf Berlin, p. 23; Rusinek, ‘Krieg als Sehnsucht’, pp. 137–44. For more on the NSDAP’s recruitment of Berlin students, see Kruppa, Rechtsradikalismus in Berlin, p. 352f. 6 Wessel, Von Land und Leuten, in: JBK, manuscript. Germ. Oct. 761, pp. 3–8. 7 Cited in Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, pp. 79, 81. 8 See Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik. Politische Kommunikation, symbolische Politik und Öffentlichkeit im Reichstag, Düsseldorf 2003, p. 378f. 9 Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, p. 634; Meyer zu Uptrup, Kampf gegen die ‘jüdische Weltverschwörung’. 10 See Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung, p. 99. 11 Lübeck, Horst Wessel, p. 56. 12 Krasnow, Vom Zarenadler zur Roten Fahne; Jeffrey L. Sammons (ed.): Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion. Die Grundlage des modernen Antisemitismus – eine Fälschung. Text und Kommentar, Göttingen 1998. For a more comprehensive approach see Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism. White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945, Cambridge 2005. 13 See Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung, pp. 63–68; Meyer zu Uptrup, Kampf gegen die ‘jüdische Weltverschwörung’, pp. 99–102. 14 Cf. the entries in Wessel’s ‘Certificate of Registration for Subtenants’, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1280; Information provided by Thomas Maisel of the Vienna University archives on 3 June 2008. 15 Letter from Horst Wessel dated 21 February 1928, in: ‘Was Horst Wessel aus Wien berichtete’, Völkischer Beobachter, 16 March 1938, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224. 16 Wessel, Politika, p. 64. 17 Cited in Oertel, Horst Wessel, illus. 12. 18 ‘Der Kampf um Wien. Ein Rückblick’, in: Der Notschrei (Vienna) ii/9 (1 October 1932), p. 4, in: BPolW, box entitled ‘NSDAP 1920–1947’, ref. no. 2/3/1932, ‘Der Notschrei’. 1

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Notes 19 Horst Wessel, Politika, p. 65. 20 See Bernd Beutl, ‘Zäsuren und Strukturen des Nationalsozialismus in der Ersten Republik’, in: Wolfgang Duchkowitsch (ed.), Die österreichische NS-Presse 1918–1933, Vienna 2001, pp. 20–47, here pp. 29–35; John T. Lauridsen, Nazism and the Radical Right in Austria 1918–1934, Copenhagen 2007, pp. 304–21. For a detailed look at Nazi youth groups: Johanna Gehmacher, Jugend ohne Zukunft. Hitler-Jugend und Bund Deutscher Mädel in Österreich vor 1938, Vienna 1994, pp. 120–56. 21 Handwritten note on a bookkeeping form of the local chapter of the Hitlerjugend in Vienna-Favoriten, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1280. 22 See ‘Sprechabend der Wiener Jugend’, Deutsche Arbeiter-Presse, Nationalsozialistischvölkisches Kampfblatt der schaffenden Stände Grossdeutschlands, 4, 21 January 1928, p. 7; AT-OeStA/AdR, 02/BKA/SR, Sign. 22/Nö, 1928, box 5076, ref. no. 111.423/28; Oertel, Horst Wessel, illus. 12. 23 ‘Vergesst es nicht!’, Nachrichten der Hitler-Jugend des Verbandes nationalsozialistischer Jugendarbeiter. Ortgruppe Favoriten, iv/1, March 1930, p. 1. 24 Horst Wessel, Politika, p. 64f. 25 AT-OeStA/AdR, 02/BKA/SR, Sign. 22/Nö, 1929, box 5078, ref. no. 86.671/29. 26 See AT-OeStA/AdR, 02/BKA/SR, Sign. 22/Nö, 1929, box 5078, ref. no. 128.638/29; Gerhard Botz, Gewalt in der Politik. Attentate, Zusammenstösse, Putschversuche, Unruhen in Österreich 1918 bis 1934, Munich 1976, pp. 133–38. 27 Cited in AT-OeStA/AdR, 02/BKA/SR, Sign. 22/Nö, 1930, box 5060, ref. no. 207.771/30. 28 Horst Wessel, Politika, p. 65. 29 See Adam Wandruska, ‘Austrofaschismus. Anmerkungen zur politischen Bedeutung der “Heimwehr” in Österreich’, in: Manfred Funke et al. (eds.), Demokratie und Diktatur. Geist und Gestalt politischer Herrschaft in Deutschland und Europa, Düsseldorf 1987, pp. 216–22; AT-OeStA/AdR, 02/BKA/SR, Sign. 22/Nö, 1928, box 5076, ref. no. 86.991/28. 30 On 12 November 1918, following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Republic of German-Austria was created as a component of the German Republic. Less than a year later, however, in September–October 1919, the Treaty of SaintGermain was ratified, which made Austria an independent state and forbade any further attempt at unification. 31 AT-OeStA/AdR, 02/BKA/SR, Sign. 22/Nö, 1928, box 5076, ref. no. 87.430/28; Report of the Bundespolizeidirektion (Federal Police Headquarters) in Vienna to the Bundeskanzleramt (Office of the Federal Chancellor) on 10 November 1928, in: AT-OeStA/AdR, 02/BKA/SR, Sign. 22/Nö, 1928, box 5077. For a general account of the conflicts at Vienna University in the 1920s see Walter Höflechner, Die Baumeister des künftigen Glücks. Fragment einer Geschichte des Hochschulwesens in Österreich vom Ausgang des 19. Jahrhunderts bis in das Jahr 1938, Graz 1988, pp. 335–69. 32 See WStLA, M. Abt. 119, A 32: 308/1942 (Altherrenschaft ‘Horst Wessel’). 33 All quotations in this section are taken from: Walter Reinhart, Horst Wessel! Persönliche Erinnerungen von Dr Walter Reinhart, nine-page typescript dated 25 May 1938, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1280. 34 Letter from Horst Wessel dated 2 February 1928, in: ‘Was Horst Wessel aus Wien berichtete’, Völkischer Beobachter, 16 March 1938. 35 Cited in GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 283, p. 5. 36 See Louis Dupeux, ‘Nationalbolschewismus’ in Deutschland 1919–1933. Kommunistische Strategie und konservative Dynamik, Munich 1985; pp. 213ff.; Rolf Boelcke, ‘Die Spaltung der Nationalsozialisten’, in: Die Tat xxii/5 (August 1930), pp. 357–67. 37 Wessel, Politika, p. 57. 38 See Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus, Bonn 1972, pp. 26–52.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero On the concept of ‘German socialism’ see Ernst zu Reventlow, Deutscher Sozialismus. Civitas Die Germanica, Weimar 1930; Werner Sombart, Deutscher Sozialismus, BerlinCharlottenburg 1934; M. Frederick Plöger, Soziologie in totalitären Zeiten. Zu Leben und Werk von Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann (1904–1987), Berlin 2007, pp. 188–92; for the National Socialist variant see the programmatic texts of Rosenberg and Strasser in: Albrecht Tyrell (ed.), Führer befiehl… Selbstzeugnisse aus der ‘Kampfzeit’ der NSDAP. Dokumentation und Analyse, Düsseldorf 1969, pp. 278–81. 40 Ernst Günther Gründel, Die Sendung der Jungen Generation. Versuch einer umfassenden revolutionären Sinndeutung der Krise, Munich 1932, p. 422f. 41 See Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, pp. 72–80; Michael Grüttner, Studenten im Dritten Reich, Paderborn 1995, pp. 23ff.; Hans Mommsen, ‘Generationskonflikt und Jugendrevolte in der Weimarer Republik’, in: Thomas Koebner / Rolf-Peter Janz/Frank Trommler (eds), ‘Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit’. Der Mythos Jugend, Frankfurt am Main 1985, pp. 50–67; Detlev J.K. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik. Krisenjahre der Klassischen Moderne, Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 94–100; idem, Jugend zwischen Krieg und Krise, pp. 29–56. 42 Dingräve, Wo steht die junge Generation?, p. 38. 43 Richard Fiedler, ‘Horst Wessel – ewiges Vorbild’, Mitteldeutsche National-Zeitung, 23 February 1939, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1280. 44 Memorandum entitled ‘Hitler-Jugend’, in: Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung, 148, 6 June 1928, p. 6. 45 Cited in Die Bewegung (southern German edition), 28 January 1941, p. 4, in: BArch/B, 1200010175, box 13286. 46 Reinhart, Horst Wessel!, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1280; Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 84. 47 Klaus Mann, Horst Wessel, chapter 4, p. 1, in: Monacensia, KM 561; Ewers, Horst Wessel, p. 35f. 48 Cited in Lübeck, Horst Wessel, p. 73. 49 Dingräve, Wo steht die junge Generation?, p. 30. The Catholic term ‘sacrificio dell’intelletto’ originally referred to the subordination of individual will to the authority of the Church. 50 See Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, vol. 2, p. 174f.; Thamer, Verführung und Gewalt, p. 416. 51 Kugel, Alles schob man ihm zu, p. 315. 52 See Horst Wessel, Politika, pp. 57f., 68–74; Paul, Aufstand der Bilder, p. 135. 53 See Horst Wessel, Politika, p. 63. The ban on the NSDAP in Prussia was valid from 6 May 1927 to 31 March 1928. 54 Horst Wessel, Von Land und Leuten, pp. 20–35, here p. 21. 55 The depiction in Reuth (Goebbels, p. 130), who claimed that Wessel was part of a 50-man SA-Gruppe that marched from Berlin to Nuremberg by foot, is inaccurate. Wessel joined the group, which had meanwhile shrunk to 30 men, just outside of Nuremberg. See Wessel, Von Land und Leuten, pp. 33ff. 56 Ibid., p. 24. 57 Ibid., p. 25. 58 Ibid., p. 24f. 59 Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP in Nürnberg, pp. 29–38. 60 Wessel, Politika, p. 63. 61 Or so Wessel claimed in his curriculum vitae written at the end of secondary school, cited in Lübeck, Horst Wessel, p. 9. 62 Wessel, Politika, p. 57f. 63 Ibid., p. 61. 64 Criminal record of Horst Wessel in the files of police headquarters in Berlin, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1370a. 39

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Notes 65 See Swett, Neighbors and Enemies, p. 238. 66 Or so Wessel claimed in his curriculum vitae written at the end of secondary school, cited in Lübeck, Horst Wessel, p. 9; Karl Keese, ‘Horst Wessel und der Kreis HamelnPyrmont’, in: Kreisausschuss des Kreises Hameln-Pyrmont (ed.), Hameln-Pyrmont. Ein Heimatbuch des Kreises, Magdeburg 1934, pp. 9ff., here p. 10. 67 Wessel, Politika, p. 35f. 68 Karl Ernst, ‘SA im Kampf’, in: Wilhelm Kube (ed.): Almanach der nationalsozialistischen Revolution, Berlin 1934, pp. 113–18, here p. 117. 69 Horst Wessel, Politika, pp. 56, 60. 70 Otto Gimm, ‘Die Sommerfrische Elgersburg im Thüringer Wald’, in: Die Henne, weekend supplement ‘Rund um den Kickelhahn’, 37, 15–16 September 1934; information provided by Helmut Rose, Elgersburg, on 14 August 2008. 71 ‘Horst Wessels Lieblingsplatz, Mitteldeutschland Eisenacher Zeitung, 217, 17 September 1934; ‘Horst-Wessel-Denkmal in Elgersburg eingeweiht’, Eisenacher Tagespost, 219, 17 September 1934. 72 See Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 89. 73 Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 93. A report from Department IA of the Berlin police to the Prussian prime minister about the ‘Extraordinary General Assembly of the members of the NSDAP of the Gau of Berlin on 22 November 1929 at the “Neue Welt” [amusement park and beer garden], Hasenheide’ from 25 November 1929 would seem to support this claim. According to the report, Goebbels led the list of Nazi speakers in Berlin with 93 speeches. Civil servant Dr Martin Loepelmann, a teacher at the ‘Rheingauschule’ Gymnasium in Berlin-Friedenau, city councillor for the NSDAP and former group leader in the Wiking-Bund, took third place with 46. The second most frequent speaker is not mentioned in the report – perhaps because Wessel was unknown to its author. See GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 302, p. 11f. 74 ‘Achtung! Befehlsausgabe!’, Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung, 18, 5 May 1929. 75 LAB, A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, #21680, p. 372. 76 Reitmann, Horst Wessel, pp. 49–53, 69. 77 Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 148; Erich Honecker, Aus meinem Leben, Frankfurt am Main 1980, p. 30. For a detailed account on the significance of the shawm as a political ‘battle instrument’: Werner Hinze, Die Schalmei. Vom Kaisersignal zum Marschlied vom KPD und NSDAP, Essen 2003; idem, Schalmeienklänge im Fackelschein. Ein Beitrag zur Kriegskultur der Zwischenkriegszeit, Hamburg 2002. 78 See Balister, Gewalt und Ordnung, pp. 114ff.; Sturm 33. Hans Maikowski, geschrieben von Kameraden des Toten, Berlin 1942, p. 55. 79 See Roegels, Der Marsch auf Berlin, p. 12; Fritzsche, ‘On Being the Subjects of History’, pp. 170–76. 80 See the letter from the supreme SA-Führer dated 10 November 1931, in: BArch/B, NS 26/306; Wessel, Politika, p. 75; Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 121. 81 A notion shared by Gailus in ‘“Nationalsozialistische Christen” und “christliche Nationalsozialisten”’, p. 247f. 82 See the essays in Heinz-Elmar Tenorth et al. (eds): Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze (1885– 1969). Ein Leben für Kirche, Wissenschaft und soziale Arbeit, Stuttgart 2007; Rolf Lindner (ed.), ‘Wer in den Osten geht, geht in ein anderes Land’. Die Settlementbewegung in Berlin zwischen Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik, Berlin 1997. 83 Cited in Werner Krebber (ed.): Den Menschen Recht verschaffen. Carl Sonnenschein – Person und Werk, Würzburg 1996, p. 125f. 84 On Volksgemeinschaft see most recently Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich, Cambridge 2008, pp. 38–56; Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung, pp. 35–62.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 85 Richard Haage, ‘Bourgeoisie, Jungbürgertum und Proletariat’, in: Der Kronacher Bund. Bundesrundbrief des Kronacher Bundes der alten Wandervögel e.V. und des Bundes der Wandervögel e.V., 8, 3 (December 1928), pp. 33–37. See also GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 260, p. 90. 86 Cited in Willi Münzenberg, Die Dritte Front. Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen, Berlin 1931, p. 297. 87 Wessel, Politika, p. 59. 88 Joseph Goebbels, ‘Ansprache auf der Gedenkplatte für Horst Wessel’, gramophone record, c.1930, in: Deutsches Musikarchiv Berlin. 89 Krasnow, Vom Zarenadler, vol. 1, p. 115. 90 Ingeborg Wessel, Horst Wessel. Sein Lebensweg, p. 85. 91 See Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, pp. 48–51. 92 The song lyrics are taken from: Sturm- und Kampflieder, compilation commissioned by the SA. For an overview of the numerous, slightly different variations of the text see Broderick, Das Horst-Wessel-Lied, p. 9ff. 93 According to Rüdiger (i.e. Edgar Schröder), SA- und SS-Appell der Gruppe BerlinBrandenburg und der Gruppe Ost in Berlin, mit einem Anhang ‘Wie das Horst-Wessel-Lied entstand’, Berlin 1933, p. 39. See also Oertel, Horst Wessel, p. 106f. 94 ‘Die Melodie des Horst-Wessel-Liedes’, Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 505, 28 October 1933, cited in LkA EKvW, depositum Johannes Kuhlo, collection 3, #16, vol. 4; Ingeborg Wessel, ‘Wie das Horst-Wessel-Lied entstand’, in: idem (ed.), Das neue Buch für Mädels, pp. 17ff. 95 Cited in Broderick, Das Horst-Wessel-Lied, p. 5. For a detailed assessement see Roth, Das nationalsozialistische Massenlied, pp. 46–110. 96 Martin Wähler, ‘Das politische Kampflied der Gegenwart im Unterricht’, in: Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 48 (1934), pp. 634–43, here pp. 635, 641. 97 GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 302, pp. 23–25, 37–40. 98 Cited in Kempner (ed.), Der verpasste Nazi-Stopp, p. 107f. See also Broderick, Das HorstWessel-Lied, p. 9. 99 See Paul, Aufstand der Bilder, pp. 170–73. 100 The ‘honour roll of the movement’ listed five ‘martyrs’ for 1928, ten for 1929 and 17 for 1930. Five of them came from Berlin. From 1931 to 1933 these figures rose dramatically, reaching their official peak in 1932 with 87 dead. See BArch/B, R 187/374. 101 See ‘Bekanntmachung betreffend der Gründung der Nationalsozialistischen Sterbekasse’, Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung, 4, 26 January 1930. 102 Alfred Juhre, ‘Durch unser Blut wird Deutschland frei’, in: Sturm- und Kampflieder; Reichardt, ‘Gewalt, Körper, Politik’, p. 223. The seminal study on this is: Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden. 103 Reulecke, ‘…und sie werden nicht mehr frei ihr ganzes Leben!’, p. 138. 104 Gailus, ‘Vom Feldgeistlichen’, p. 786.

4. The SA’s Battle of the Streets 1 Fürst, Gefilte Fisch, p. 512; Huchel’s phrase is cited in Christian Härtel, Stromlinien. Wilfrid Bade – Eine Karriere im Dritten Reich, Berlin 2004, p. 14f. 2 Frank Matzke, Jugend bekennt: So sind wir!, Leipzig 1930, p. 84. 3 See Helmut Lethen, Verhaltenslehren der Kälte. Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen, Frankfurt am Main 1994 [Cool Culture. The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, Berkeley, California et al. 2002]; Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Das “Fronterlebnis” des Ersten Weltkrieges – eine sozialhistorische Zäsur? Deutungen und Wirkungen in Deutschland und Frankreich’, in: Hans Mommsen (ed.), Der Erste Weltkrieg und die

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Notes europäische Nachkriegsordnung. Sozialer Wandel und Formveränderung der Politik, Cologne 2000, pp. 43–82; idem, ‘Germany after the First World War – A violent society? Results and implications of recent research on Weimar Germany’, in: Journal of Modern European History i/1 (2003), pp. 80–95. 4 Klaus Mann, ‘Die Mythen der Unterwelt’, p. 113. 5 Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation. The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (trans. Tom Lampert), Madison, Wisconsin, 2009, p. 76 (German: Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, p. 138). 6 Cited in: GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 283, pp. 2–8, here p. 6. 7 Ernst Röhm, cited in Sammlung Schumacher, Frühe Geschichte der NSDAP, p. 118, in: BArch/B, R 187/374. 8 Longerich, Geschichte der SA, p. 25f. 9 Cited in Kempner (ed.), Der verpasste Nazi-Stopp, p. 106; the Hitler quote can be found in: GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 283, pp. 2–8, here p. 7. 10 Sammlung Schumacher, Frühe Geschichte der NSDAP, pp. 169–74, 179ff., 190f., in: BArch/B, R 187/374. 11 Ibid. pp. 173f., 183. See also Graf, Politische Polizei zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur, p. 41. 12 GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 84a Justizministerium, #51596, pp. 63–114, here p. 105f. 13 Ibid., pp. 6–11, here p. 7. 14 Wessel, Politika, p. 60. 15 ‘“Unser Sturmführer Horst Wessel.” Zu seinem Todestage am 23. Februar’, in: Die Schaumburg / Schaumburg-Lippische Landeszeitung, 46, 23 February 1934. 16 Lyrics to two other songs by Wessel are published in Reitmann, Horst Wessel, pp. 39ff. 17 See Wessel, Politika, p. 48. On the ‘Wild Bunch’ see Peukert, Jugend zwischen Krieg und Krise, pp. 251–66. 18 LAB, A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, #7569, p. 364. 19 Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 71; Kugel, Alles schob man ihm zu, p. 315; Reuth, Goebbels, p. 130. 20 See Ettelson, The Nazi ‘New Man’, pp. 99–115. 21 Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 1/III, p. 165. 22 Police report, undated, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1370a. 23 See the letter from the supreme SA-Führer dated 31 August 1931, in: BArch/B, NS 26/306. 24 See Reschke, Der Kampf der Nationalsozialisten, pp. 211–29; on the structural importance of these taverns see also Schmiechen-Ackermann, Nationalsozialismus und Arbeitermilieus, pp. 374–82. 25 Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?, p. 116. 26 Engelbrechten, Eine braune Armee entsteht, p. 85. See also Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, pp. 468–74; Schumann, Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, p. 285f.; Bessel, Political Violence, pp. 49–53. 27 GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 119, p. 340a. 28 LAB, A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, #7545, p. 140. 29 SA order entitled ‘Kopfschutz’ (Head Protection) of 8 August 1930, in: BArch/B, NS 23/305. 30 AT-OeStA/AdR, 02/BKA/SR, Sign. 22/Nö, 1930, box 5060, ref. no. 177.743/30. 31 Cited in Kempner (ed.), Der verpasste Nazi-Stopp, p. 143. 32 Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, p. 312f. 33 Ingeborg Wessel, Mein Bruder Horst, p. 60f. 34 Longerich, Geschichte der SA, p. 138; Schuster, Die SA in der nationalsozialistischen ‘Machtergreifung’, p. 114f.

265

The Making of a Nazi Hero 35 LAB, A-Rep. 358–01, #2165, pp. 4ff. 36 See Schmiechen-Ackermann, Nationalsozialismus und Arbeitermilieus, pp. 190ff., 385. 37 Wessel, Politika, p. 75; Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, pp. 336, 555. 38 Weimann, Diagnose Mord, p. 167. 39 See the police report of 9 June 1931, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1370a; written reply of the Berlin criminal police to the district president in Kassel dated 9 December 1932, in: ibid.; Ingeborg Wessel, ‘Mein Bruder Horst’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 54, 23 February 1934. 40 ‘Wessels Freundin als Zeugin’, Der Abend. Spätausgabe des ‘Vorwärts’, 448, 24 September 1930. 41 For more detail see Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, pp. 406–35. 42 Cited in Engelbrechten, Eine braune Armee entsteht, p. 115. 43 For a political and historical overview see most recently Dirk Blasius, Weimars Ende. Bürgerkrieg und Politik 1930–1933, Göttingen 2005. 44 See LAB, A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, #21598. 45 Albert Grzesinski, Im Kampf um die deutsche Republik. Erinnerungen eines Sozialdemokraten, edited by Eberhard Kolb, Munich 2001, p. 228f. 46 ‘Die Tragödie im Riesen-Gebirge’, Der Angriff, 65, 29 December 1929. On the language of mountaineering see Gertrud Pfister, ‘Sportfexen, Heldenmythen und Opfertod: Alpinismus und Nationalsozialismus’, in: Geschichte und Region / Storia e regione xiii/1 (2004): Sport und Faschismus, edited by Claudia Ambrosi and Wolfgang Weber, Innsbruck 2004, pp. 21–59. 47 Lazar, Der Fall Horst Wessel, p. 104; Schmidt, ‘Der Überfall auf Horst Wessel’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 54, 23 February 1934; Max Kullak, Horst Wessel. Durch Sturm und Kampf zur Unsterblichkeit, Langensalza 1933, p. 34. 48 See ‘Achtung! Befehlsausgabe!’, Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung, 42, 20 October 1929. 49 Hans Flut, ‘Kamerad Wessel’, in: Reitmann, Horst Wessel, pp. 7–34, here p. 26. 50 Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism, p. 46f.; Jürgen W. Falter, ‘Die Jungmitglieder der NSDAP zwischen 1925 und 1933. Ein demographisches und soziales Profil’, in: Wolfgang R. Krabbe (ed.), Politische Jugend in der Weimarer Republik, Bochum 1993, pp. 202–21. 51 Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, pp. 338, 418–26. For similar observations on the relationship between youth culture and violence in large North American cities between the two wars see Thomas Welskopp, ‘Karrieren im Schlagschatten der Kriminalität. Unterschiedliche Wege zur Integration von Einwanderern in amerikanischen Grossstädten der 1920er Jahre’, in: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 46 (2006), pp. 205–48. 52 See Sturm 33. Hans Maikowski, geschrieben von Kameraden des Toten, Berlin 1942, pp. 73–77; Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde, pp. 486–89. 53 Ingeborg Wessel, ‘Mein Bruder Horst!’, in: Rote Erde (Dortmund), 23 February 1935, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224. 54 Schmidt, ‘Der Überfall auf Horst Wessel’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 54, 23 February 1934.

5. The Culprits Flee 1 2

‘“Ali” packt aus’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 449, 23 September 1930. The metalworker Hermann Schmidt, born in 1886 near Jätschau (Jaczów) close to Glogau (Głogów) in Lower Silesia, belonged to the KPD from 1920, working, among other things, for the party’s Unterbezirk Zentrum (‘Centre’ branch) in the ‘anti-military apparatus’, the party’s military-political department. In 1930 he was

266

Notes

3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

a member of the board of the Berlin-Brandenburg Rote Hilfe. See Institut für die Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (ed.), In den Fängen des NKWD, p. 204. Cited in ‘Die “Rote Fahne” entlarvt’, Völkischer Beobachter, 11 February 1930, cited in: SBB PK, literary estate 353: Heinz Knobloch, box ‘Der arme Epstein 1’. See also LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8307, pp. 292–295 (BStU pagination). On Rote Hilfe see Hering / Schilde (eds), Die Rote Hilfe; Brauns, Schafft Rote Hilfe!; Schneider / Schwarz / Schwarz (eds), Die Rechtsanwälte der Roten Hilfe Deutschlands. See Wolfgang Struck, ‘Die Geburt des Abenteuers aus dem Geist des Kolonialismus. Exotische Filme in Deutschland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, in: Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus, Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 263–81. ‘Ali Hoehler schildert Wessels Tod’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 445, 24 September 1930. LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8307, pp. 292–95 (BStU pagination). See ibid., #8309, pp. 109–23 (BStU pagination). Ibid., #8303, p. 50f. Ibid., #8303, p. 54. There is no scholarly biography of Pieck to date. On his role prior to 1933 see Becker / Jentsch, ‘Organisation und Klassenkampf’. On Geschke and the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime) see zur Nieden, Unwürdige Opfer. LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8308, pp. 15, 140f.; ibid., #8305, pp. 78–86 (BStU pagination). Viktor Drewnitzki, born on 15 December 1886 in Opole, had already had an impressive career as a functionary by this point. See LHASA, MD, V/10/112/1; Rep. K. MW VdN Magdeburg, #3799. ‘Ali Hoehler schildert Wessels Tod’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 445, 24 September 1930; ‘“Ali” packt aus’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 449, 23 September 1930. See LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, pp. 109–23 (BStU pagination). BArch/B, R 58/499, pp. 5, 11; memorandum from the political department of police headquarters in Berlin to ‘all eastern border stations’ dated 17 January 1930, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1280. BArch/B, R 58/499, p. 10; ‘Ali Hoehler schildert Wessels Tod’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 445, 24 September 1930. LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, pp. 142ff.; statement of Karl Godowski from 4 February 1930, in: ibid., pp. 135ff. See LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2756, p. 11f.; Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/I, p. 81; ‘Die Hauptbelastungszeugin im Wessel-Prozess’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 451, 24 September 1930. See LAB, C-Rep. 118–01, #2755, p. 8; LBO, reg. #10229, p. G 10.

6. Traces to Nowhere 1

2

3

The Stasi were presumably not interested in Wessel but rather in Max Jambrowski, and put the files under his name in the early 1950s. Since the summer of 2008 they have been located in the Landesarchiv Berlin (Berlin State Archives, LAB). On the Stasi’s Nazi archive see Henry Leide, NS-Verbrecher und Staatssicherheit. Die geheime Vergangenheitspolitik der DDR, Göttingen 2005, pp. 143–81. LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 44. On the prostitution scene in Berlin see Elder, Murder Scenes, pp. 120–31; Martin Lücke, Männlichkeit in Unordnung. Homosexualität und männliche Prostitution in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik, Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 166–94. LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, pp. 41–44.

267

The Making of a Nazi Hero 4 Ewers, Horst Wessel, pp. 89ff. 5 Ibid., pp. 137f., 143f. 6 Engelbrechten, Eine braune Armee entsteht, p. 102. 7 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 76. 8 Apfel, Les dessous de la justice allemande, pp. 202, 206. 9 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 41. 10 Ibid., pp. 51–55. 11 Ibid., p 33f. 12 Ibid., p. 8f. 13 Ibid., p. 15. 14 A variety of possible motives are also discussed in Apfel, Les dessous de la justice allemande, p. 205. 15 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8308, p. 99f. (BStU pagination). 16 See GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 84a Justizministerium, #51633, pp. 19–28, here p. 27. 17 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 42. 18 Ibid., pp. 82–85; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8305, p. 40f. (BStU pagination). 19 An early instance of this claim can be found in ‘SA-Führer aus Eifersucht umgelegt’, Die Rote Fahne, 13, 16 January 1930. 20 See Wagner, Hitlers Kriminalisten, pp. 50–55; Graf, Politische Polizei zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur, pp. 36–43, 438. Some police historians, on the other hand, contend that the political police of Prussia were a ‘largely loyal instrument of the social-democratic police command’; the KPD and NSDAP were equally kept under surveillance and control, at least according to Dams / Stolle, Die Gestapo, p. 14. 21 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, pp. 100–103. 22 Ibid., pp. 100–103. 23 Ibid., pp. 104, 120f. 24 Ibid., p. 126f. 25 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8308, p. 31. 26 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 116f. 27 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8308, p. 82. 28 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8303, p. 16 (BStU pagination). 29 Roegels, Der Marsch auf Berlin, p. 33. 30 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8308, pp. 6–15; 119–24 (BStU pagination). 31 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8303, pp. 121f., 178–94 (BStU pagination); LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8306, pp. 305–308 (BStU pagination).

7. Sensation in the Criminal Court: The First Horst Wessel Trial (1930) 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

Mann, ‘Die Mythen der Unterwelt’, p. 108. See Daniel Siemens, ‘Die “Vertrauenskrise” der Justiz in der Weimarer Republik’, in: Moritz Föllmer / Rüdiger Graf (eds), Die ‘Krise’ der Weimarer Republik. Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 139–63; idem., Metropole und Verbrechen, pp. 114–44, 189–92. See GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 283, pp. 137–40. See ‘Der Mord an Wessel’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 442, 22 September 1930; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8303, vol. 1, p. 164; ‘Ali Hoehler schildert Wessels Tod’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 445, 24 September 1930; Apfel, Les dessous de la justice allemande, p. 204. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/I, pp. 245, 249. StA H, residents’ registration archive, entry on Gertrud Richter. See Moritz Goldstein, Berliner Jahre. Erinnerungen 1880–1933, Munich 1977. ‘Die Drei an Wessels Tür’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 450, 24 September 1930.

268

Notes 9 Oertel, Horst Wessel, p. 104; on Tolk, see Gabriele Tergit, Wer schiesst aus Liebe? Gerichtsreportagen, Berlin 1999, p. 180; on Frey’s committed efforts, see Kempner, Ankläger einer Epoche, p. 42. 10 Becker / Jentsch, ‘Organisation und Klassenkampf’, p. 438f.; GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77, 4043, 385; Tischler, ‘Die Gerichtssäle müssen zu Tribunalen gegen die Klassenrichter gemacht werden’, pp. 111, 120. 11 Marianne Brentzel, Die Machtfrau. Hilde Benjamin, 1902–1989, Berlin 1997, p. 41. 12 Schneider / Schwarz / Schwarz (eds), Die Rechtsanwälte der Roten Hilfe Deutschlands, pp. 99, 204f. 13 For a detailed account see Hett, Crossing Hitler; Henning Grunwald, Political Justice in the Weimar Republic. Party Lawyers, Political Trials and Judicial Culture, Münster 2012; Tischler, ‘Die Gerichtssäle müssen zu Tribunalen gegen die Klassenrichter gemacht werden’. 14 Cited in Brauns, Schafft Rote Hilfe!, p. 173. See also Ulrich Stascheit, ‘Felix Halle (1884–1937) – Justitiar der Kommunistischen Partei’, in: Kritische Justiz (ed.), Streitbare Juristen. Eine andere Tradition, Baden-Baden 1988, pp. 153–63. 15 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8305, pp. 271 (BStU pagination); LAB, A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, #21680, p. 374. 16 BArch/B, SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/93, p. 247f. 17 ‘Die Drei an Wessels Tür’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 450, 24 September 1930. 18 BArch/B, SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/82, pp. 51, 61; SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/93, p. 249. 19 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8303, p. 172 (BStU pagination). 20 ‘Sturmszenen vor dem Kriminalgericht’, Der Tag, 228, 24 September 1930; ‘“Ali” packt aus’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 449, 23 September 1930. 21 ‘Strafanträge im Wessel-Prozess’, Der Tag, 230, 26 September 1930; Apfel, Les dessous de la justice allemande, p. 208. 22 BArch/B, Dok/k 42 (DZ-Kartei), pp. 14ff. 23 ‘Der Mord an Wessel. Was ist eine “proletarische Abreibung”?’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 443, 23 September 1930. 24 BArch/B, Dok/k 42 (DZ-Kartei), p. 9f. 25 Ibid., p. 10 [emphasis in original]. 26 Ibid., p. 20. 27 BArch/B, SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/93, p. 247. 28 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8303, p. 221 (BStU pagination). 29 ‘Noch ein politischer Mordprozess’, Berliner Börsen-Courir, 442, 22 September 1930. 30 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #2506, vol. 8, pp. 111–20. 31 Ibid., pp. 143–49. The second verdict of the Berlin Landgericht is missing in the files of the Landesarchiv Berlin but is contained in the files of the Prussian Ministry of Justice (GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 84a, 124821). 32 See Gumbel, Vier Jahre politischer Mord; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, pp. 408–12. 33 See also Ettelson, The Nazi ‘New Man’, pp. 89–98. 34 Rudolf Olden, ‘Das oberste Gesetz der Gerechtigkeit’, Berliner Tageblatt, 386, 16 August 1932. 35 See ‘Judenbastard’, Berliner Tageblatt, 410, 31 August 1930; GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 2, p. 64f. 36 BArch/B, R 3001/108644, p. 31f. 37 ‘Ungeheuerliche Strafanträge im Wessel-Prozess’, Die Rote Fahne, 225, 26 September 1930. 38 ‘Prämien auf faschistischen Arbeitermord’, Die Rote Fahne, 228, 28 September 1930; ‘Brutale Zuchthausurteile im Wessel-Prozess’, Die Rote Fahne, 226, 27 September 1930.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 39 ‘Racheurteile des Systems’, Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung, 42, 19 October 1930; ‘Wessel seinen Verletzungen erlegen’, Der Montag Morgen, 8, 24 February 1930; ‘Horst Wessels Tod – Werk eines Juden!’, Der Angriff, 51, 26 June 1930. 40 ‘Die übliche Milde für Marxisten’, Der Tag, 231, 27 September 1930; ‘Prozesse des Systems: Das Urteil gegen die Mörder Horst Wessels’, Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung, 39, 28 September 1930; ‘Der Prozess gegen Wessels Mörder’, Völkischer Beobachter (Bavarian edition), 230, 27 September 1930; BArch/B, R 3001/108644, p. 28.

8. Cult and Commerce See Peter Reichel, Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reichs. Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus, Munich 1991; Sobański, Nachrichten aus Berlin, p. 36. 2 On the current state of scholarship: Hans Maier, ‘Political religion: a concept and its limitations’, in: Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions viii/1 (March 2007), pp. 5–16; Friedrich Kiessling, ‘Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion. Zu einer neuen und alten Deutung des Dritten Reichs’, in: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 45 (2005), pp. 529–47; Hans Günther Hockerts, ‘War der Nationalsozialismus eine politische Religion? Über Chancen und Grenzen eines Erklärungsmodells’, in: Klaus Hildebrand, Zwischen Politik und Religion. Studien zur Entstehung, Existenz und Wirkung des Totalitarismus, Munich 2003, pp. 45–71; Hardtwig, ‘Political religion in Modern Germany’. On the cult of Hitler see Ian Kershaw, Der Hitler-Mythos. Volksmeinung und Propaganda im Dritten Reich, Stuttgart 1980. 3 See Saehrendt, Der Stellungskrieg der Denkmäler, pp. 10–16, 140f. 4 Berghoff, Der Tod des politischen Kollektivs, pp. 155–62, 194. 5 See Broderick, Das Horst-Wessel-Lied, p. 38, fn. 6; Sobański, Nachrichten aus Berlin, p. 46. 6 Roswitha Berndt et al., Von all unseren Kameraden… Der kleine Trompeter und seine Zeit, published by the Bezirkskommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte der örtlichen Arbeiterbewegung und Bezirksparteiarchiv bei der Bezirksleitung Halle der SED, Halle an der Saale 1967, pp. 72ff. 7 See Lammel, Das Arbeiterlied, pp. 142f., 226. 8 See Berndt, Von all unseren Kameraden, illus. 84–87. 9 Cited in Roth, Das nationalsozialistische Massenlied, p. 120. 10 Joseph Goebbels, Michael. Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern, Munich 1929 (Translated by Joachim Neugroschel as Michael. A Novel, New York 1987). See also ‘Kampf um Berlin: Die Bluttat an dem Sturmführer Wessel’, Der Angriff, 6, 19 January 1930. 11 See the astute analysis of Brittnacher, ‘Martyrer im Braunhemd’, pp. 220–28. 12 Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt, Hamburg 1932, pp. 40, 68. 13 See ‘Horst Wessel’, Völkischer Beobachter, 283, 10 October 1933; ‘Horst Wessel. Bielefelds bestem Sohn. Vom Sänger und Kämpfer des Dritten Reiches’, Westfälische Neueste Nachrichten, 235, 7 October 1933. 14 ‘Horst Wessel zum Gedächtnis’, in: Der Angriff, 81, 9 October 1930; Joseph Goebbels, ‘Horst’, in: ibid. 15 Bade, Horst Wessel, p. 23; Joseph Goebbels, ‘Horst’, Der Angriff, 81, 9 October 1930; E.W. Friedrich, ‘Als Horst Wessel starb. Ein Tatsachenbericht über die Beerdigung unseres Helden’, Westdeutscher Beobachter (Cologne), 27 February 1935, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224. 16 Johan Huizinga, In the Shadow of Tomorrow, New York 1936, pp. 166–68. 17 For a detailed treatment see Luckey, Personifizierte Ideologie, pp. 35–94. 18 On Ewers and his relationship to National Socialism see Kugel, Alles schob man ihm zu, pp. 294–355; Stefanie Stockhorst, Hanns Heinz Ewers als Prophet ohne Zukunft. 1

270

Notes Bedingungsanalyse des gescheiterten Propagandaromans ‘Horst Wessel’, Wetzlar 1999; Michael Sennewald, Hanns Heinz Ewers. Phantastik und Jugendstil, Meisenheim am Glan 1973, pp. 181–208. 19 See Klaus Vondung, ‘Stationen des Jugendkults in der deutschen Literatur zwischen 1900 und 1933’, in: Marc Cluet (ed.), Le Culte de la jeunesse et l’enfance en Allemagne 1870– 1933, Rennes 2003, pp. 263–77, here p. 270f.; Brittnacher, ‘Martyrer im Braunhemd’, pp. 220–28. 20 ‘Der Horst-Wessel-Film’, Filmkurier, 10 July 1933, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Hans Westmar (Film, 1933)’; Kugel, Alles schob man ihm zu, pp. 305–309, 313; HU/UA, ‘Rektor und Senat’ archive, 574, pp. 171ff. 21 Cited in S. Doris Wesener, …und die Dichtung wurde zur Wahrheit. Eine Analyse zur Entstehung des Horst-Wessel-Mythos anhand des Romans ‘Horst Wessel’. Ein deutsches Schicksal’ von Hanns Heinz Ewers, Master’s thesis, Graz 1999, p. 38. 22 Copy of a dedication from the Hitler Library of the Library of Congress, Washington, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Schreibverbot für Hanns Heinz Ewers’. 23 Draft of a letter from Josephine Ewers-Bumiller to Hanns Heinz Ewers, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Ewers-Bumiller’ [emphasis in original]. 24 Cited in Wesener, …und die Dichtung wurde zur Wahrheit, p. 40. 25 Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, ‘Vom Fliegen und Töten. Militärische Männlichkeit in der deutschen Fliegerliteratur, 1914–1939’, in: Karen Hagemann / idem (eds), Heimat-Front. Militär und Geschlechterverhältnisse im Zeitalter der Weltkriege, Frankfurt am Main 2002, pp. 208–35. 26 See Zwicker, ‘Nationale Märtyrer’; Friedländer (ed.), Bertelsmann im Dritten Reich, p. 356; Klee, Die SA Jesu Christi, pp. 14–17. 27 Rolf Brandt, Albert Leo Schlageter. Leben und Sterben eines deutschen Helden, Hamburg 1940, p. 103; Ewers, Horst Wessel, p. 288f. 28 ‘Soldaten. Horst Wessel’, Der Angriff, 22 November 1932, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Horst Wessel (Roman, 1932)’; Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/III, p. 52; ‘Führende Männer der NSDAP über Horst Wessel. Ein deutsches Schicksal von Hanns Heinz Ewers’, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Horst Wessel (Roman, 1932)’. 29 ‘Blutrausch-Poeten vom Braunen Haus’, Rote Post (Berlin), 29 January 1933, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Biographisches (Hanns Heinz Ewers und der NS)’; Dr Werner Arendt, ‘Hanns Heinz Ewers’ Buch “Horst Wessel”. Und was darüber zu sagen ist’, Dortmunder Generalanzeiger, 7 December 1932, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Horst Wessel (Roman, 1932)’; ‘Geld aus Dreck’, Welt am Abend, 30 January 1933, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Biographisches (Gegnerische Äusserungen zu Hanns Heinz Ewers 1933/34)’. 30 ‘Roman der Knaben’, Stuttgarter Sonntagszeitung, 13 November 1932, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Horst Wessel (Roman, 1932)’. 31 Heiko Luckey, ‘Believers writing for believers: Traces of political religion in National Socialist pulp fiction’, in: Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions viii/1 (March 2007), pp. 77–92; Gisevius, Bis zum bittern Ende, p. 48. 32 Baird, To Die for Germany, p. 103. 33 See Thomas Tavernaro, Der Verlag Hitlers und der NSDAP. Die Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH, Vienna 2004; Sophie Fetthauer, Musikverlage im ‘Dritten Reich’ und im Exil, Hamburg 2004, pp. 285–91. 34 Testimony of Inge Sanders to Denazification Committee VI on 8 August 1949, in: NLA-HStA, Nds.171 Hanover, 22133.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 35 Information provided to the author in writing by Bettina Kleinschmidt, Rostock University Archives, on 30 May 2008. 36 See HU/UA, Student directory of Berlin University, entry on Ingeborg Wessel (442, October 1932). 37 HU/UA, faculty of medicine collection, 1053, and Student directory of Berlin University, entry on Ewald Sanders (3262, between November 1931 and April 1932); information provided to the author by Ms Freund, Moers Civil Registry Office on 11 June 2008; Walter Albrecht, Dehrenberg. Höfe und Familien seit 400 Jahren, Hanover 1986, p. 18. 38 In the German system, medical students qualify initially as physicians (enabling them to practise medicine), and only go on to earn the title of ‘doctor of medicine’ once an additional dissertation has been completed. 39 Ingeborg Sanders, Über den Einfluss der Labyrinthfistel auf das Hörvermögen nach Radikaloperation, typewritten manuscript, no place of publication [1944]. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library) in Leipzig has a copy of the text. No examination documents could be found at the medical faculty of Berlin University for the years 1937 to 1944, however. 40 See Ulrike Erben, ‘“Die Ärztin gehört mit an die vorderste Front”. Das Berufsbild der deutschen Ärztin im Nationalsozialismus im Spiegel der Zeitschrift “Die Ärztin”’, in: Ingrid Arias (ed.), ‘Im Dienste der Volksgesundheit’. Frauen, Gesundheitswesen, Nationalsozialismus, Vienna 2006, pp. 5–14. 41 Inge Sanders ‘Entnazifizierungs-Fragebogen’ of 9 February 1948, in: NLA-HStA, Nds.171 Hanover, 22133; BArch/Bay, ZLA1/5822815, pp. 4–11, 17, 38. 42 Testimony of Inge Sanders to the denazification committee on 10 June 1948, in: NLA-HStA, Nds.171 Hanover, 22133. 43 Handwritten letter from Margarete Wessel to the Reichsschatzmeister (Reich treasurer) of the NSDAP dated 9 January 1934, in: BArch/B, NSDAP-ParteikanzleiKorrespondenz, entry on Margarete Wessel; letter from the Reichsschatzmeister of the NSDAP to Margarete Wessel dated 16 February 1934, in: ibid. 44 Testimony of Inge Sanders to denazification committee on 10 June 1948, in: NLAHStA, Nds.171 Hanover, 22133; file memo on the interrogation of Dr Inge Sanders on 10 June 1948, in: ibid. 45 Testimony of Inge Sanders to the denazification court on 8 August 1949, p. 3, in: ibid. 46 Kattentidt, ‘Was unsere Kinder lesen möchten’, p. 66. 47 Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich, p. 87. 48 See Reichsgesetzblatt [Reich Legal Gazette] 1933, I, p. 285; NLA-StA Oldenburg, collection 131, #442, pp. 10, 13. 49 See also the detailed analysis of Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden, pp. 222–29. 50 Cited in Ralph Wiener, Als das Lachen tödlich war. Erinnerungen und Fakten 1933–1945, Rudolstadt 1988, p. 79. 51 ‘Hans Westmar. Einer von vielen’, Illustrierter Film-Kurier, 2034 (1933), in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Reklamematerial zu Hans Westmar’. 52 ‘Die ersten Horst-Wessel-Szenen, Berliner Westen, 24 July 1933, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Hans Westmar (Film, 1933)’; Hanfstaengl, The Unknown Hitler, p. 251f. 53 Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/III, p. 286; ‘Dr Goebbels über das Verbot des “Horst-Wessel-Films”’, Völkischer Beobachter, 284, 11 October 1933. See also ‘Der Horst-Wessel-Film verboten’, Der Angriff, 237, 9 October 1933. 54 Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/III, p. 255. 55 ‘Film depicting Nazi triumph hailed in Berlin’, New York Herald Tribune, 14 December 1933, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Hans Westmar (Film)’; Hanfstaengel, The Unknown Hitler, p. 252.

272

Notes 56 See Martin Loiperdinger (ed.), Märtyrerlegenden im NS-Film, Opladen 1991; Oertel, Horst Wessel, pp. 147–58. 57 BArch/B, R 43II/388, p. 16. 58 ‘Hans Westmar. Uraufführung im Capitol’, Berliner Morgenpost, 14 December 1933, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Hans Westmar (Film)’; Siegel Monopolfilm (ed.), Hans Westmar. Urteil der Presse, in: ibid., ‘Reklamematerial zu Hans Westmar’ folder. 59 Siegel Monopolfilm (ed.), Hans Westmar. Urteil der Presse, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Reklamematerial zu Hans Westmar’; ‘HorstWessel-Gedenken’, Niedersächsische Tages-Zeitung (Hanover), 45, 22–23 February 1936; Ewers, Der Unverantwortliche, p. 354. 60 See Walther Linden, ‘Ewers’ nationale Romane’, in: Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 48 (1934), p. 207f.; list of harmful and undesirable literature dated 31 December 1938, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Schreibverbot für Hanns Heinz Ewers’; Kugel, Alles schob man ihm zu, p. 355; clippings and reports on the writings of Hanns Heinz Ewers, undated, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Schreibverbot für Hanns Heinz Ewers’; excerpt from the Nazi periodical Bücherkunde from August 1944, in: ibid. 61 Indictment of Dr Richard Plasch (1935), pp. 3, 7, in: estate of Richard Plasch (in private hands). I am very grateful to Mrs Reglindis Plasch for kindly giving me a copy of this document. 62 Letter of Richard Plasch to Ernst Röhm of 12 February 1934, in: ibid. 63 Indictment of Dr Richard Plasch (1935), p. 5; affidavit of film producer Emil Karl Beltzig, Munich, 25 January 1967, both contained in: ibid. 64 Copy of contemporary verdict statistics (file 221.0.49.35), in: SBB PK, literary estate 353: Heinz Knobloch, box ‘Der arme Epstein 1’. 65 Knobloch, Der arme Epstein, p. 149; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #2166, p. 5f.; information provided by Claus and Wera Küchenmeister in a conversation with the author on 10 November 2007 in Siethen, Brandenburg.

9. With God’s Blessing 1 2

3 4 5 6

7

See Zwicker, ‘Nationale Märtyrer’; Fuhrmeister, ‘Ein Märtyrer auf der Zugspitze?’; Friedländer (ed.), Bertelsmann im Dritten Reich, p. 356; Klee, Die SA Jesu Christi, pp. 14–17. See Rolf Brandt, Albert Leo Schlageter. Leben und Sterben eines deutschen Helden, Hamburg 1940, pp. 3, 16; Fuhrmeister, ‘Ein Märtyrer auf der Zugspitze?’, paragraphs 8ff.; Albert Leo Schlageter. Gesammelte Aufsätze aus der Monatsschrift des CV, Munich 1932, pp. 10, 32, 89. See Smid, ‘Protestantismus und Antisemitismus’, p. 56; GStAPK, I. HA, Rep. 77, 4043, 423, p. 75. Cited in GStAPK, I. HA, Rep. 77, 4043, 423, p. 14. See in a similar vein Hans-Walter Schmuhl, ‘Evangelische Kirche und Zweiter Weltkrieg’, in: Bernd Hey, Kirche in der Kriegszeit 1939–1945, Bielefeld 2005; Hamm, Schuld und Verstrickung der Kirche, pp. 24–34. See Gailus, ‘1933 als protestantisches Erlebnis’, pp. 483, 502; Lindemann, ‘Antijudaismus und Antisemitismus’, pp. 577ff., 606f.; Dahm, Pfarrer und Politik, pp. 195–211; Ralph Wiener, Als das Lachen tödlich war. Erinnerungen und Fakten 1933–1945, Rudolstadt 1988, p. 114f. Lindemann, ‘Antijudaismus und Antisemitismus’, p. 577; Smid, ‘Protestantismus und Antisemitismus’, p. 62f.; Hamm, Schuld und Verstrickung der Kirche, pp. 30ff.

273

The Making of a Nazi Hero Otto Dibelius, Das Wiedererwachen des Glaubens in der Gegenwart, Berlin 1933, p. 41; Kurz, Nationalprotestantisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik, p. 319, fn. 38. 9 Müller-Schwese, ‘Die Männer in der Kirche’, Berliner Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt lv/43 (22 October 1933), p. 13f. 10 Erich Stange, ‘Junge kämpferische Front’, in: Arnold Dannermann (ed.), Jugend bekennt sich zu Christus und Nationalsozialismus, Dresden 1933, pp. 5–11, here p. 5. 11 Hermann Prahl, ‘Alles für Deutschland, Deutschland für Christus!’, in: ibid., pp. 57–78, here p. 63f. 12 Will Kelter, Horst Wessel, Leipzig 1933, p. 5; Heinz Weidemann, So sieht die kommende Kirche aus, Bremen 1939, p. 10. 13 Cited in Gailus, ‘1933 als protestantisches Erlebnis’, p. 485; as well as ‘Bischof Hossenfelder über die Ziele der “Deutschen Christen”’, Völkischer Beobachter (northern German edition), 272, 29 September 1933. 14 Cited in Gailus, ‘Das Lied, das aus dem Pfarrhaus kam’. 15 Stefanie Endlich / Monika von Bernu Geyler / Beate Rossié (eds), Christenkreuz und Hakenkreuz. Kirchenbau und sakrale Kunst im Nationalsozialismus, Berlin 2008, p. 36f.; Hans Proligheuer, Hitlers fromme Bilderstürmer. Kirche und Kunst unterm Hakenkreuz, Cologne 2001, pp. 61–68. 16 See Robert Steiner, ‘Paul Humburg und das nationale Bewusstsein’, in: Monatshefte für Evangelische Kirchengeschichte des Rheinlandes 24 (1975), pp. 65–110, here p. 90; Gisela Hasenknopf, Aus dem Familienleben von Paul Humburg. Erinnerungen seiner Tochter, Düsseldorf 2000, p. 26. 17 Information provided to the author by Dr Ulrich Bender, Detmold, on 27 May 2008. 18 Cited in Prolingheuer, Kleine politische Kirchengeschichte, p. 55f. 19 See Hermann Kurzke, ‘“Wann wir schreiten Seit an Seit”. Eine Liedkarriere’, in: Barbara Stambolis / Jürgen Reulecke (eds), Good-bye memories? Lieder im Generationengedächtnis des 20. Jahrhunderts, Essen 2007, pp. 43–49. On the song ‘Märkische Heide’ see part II, Appropriations. 20 For a detailed but ideologically biased account see Steiner, ‘Paul Humburg und das nationale Bewusstsein’, pp. 86–95. 21 Friedländer, Bertelsmann im Dritten Reich, p. 117. Johannes Kuhlo, born on 8 October 1856, was an important Church musician. Together with his father, the parson Eduard Kuhlo, he is considered the forefather of the Ravensberg trombone movement. 22 See Reinhard Neumann, ‘Pastor Johannes Kuhlo (1856–1941). Seine politische Einstellung als Vorsteher der Westfälischen Diakonenanstalt Nazareth von 1893– 1922 und darüber hinaus’, in: Jahrbuch für Westfälische Kirchengeschichte 102 (2006), pp. 367–403, here pp. 389–96; Puschner, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich, p. 215. 23 See the brochure ‘Westfälische Diakonenanstalt “Nazareth”’, undated, in: LkA EKvW, depositum Johannes Kuhlo, collection 3, #16, vol. 75; ‘Innere Mission im neuen Staat’, Berliner Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt lv/47 (19 November 1933), p. 6. For a detailed study of the relationship between the deaconry and National Socialism see Häusler, ‘Dienst an Kirche und Volk’, pp. 314–67; see also Klee, Die SA Jesu Christi, pp. 11–19. 24 See Bräutigam, Mut zur kleinen Tat, p. 287f.; Häusler, ‘Dienst an Kirche und Volk’, p. 322f.; S. Nicol, ‘Die unveränderlichen Grundlagen der männlichen Diakonie im Lichte der neuen Zeit’, in: Deutsches Diakonen-Blatt xxi/6 (June 1934), pp. 115–19, here pp. 117ff. 25 Christian Hoffmann, ‘Volksmission – Hausmission’, in: Deutsches Diakonen-Blatt xxi/1 (April 1934), p. 67f. 26 Kuhlemann, Die Kirchliche Hochschule Bethel, p. 55; Reinhard Neumann, Die Geschichte der Westfälischen Diakonenanstalt Nazareth in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, unpublished manuscript. 8

274

Notes 27 28

Emer, ‘Bielefelds bestem Sohn’, p. 82. Gottfried Michaelis, ‘Das Studentenwohnheim Jägerstift in den Jahren 1934–1936’, in: Matthias Benad (ed.), Bethels Mission (1). Zwischen Epileptischenpflege und Heidenbekehrung, Bielefeld 2001, pp. 119–32, here pp. 120, 123, 126. On the position of the seminary of Bethel as of 1933 see the nuanced account of Kuhlemann, Die Kirchliche Hochschule Bethel, pp. 60–87. 29 Kuhlemann, Die Kirchliche Hochschule Bethel, pp. 66, 69f. 30 Häusler, ‘Dienst an Kirche und Volk’, pp. 319, 338–50. On the Johannesstift (Foundation of St John) under National Socialism see Bräutigam, Mut zur kleinen Tat, esp. pp. 281–95. 31 GStAPK, I. HA, Rep. 90 Staatsministerium, Annex P Geheime Staatspolizei, #87/2, pp. 136–46, here p. 145. This is also the prevailing opinion among scholars: see Christoph Kösters, ‘Christliche Kirchen und nationalsozialistische Diktatur’, in: Dietmar Süss / Winfried Süss (eds), Das ‘Dritte Reich’. Eine Einführung, Munich 2008, pp. 121–41, esp. p. 126f.; Thamer, Verführung und Gewalt, pp. 435–46. 32 See Reijo E. Heinonen, Anpassung und Identität. Theologie und Kirchenpolitik der Bremer Deutschen Christen 1933–1945, Göttingen 1978, pp. 124–31.

10. A Hero for German Youth 1

K. Schwenke, ‘Deutsches Schrifttum im Deutschunterricht und im Geschichts­ unterricht. Versuch einer notwendigen Abgrenzung im Lichte der besonderen Aufgaben der deutschen höheren Schule’, in: Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 48 (1934), pp. 504–10, here pp. 505, 509. 2 LAB, A. Rep. 020–11, vol. 24, p. 15f. 3 Director of studies Dr Hans Roeder, ‘Bericht über das Schuljahr 1933/34 des Städtischen Oberlyzeums nebst Elisabethlyzeum, Frauenschule und sozialpädagogischem Lehrgang’, in: StA H, HR 16 SB 46. 4 ‘Horst-Wessel-Feier im Köllnischen Gymnasium zu Berlin’, in: Deutsches PhilologenBlatt. Korrespondenz-Blatt für den akademisch gebildeten Lehrerstand 41 (1933), p. 455f.; John Stave, Stube und Küche. Erlebtes und Erlesenes, Berlin 1987, p. 47. 5 On the book’s popularity see Kattentidt, ‘Was unsere Kinder lesen möchten’, p. 66. 6 Margarethe Weigt, ‘Horst Wessel, der Freiheitsfänger’, in: Inge[borg] Wessel (ed.), Das neue Buch für Mädels, 3rd edition, Stuttgart, undated, p. 22. 7 Cited in ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied in den Schulen’, Crossener Tageblatt, 113, 16 May 1933. 8 Newspaper clipping from Pädagogische Warte, 15 July 1933, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Horst Wessel (Roman, 1932)’; Kurt Jacoby, ‘Das Schrifttum über die nationalsozialistische Revolution im Deutschunterricht der Unterklasse’, in: Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 48 (1934), pp. 713–23, here p. 718. 9 Czech-Jochberg, Das Jugendbuch von Horst Wessel, pp. 87ff. For an analysis of the popular Wessel biographies of 1933 and 1934 see Luckey, Personifizierte Ideologie, pp. 57–71. 10 Cited in Einst und jetzt im deutschen Lied. Kameradschafts-Liederbuch des NS-Reichskriegerbundes, Berlin 1938, p. 8f. 11 Inge[borg] Wessel, ‘Das Mädel und die Fahne’, in: idem (ed.), Das neue Buch für Mädels, Stuttgart 1933, pp. 12–15, here p. 14f. 12 See Marion E.P. de Ras, Körper, Eros und weibliche Jugend. Mädchen im Wandervogel und in der Bündischen Jugend 1900–1933, Pfaffenweiler 1988; Ernst Erich Noth, Die Gestalt des jungen Menschen im deutschen Roman der Nachkriegszeit, edited by Lother Glotzbach, Frankfurt am Main 2001, pp. 55–71, 141–49. 13 See Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil, verses 682f.: ‘Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast / erwirb es um es zu besitzen’; Eberhard Frommann:

275

The Making of a Nazi Hero Die Lieder der NS-Zeit. Untersuchungen zur nationalsozialistischen Liedpropaganda von den Anfängen bis zum zweiten Weltkrieg, Cologne 1999, p. 21f. 14 See Arthur Preuss, ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’, in: Das humanistische Gymnasium. Zeitschrift des Deutschen Gymnasialvereins 44, 6 (1933), p. 235. 15 LAB, A Rep. 020–11, vol. 16, p. 26. 16 ‘Horst-Wessel-Feier im Köllnischen Gymnasium zu Berlin’, in: Deutsches PhilologenBlatt. Korrespondenz-Blatt für den akademisch gebildeten Lehrerstand 41 (1933), p. 456. 17 Foreword by Wolf Meyer-Erlach, in: Düning, Der SA-Student im Kampf um die Hochschule, p. 7. 18 Düning, Der SA-Student im Kampf um die Hochschule, p. 37; Hannes Schneider, ‘Die Schulung des nationalsozialistischen Studenten’, in: NS-Studentenbriefe. Nachrichtenund Schulungsmaterial des NSD-Studentenbundes 1 (November 1934), pp. 9–12; ‘Keine Stubenhocker – sondern Kerle’, in: ibid., 3 (December 1934), pp. 10–12. 19 Sobański, Nachrichten aus Berlin, p. 34. 20 See the anecdotes in: ‘Im Sturmlokal Horst Wessels. Was die Kameraden von ihrem Sturmführer erzählen’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 22–23 January 1933; Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar, Eintrag ‘Horst-Wessel-Stipendium’, in: Benz / Graml / Weiss (eds), Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, p. 520. 21 See Sonja Levsen, Elite, Männlichkeit und Krieg. Tübinger und Cambridger Studenten 1900–1929, Göttingen 2006; Schäfer, ‘Studentische Korporationen im Übergang von der Weimarer Republik zum deutschen Faschismus’. 22 Düning, Der SA-Student im Kampf um die Hochschule, pp. 89–92; ‘Verpflichtet Geschichte? Politische Tradition’, Die Bewegung (southern German edition), 28 January 1941, p. 4, in: BArch/B, 1200010175, #13286. 23 See WStLA, M. Abt. 119, A 32: 308/1942. 24 Information provided to the author by the Stadt- und Landesarchiv Wien (City and Regional Archives, Vienna) on 3 January 2008; ‘Horst-Wessel-Platz und Horst-WesselStrasse’, in: Felix Czeike, Historisches Lexikon Wien in fünf Bänden, vol. 3, Vienna 1994, p. 271; Ludwig Rossa, Strassenlexikon von Wien, Vienna 1945, p. 211. The politician, physician and journalist Victor Adler is considered to be one of the founding fathers of the Social Democratic Workers Party of German-Austria (SDAP), which changed its name in 1934 to the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ). He wrote his name with a ‘c’, however, not with a ‘k’. 25 Decree of Gauleiter Bürckel to all Landeshauptmannschaften (provincial heads of government) and the Municipal Council of the City of Vienna dated 11 May 1938, in: AT-OeStA/AdR, ‘Bürckel’/Materie, box 38, folder 1772. 26 Cited in F. König, ‘Eine Weihestunde für den deutschen Freiheitshelden Horst Wessel’, in: Nachrichten der Hitler-Jugend des Verbandes nationalsozialistischer Jungarbeiter. Ortsgruppe Favoriten, v/13 (April 1931), p. 1f. See also WStLA, M. Abt. 119, A 32: Zl.: 2323/1925. 27 Speech of SA-Stabschef Victor Lutze on the tenth anniversary of Horst Wessel’s death, typescript, p. 3, in: BArch/B, NS 23/236. 28 Cited in Roth, Das nationalsozialistische Massenlied, p. 191. 29 See Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden, pp. 548–70; Siegfried Mennenöh, ‘Sänger der Freiheit. Zum Todestage Horst Wessels’, Deutsche Rundschau (Bromberg), 24 February 1943, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224. 30 Mennenöh, ‘Sänger der Freiheit. Zum Todestage Horst Wessels’, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224; idem, ‘Kamerad Horst Wessel. Gedanken der Front zu seinem Todestage’, Forster Tageblatt, 21–22 February 1942, in: ibid. 31 And this regardless of the fact that the cult of Nazi ‘martyrs’ such as Wessel served from the very beginning as a model for the veneration of future war victims. See Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden, pp. 452–57.

276

Notes SA-Gruppenführer Hacker, ‘An die SA-Männer im Wartheland’, Ostdeutscher Beobachter (Posen), 23 February 1942, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224. 33 Joseph Goebbels, ‘Die Juden sind schuld!’, Das Reich, 16 November 1941, in: BArch/B, R 187/627. 34 Berghoff, Der Tod des politischen Kollektivs, p. 162 [emphasis in original]. 35 Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden, p. 466f.; BArch/B, R 58/172, p. 272. 36 BArch/B, NS 18/661, pp. 1–3; Prolingheuer, Kleine politische Kirchengeschichte, p. 87. 37 See Michael Wolffsohn / Thomas Brechenmacher, Die Deutschen und ihre Vornamen. 200 Jahre Politik und öffentliche Meinung, Munich 1999, pp. 208, 228–33; Oliver Lorenz, ‘Die Adolf-Kurve 1932–1945’, in: Götz Aly (ed.), Volkes Stimme. Skepsis und Führervertrauen im Nationalsozialismus, Bonn 2006, pp. 22–37. 38 Rita von der Grün, ‘Funktionen und Formen von Musiksendungen im Rundfunk’, in: Hans-Werner Heister / Hans-Günter Klein (eds), Musik und Musikpolitik im faschistischen Deutschland, Frankfurt am Main 1984, pp. 98–106, here p. 105. 32

11. Monuments in Stone and Iron See Saehrendt, Der Stellungskrieg der Denkmäler, pp. 140–45. For detailed descriptions see Engelbrechen / Volz, Wir wandern durch das nationalsozialistische Berlin. 3 Saehrendt, Der Stellungskrieg der Denkmäler, p. 142; Engelbrechten, Eine braune Armee entsteht, p. 255. 4 See in particular the photograph ‘Der Führer am Grabe Horst Wessels’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 24 January 1933; Hans Breuer, ‘Mahnmal für die deutsche Jugend. Ein Gedenkstein für Horst Wessel’, Der Tag, 24 November 1932, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Horst Wessel (Roman, 1932)’. 5 ‘S.A. marschiert zum Grabe Horst Wessels’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 22–23 January 1933. 6 Cited in ‘Der Führer am Grabe Horst Wessels’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 24 January 1933. 7 Ibid.; ‘Die Gedenkfeier am Grabe Horst Wessels’, Wiesbadener Zeitung, 23 January 1933, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Biographisches (Hanns Heinz Ewers und der NS)’. 8 Thomas Friedrich, Die missbrauchte Hauptstadt, p. 414; ‘Ihr Geist ist unser Geist’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 24 January 1933. 9 ‘Die Grabsteinweihe auf dem Friedhof’, Spandauer Zeitung, 23 January 1933, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Biographisches (Hanns Heinz Ewers und der NS)’. 10 Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/III, p. 113. 11 Letter from Otto Hinze to the consistory of the province of Brandenburg dated 14 August 1929, in: ELAB, Konsistorialakte 14/3340. 12 Letter from deputy headmaster Georg Bolte to the Protestant consistory dated 29 January 1933, in: ibid.; memorandum of Superintendent Zimmermann dated 6 March 1933, in: ibid. 13 See Hanauske, Dieter (ed.), Die Sitzungsprotokolle des Magistrats der Stadt Berlin 1945/46, part 1, p. 286, fn. 27. 14 Cited in Helmut Heiber (ed.), Goebbels-Reden, vol. 1: 1932–1939, Düsseldorf 1971, pp. 128ff. [emphasis mine]. 15 ‘Eine Gedenktafel für Horst und Werner Wessel’, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 January 1934, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Biographisches (Hanns Heinz Ewers und der NS)’. 1 2

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 16 17

LAB, A. Rep. 358–01, vol. 8245, pp. 60–63. ‘Inschriftsweihe am Wessel-Haus’, Der Tag, 16 January 1934, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Biographisches (Hanns Heinz Ewers und der NS)’; caption to a picture of the dedication ceremony, Montagspost, 15 January 1934, in: HHI, literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers, folder entitled ‘Zeitungsausschnitte Hanns Heinz Ewers und der Nationalsozialismus’. 18 Engelbrechten / Volz, Wir wandern durch das nationalsozialistische Berlin, p. 93; Saehrendt, Der Stellungskrieg der Denkmäler, p. 142. After the Second World War Wessel-Platz was renamed Liebknecht-Platz and later became Rosa-LuxemburgPlatz. The building today houses the headquarters of the political party ‘Die Linke’ (The Left). 19 Hugo Binder, ‘Das Haus am Luxemburgplatz, Neues Deutschland, 9–10 June 1990; Angelika Klein, ‘Man sanktionierte den Coup dann einfach per Gesetz, Neues Deutschland, 28–29 December 1991 (cited in newspaper clippings, in: SBB PK, literary estate 353: Heinz Knobloch, box ‘Der arme Epstein 2’). 20 ‘Horst-Wessel-Platz’, in: Hans-Jürgen Mende (ed.): Alle Berliner Strassen und Plätze. Von der Gründung bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 2, Berlin 1998, p. 319. 21 See Saehrendt, Der Stellungskrieg der Denkmäler, p. 142f.; ‘Umgestaltung des HorstWessel-Platzes’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 54, 23 February 1934. 22 See Saehrendt, Der Stellungskrieg der Denkmäler, p. 145, fn. 246. 23 See the address of Mayor Julius Lippert, in: LAB, A Rep. 001–02, vol. 483. 24 ‘Horst-Wessel-Strasse’, in: Mende (ed.), Alle Berliner Strassen und Plätze, vol. 2, p. 319. 25 Cited in Saehrendt, Der Stellungskrieg der Denkmäler, pp. 144f. 26 Engelbrechten, Wir wandern durch das nationalsozialistische Berlin, p. 96. 27 See StAD, G 27 Darmstadt, vol. 887, p. 3. 28 See LAB, A Rep. 020–11; ‘Horst-Wessel-Gedenkstunde’, Völkischer Beobachter (Berlin edition), 56/57, 25–26 February 1934. 29 Memorandum of the district president to the Berlin chief of police from 27 November 1932, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1370a. 30 The case of Hamelin is typical, where several renamings took place in late March 1933, after which the town boasted a Hindenburg Stadium, Adolf-Hitler-Allee, Schlageter-Platz and Horst-Wessel-Platz. See Heinrich Spanuth / Rudolph Feige (eds), Geschichte der Stadt Hameln, vol. 2, Hameln 1963, p. 433. 31 So claimed Mayor Knipping in a speech on 5 July 1939 given at the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, cited in Friedrich Schütz, ‘Mainz vor 50 Jahren. 1. Juli bis 30. September 1939’, in: Mainz. Vierteljahreshefte für Kultur, Politik, Wirtschaft, Geschichte ix/3 (1989), pp. 128–34, here p. 129f. 32 ‘Eine Denkmalsweihe in Mainz’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 November 1939, in: BArch/B, NS 23/224. 33 See ‘Horst Wessels Lieblingsplatz’, Mitteldeutschland Eisenacher Zeitung, 217, 17 September 1934; ‘Horst-Wessel-Denkmal in Elgersburg eingeweiht’, Eisenacher Tagespost, 219, 17 September 1934. 34 Cited in Otto Gimm, ‘Die Sommerfrische Elgersburg im Thüringer Wald’, in: Die Henne, weekend supplement ‘Rund um den Kickelhahn’, 37, 15–16 September 1934. 35 ‘Horst Wessel. Bielefelds bester Sohn’, Westfälische Neueste Nachrichten, 235, 7 October 1933. 36 Lippe im Dritten Reich. Die Erziehung zum Nationalsozialismus. Eine Dokumentation 1933–1939, compiled and edited by Volker Wehrmann, published by the Dokumentationsstelle für regionale Kultur- und Schulgeschichte an der Fakultät für Pädagogik der Universität Bielefeld, Detmold 1987, p. 116. See also Vogelsang, Geschichte der Stadt Bielefeld, vol. 3, pp. 115–326. 37 StA Bi, collection 250,1/NSDAP, #1, p. 4.

278

Notes Westfälischer Generalanzeiger, 16 May 1933; cited in ‘Marschiert im Geiste mit…’ HorstWessel-Kult in Bielefeld, published by Oberstufen-Kolleg Bielefeld, Bielefeld 1993, p. 18. 39 Emer, ‘Bielefelds bestem Sohn’, p. 82. 40 ‘Der Horst-Wessel-Tag in Bielefeld’, Westfälischer Beobachter, 236, 7 October 1933. 41 See ‘Marschiert im Geiste mit…’, p. 27. 42 See the memorandum of district director of propaganda Bernhard Blasius to Reich Minister Dr Göbbels [sic] from 29 June 1933, in: StA Bi, collection 250,1/NSDAP, #14; ‘Horst-Wessel-Denkmal im Teutoburger Wald’, Völkischer Beobachter, 281/282, 8–9 October 1933. 43 ‘Die Horst-Wessel-Plakette’, Westfälischer Beobachter, 235, 6 October 1933. 44 See Emer, ‘Bielefelds bestem Sohn’, p. 85; ‘Der Horst-Wessel-Tag in Bielefeld’, Westfälischer Beobachter, 7 October 1933; Vogelsang, Geschichte der Stadt Bielefeld, vol. 3, p. 197; ‘Uraufführung im Stadttheater: Katte’, Westfälischer Beobachter, 238, 10 October 1933. 45 See Rudolf Jung, ‘Die Westfalenfahrt der Alten Garde’, Völkischer Beobachter (northern German edition), 167, 16 June 1939; Felix Rengstorf: ‘Die Westfalenfahrt der “Alten Garde” 1939. Führermythos, Heimat und Wirtschaft’, in: Freitag (ed.), Das Dritte Reich im Fest, pp. 175–84. 46 Hinckeldey also created a Stalingrad monument in 1943 that was displayed at the Zeughaus in Berlin. See H. Arenhold, ‘Vom mittleren Abschnitt… ZeughausAusstellung berichtet vom Osteinsatz unserer Soldaten’, Völkischer Beobachter, 84, 25 March 1943. 47 See Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung, pp. 139, 242f. 48 Karl Keese, ‘Horst Wessel und der Kreis Hameln-Pyrmont’, in: Hameln-Pyrmont. Ein Heimatbuch des Kreises, published by the Kreisausschuss des Kreises Hameln-Pyrmont, Magdeburg 1934, p. 9f. 49 Werner Konstantin von Arnswaldt, ‘Horst Wessels Ahnen im Wesertal’, in: Heimatblätter. Beilage zur Schaumburger Zeitung. Beiträge zur Förderung der Heimatkunde und Heimatliebe, 25, 30 June 1933. 50 Karl Heinz Engelking, ‘Niedersachsens politischer Einsatz, in: Gautag 1936 (brochure), published by the Gauleitung der NSDAP Süd-Hannover-Braunschweig, Hanover 1936, p. 5f., here p. 6. 51 Alfred Rosenberg, ‘Niedersachsens Sendung’, in: Führer zum Gautag der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiter-Partei am 21. und 22. Februar 1931 in der Stadt Braunschweig, published by the Propaganda-Abteilung der Gauleitung SüdhannoverBraunschweig, Hanover, undated, pp. 5ff. 52 See StA HM, Acc. 1 #599, p. 93. 53 Ibid., p. 70. 54 Ibid., p. 95. 55 See ibid., p. 130. 56 Ibid., pp. 133f. 57 ‘Gold der Treue’, Der Spiegel, 24, 11 June 1979, pp. 84–89. For details see the minutes of the council meeting of 9 May 1979, in: StA HM, collection 140.2, #34. 58 Cited in Klaus Mann, Horst Wessel, chapter 1, p. 1. 59 Ibid. 60 Provisional budget for the construction of the Horst Wessel monument on the Süntel ridge, in: Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, Hann. 122A, #3511. 61 See the drafts in: ‘Horst Wessels Jugendland und Heimat’ (newspaper clipping), in: ibid. 62 Memorandum of the Regierungspräsident (district president) of Hanover to the Oberregierungspräsident (chief district president) dated 9 December 1933, in: ibid.; 38

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63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71

memorandum of the Provinzial-Konservator (provincial curator) of Hanover to the chief district president of Hanover dated 23 December 1933, in: ibid., p. 12f. ‘Horst Wessels Verwandte haben das Wort’, in: Heimatblätter. Beilage zur Schaumburger Zeitung. Beiträge zur Förderung der Heimatkunde und Heimatliebe, 27, 14 July 1933. See StA HM, Acc. 1 #770, p. 2f. Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, Hann. 122A, #3511, p. 12. Ibid, p. 15; Helmut Lambert, ‘Der Plan des Horst-Wessel-Ehrenmals im Süntel’, in: Der Klüt. Heimatkalender für das Oberwesergebiet, edited by Hans Kittel, commissioned by the district of Hameln-Pyrmont, no place or year of publication, p. 38f. Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, Hann. 122A, #3511, p. 16f. See Bernhard Gelderblom, ‘Die Reichserntedankfeste auf dem Bückeberg 1933–1937. Ein Volk dankt seinem Verführer’, in: Gerd Biegel / Wulf Otte (eds), Ein Volk dankt seinem Verführer. Die Reichserntedankfeste auf dem Bückeberg 1933–1937, Braunschweig 2002, pp. 19–61; StA HM, Acc. 1 #1001. Grieben Reiseführer, vol. 45: Weserbergland, mit Angaben für Autofahrer und Anhang für Wanderruderer, 16th edition, Grieben-Verlag, Berlin 1939, p. 165. StA HM, Acc. 1 #770, p. 19; ‘Es leuchtet übers weite Land’, Deister- und Weserzeitung, 108, 10 May 1938. Ibid.; StA HM, Acc. 1 #770, p. 24.

12. Exploiting the Myth 1 2

SBB PK, PSB III C 1 vol. 27, pp. 487ff. Letter from Ralf Breslau, director of literary estates and autographs at the Berlin State Library, to the author dated 11 January 2008. 3 See Statistisches Reichsamt (ed.), Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich 1939/1940, Berlin 1940, p. 347; idem. (ed.), Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich 1938, Berlin 1938, p. 355. 4 Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/III, pp. 113, 149 und 203. 5 See DVA, folder entitled ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’, F004418, pp. 1–7, here p. 1f. 6 Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/III, p. 203. 7 Cited in Michael H. Kater, Die missbrauchte Muse. Musiker im Dritten Reich, Munich 1998, p. 294. See also Michael Meyer, The Politics of Music in the Third Reich, New York 1991, p. 30f. 8 See Alfred Weidemann, ‘Ein Vorläufer des Horst-Wessel-Liedes?’, in: Die Musik xxviii/12 (1936), p. 911f. 9 DVA, folder entitled ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’, F004418, pp. 3, 7; Hanfstaengl, The Unknown Hitler, p. 160. 10 See Heinz Kiekebusch / Hans Aschoff (eds), Der Wehrstudent. Sammlung deutscher Soldaten-, Volks- und Studentenlieder, Berlin 1932, p. 90; ‘Die Melodie des Horst-WesselLiedes’, Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 505, 28 October 1933. On possible musical precursors see also Broderick, Das Horst-Wessel-Lied, pp. 15ff. 11 H. Maass, ‘Die Straße frei!’, in: Hitler-Jugend: Kampfblatt schaffender Jugend, edition ‘C’ (Austria), iv/10 (September 1927), p. 1. The complete song text goes as follows: ‘Die Straße frei! – Die letzten Deutschen kommen / Aus einer sterbenden, ehrlosen Zeit / Wir kämpfen um die Ziele, die uns frommen – / Was kümmert uns der Tod? Wir sind bereit! // Die Straße frei! – Wir tragen Ehrennarben / Aus schwerem Kampf, geführt in Leidenschaft / Und trauernd um die Brüder, die uns starben / Weht dunkler Flor von unserem Fahnenschaft. // Die Straße frei! – Aus jedem unsrer Lieder / Schallt unser Schwur wie heisser Sehnsuchtsschrei: Wir wollen eine Deutsche Zukunft wieder – / Sieg oder Untergang! – Die Straße frei!’ See also Broderick, Das HorstWessel-Lied, p. 38, fn. 2. On Hädelmayer and Wessel see Meyer, The Politics of Music, p. 69.

280

Notes 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

DVA, folder entitled ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’, F004418, p. 1f.; Kugel, Alles schob man ihm zu, p. 455, fn. 1,063. StA-L, Amtsgericht Leipzig HRB 768, vol. 1, p. 35. DVA, folder entitled ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’, F004418, p. 4. On the proceedings at the Dresden Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) see Kugel, Alles schob man ihm zu, p. 315f. ‘Über die zur Schutzfähigkeit nötige Eigenart bei der Bearbeitung volksliedartiger alter Singweisen’, verdict of the 1st Civil Senate of the Reichsgericht (Reich Supreme Court) dated 2 December 1936, copy, p. 9. I would like to thank Mr Pannier from the library of the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice of Germany) for allowing me to use this copy. Letter to the author from Isabel Palmtag of GEMA dated 6 June 2008. See StA-L, Amtsgericht Leipzig, HRB 768, vol. 1, pp. 66–69; DVA, folder entitled ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’, F004418, p. 7. StA-L, Amtsgericht Leipzig, HRB 768, vol. 1, pp. 66–69. See the entry in the excerpt from the commercial register of the Leipzig Amtsgericht (Local Court) dated 20 June 1952, in: StA-L, Amtsgericht Leipzig, HRB 768, vol. 2. Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 4, p. 204 and vol. 5, p. 30. Cited in Henrik Eberle (ed.): Briefe an Hitler. Ein Volk schreibt seinem Führer. Unbekannte Dokumente aus Moskauer Archiven – zum ersten Mal veröffentlicht, Bergisch Gladbach 2007, pp. 130–33; BArch/B, NS 31/81, p. 1; Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich, p. 128. BArch/B, R 58/3026, p. 209. Cited in Franz Danimann, Flüsterwitze und Spottgedichte unterm Hakenkreuz, Cologne 1983, p. 98. A similar version can be found in Lammel, Das Arbeiterlied, p. 198. See Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, Frankfurt am Main 2005. BArch/B, R 3001/111069, pp. 9ff.; SBG/AS, D 1 A/1020, p. 174, D 1 A/1024, p. 78 and D 1 A/1196, p. 452. BArch/B, R 3001/107960, pp. 1–9. For more detail see Patrick Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire und Deutscher Humor. Politische Bedeutung und Öffentlichkeit populärer Unterhaltung 1931–1945, dissertation, FU-Berlin 2007. See a comment by Bundespräsident Theodor Heuss, who in a letter to Bundeskanzler Konrad Adenauer explains his reservations about the continued use of ‘Das Lied der Deutschen’ (Song of the Germans) by pointing to the fact that ‘many, many people of our nation recall Haydn’s grand air as the lead-in to the “poetically” and musically inferior Horst Wessel Song’. (Letter from Theodor Heuss to Konrad Adenauer dated 2 May 1952, cited in , accessed on 2 January 2009). Decision of the 1st Criminal Division of the Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) in Oldenburg from 5 October 1987 (ref. no. Ss 481/87). Decision of the 2nd Military Service Division of the Bundesverwaltungsgericht (Federal Administrative Court) from 27 March 1981. Information provided to the author by Maria Biolcati on 4 August 2008. ‘Milva’ (CD, distributed by VUVAG Verlag und Vertrieb GmbH & Co KG, released in 1992), in: DMA. On the song’s origins see Michael Kohlstruck / Daniel Krüger, ‘Märkische Heide, märkischer Sand…’ Zur sozialen Konstruktion von politischen Bedeutungen, unpublished manuscript. See Wessel, Politika, p. 33. Gustav Büchsenschütz, ‘Märkische Heide, märkischer Sand!’, in: Brandenburger Land.

281

The Making of a Nazi Hero Monatshefte für Volkstum und Heimat, publication commissioned by the Gauleiter of Brandenburg, Wilhelm Kube, Potsdam and Berlin 1934, p. 33f. 36 Ibid.; Engelbrechten, Eine braune Armee entsteht, p. 131. 37 Letter from government spokesman Thomas Braune to the author dated 22 September 2008. Schönbohm’s comment is cited in Thorsten Metzner, ‘Braune Flecken auf dem “Roten Adler”’, in: Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin), 27 May 2008.

13. Literary Enlightenment Walter Mehring, ‘Einheirat! Horst Wessel. Alraune, geb. Ewers’, in: Die Weltbühne xxix/2 (10 January 1933), pp. 59–64, here p. 62. 2 Klaus Mann, ‘Die Mythen der Unterwelt’. The manuscript was rejected by QueridoVerlag and again by Éditions du Carrefour in Paris, see Mann, Tagebücher 1931 bis 1933, p. 252. 3 Ibid., pp. 160, 162. 4 Ibid., p. 166. 5 Cited in Klaus Mann, ‘Die Mythen der Unterwelt’, p. 103 [emphasis in original]. 6 See Gerhard Härle, Männerweiblichkeit. Zur Homosexualität bei Klaus und Thomas Mann, Frankfurt am Main 1988, pp. 259–79. 7 Klaus Mann, Horst Wessel, chapter 4, p. 12, in: Monacensia, KM 561. 8 Klaus Mann, ‘Die Mythen der Unterwelt’, p. 112; idem, Horst Wessel, chapter 3b, p. 8. 9 Cited in Klaus Mann, ‘Die Mythen der Unterwelt’, p. 112. On the status of physiognomy at the time see Claudia Schmölders / Sander L. Gilman (eds), Gesichter der Weimarer Republik. Eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte, Cologne 2000. 10 Klaus Mann, Horst Wessel, chapter 1, pp. 2, 4f. 11 Ibid., chapter 2a, p. 8. A similar idea can be found in Erika Mann, Zehn Millionen Kinder. Die Erziehung der Jugend im Dritten Reich, Munich 1986, pp. 68–71. 12 Klaus Mann, Horst Wessel, chapter 3a, p. 10. 13 Ibid., chapter 2b, pp. 2, 7. 14 Cited in Klaus Mann, ‘Die Mythen der Unterwelt’, p. 106. 15 The following quotes are taken from Brecht, ‘Die Horst-Wessel-Legende’. A slightly different version is printed in Bertolt Brecht, Werke, edited by Werner Hecht et al., vol. 19: Prosa 4, edited by Brigitte Bergheim, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 381–89. 16 Klaus Mann, Tagebücher 1931 bis 1933, p. 180. 17 For a detailed account see Brecht, Werke, vol. 19: Prosa 4, pp. 687ff. 18 Brecht, ‘Die Horst-Wessel-Legende’, pp. 48–51. 19 Cited in Brecht, Werke, vol. 11: Gedichte 1, edited by Jan and Gabriele Knopf, Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 210f. 20 Brecht, ‘Die Horst-Wessel-Legende’, pp. 52–54. 21 Ibid., pp. 52, 55. 22 Klaus Mann, Horst Wessel, chapter 4, p. 15. See also James Robert Keller, The Role of Political and Sexual Identity in the Works of Klaus Mann, New York 2001, p. 81; Stefan Zynda, Sexualität bei Klaus Mann, Bonn 1986, pp. 92–97. 23 Klaus Mann, ‘Die Mythen der Unterwelt’, p. 104. 24 Sebastian Haffner, Anmerkungen zu Hitler, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 37. 25 See Michael Hepp, Kurt Tucholsky. Biographische Annäherungen, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1993. 26 Cited in Brecht, Werke, vol. 7: Stücke, edited by Michael Voges, Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 236. 27 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, p. 448f. 1

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14. Revenge of the Nazis Cited in Sturm- und Kampflieder. See Johannes Tuchel, ‘Organisationsgeschichte der “frühen” Konzentrationslager’, in: Wolfgang Benz / Barbara Distel (eds), Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 1: Die Organisation des Terrors, Munich 2005, pp. 43–56, here p. 45; Irene Mayer, ‘Wie “wild” war der Terror der SA? Eine Analyse der frühen Berliner Konzentrationslager und SA-Haftstätten im Jahr 1933’, in: Akim Jah et al. (eds), Nationalsozialistische Lager. Neue Beiträge zur NS-Verfolgungs- und Vernichtungspolitik und zur Gedenkstättenpädagogik, Münster 2006, pp. 52–61; Longerich, Geschichte der SA, p. 172; numerous case studies in Wolfgang Benz / Barbara Distel (eds), Terror ohne System. Die ersten Konzentrationslager im Nationalsozialismus 1933–1935, Berlin 2001. 3 See Hans-Ulrich Thamer, ‘Machtergreifung 1933: Die Begründung des “Dritten Reiches”’, in: Alexander Gallus / Bayerische Landeszentrale für politische Bildungsarbeit (ed.), Deutsche Zäsuren. Systemwechsel vom Alten Reich bis zum wiedervereinigten Deutschland, Munich 2006, pp. 167–205, p. 184; GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 90 Staatsministerium, Annex P Geheime Staatspolizei, #87/2, pp. 106–35, here p. 107f. 4 Günter Morsch (ed.): Konzentrationslager Oranienburg, Oranienburg 1994; BArch/B, SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/48, pp. 80, 181; Longerich, Geschichte der SA, p. 172; Fürst, Gefilte Fisch, p. 664; Dams / Stolle, Die Gestapo, p. 104; GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 18. 5 Joseph Goebbels and Dax [i.e. Dagobert Dürr], ‘Kampf um Berlin: Horst Wessel und die Giftbrut im Liebknecht-Haus’, Der Angriff, 7, 23 January 1930. 6 See Bade, Horst Wessel, p. 40; ‘Zuchthausanträge im Wessel-Prozess’, Berliner LokalAnzeiger, 453, 25 September 1930; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8304, p. 212 (BStU pagination). 7 BArch/B, SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/47, p. 17; RY 1/1 2/3/48, p. 126; letter from Horst Joachim to Heinz Knobloch dated 2 October 1993, in: SBB PK, literary estate 353: Heinz Knobloch, box ‘Der arme Epstein 3’. 8 ‘Frauenmord an der Grünberger Chaussee’, Crossener Tageblatt, 106, 8 May 1933; report from the Frankfurter Oder-Zeitung, 11 May 1933, cited in: letter from Horst Joachim to Heinz Knobloch dated 2 October 1993, in: SBB PK, literary estate 353: Heinz Knobloch, box ‘Der arme Epstein 3’; ‘Der ersehnte Mairegen’, Crossener Tageblatt, 106, 8 May 1933. 9 Report from the Frankfurter Oder-Zeitung, 11 May 1933. 10 ‘Frauenmord an der Grünberger Chaussee’, Crossener Tageblatt, 106, 8 May 1933; ‘Der Mädchenmord bei Logau’, Crossener Tageblatt, 109, 11 May 1933; ‘Zum Mädchenmord bei Logau’, Crossener Tageblatt, 108, 10 May 1933. 11 Letter from Horst Joachim to Heinz Knobloch dated 2 October 1993, in: SBB PK, literary estate 353: Heinz Knobloch, box ‘Der arme Epstein 3’. 12 ‘Der Mädchenmord bei Logau. Eine Spur?’, Crossener Tageblatt, 110, 12 May 1933. 13 These plates began with I Y, followed by a number between 61 and over 2,000. See LVA NRW R, Regierung Düsseldorf, #40041, pp. 11–18. 14 ‘Der Mädchenmord in Logau’, Crossener Tageblatt, 111, 13–14 May 1933. 15 See Alfred Kube, Pour le mérite und Hakenkreuz. Hermann Göring im Dritten Reich, Munich 1986, pp. 26, 31ff.; Leonard Mosley, Göring. Eine Biographie, Munich 1975, pp. 165–68. 16 BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 141–46, here p. 145; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8307, p. 253 (BStU pagination). 17 See BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 4, p. 2, 14; LAB, B Rep. 058, #2271, vol. 5, p. 22. 18 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 4, p. 7. 19 LAB, B Rep. 058, #2271, vol. 2, p. 51. See also BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 4, p. 10. 20 Ernst was appointed to this position on 1 July 1932, see Führer order #11, p. 3, in: BArch/B, NS 26/308; LAB, B Rep. 058, #2271, vol. 1, p. 140. 1 2

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24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

The statements of Pohlenz confirm this. He indicated in a police interrogation on 13 July 1948 in Potsdam that he was ordered to appear at Alexanderplatz at 7 a.m. with a vehicle. See BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 2, p. 50. LAB, B Rep. 058, #2271, vol. 5, p. 30. According to this source, Ernst supposedly set fire to the Reichstag six months earlier together with Fiedler and von Mohrenschildt. See the copy of the ‘testament’ of Karl Ernst of 3 June 1934, which he hoped in vain would protect him from being murdered from within his own ranks, in: LAB, C Rep. 900–01, #106. On the authenticity of the ‘testament’, of which there is no original, see Bahar / Kugel, Der Reichstagsbrand, pp. 558–63. LAB, B Rep. 058, #2271, vol. 2, p. 107. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 53f. Pohlenz, too, said that Fiedler was involved in the killing of Höhler. See the report by the Regional Authority of the Volkspolizei (People’s Police) from 12 December 1949, in: LAB, C Rep. 375–01–08, vol. 10058, A 16. Peter Engelmann, ‘Ein erschütterndes Dokument. Ein Bericht des Direktors und einer Schwester des Horst-Wessel-Krankenhauses’, Völkischer Beobachter, 280, 7 October 1933. Such claims should be viewed with scepticism. For example, Nazi propaganda also claimed, erroneously, that SA doctor Conti stood by Wessel until his death, see Leyh, ‘Gesundheitsführung’, ‘Volksschicksal’, ‘Wehrkraft’, p. 33. See Friedrich, Die missbrauchte Hauptstadt, p. 102f.; Gumbel, Vier Jahre politischer Mord, p. 88; Robert G.L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism. The Free Corps Movement in Post-war Germany 1918–1923, New York 1969, pp. 191–97. See LAB, B Rep. 058, #2271, vol. 4, pp. 43–50; entry on ‘Richard Fiedler’, in: Joachim Lilla et al. (eds), Statisten in Uniform, p. 234f. ‘Schandstreiche eines Nazi-Rowdys’, Die Rote Fahne, 55, 6 March 1930; StAM, Staatsanwaltschaften, #21798, p. 4; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #2166, p. 39f., 48, 76, 133–39. See Führer order #7 of 10 February 1932, p. 2, in: BArch/B, NS 26/307; Knobloch, Der arme Epstein, p. 51f.; StAM, Staatsanwaltschaften, #21798, pp. 2–5, 19f.; Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 2/III, p. 47. Appraisal of Richard Fiedler from 17 July 1934, in: BArch/B, NSDAP-ParteikanzleiKorrespondenz, entry on Richard Kurt Fiedler. StAM, Staatsanwaltschaften, #21798, ‘DC-Unterlagen’ folder, pp. 2–5, 9–12; Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, part 1, vol. 3/II, p. 225. ‘Horst Wessel und die Welt’, Crossener Tageblatt, 125, 31 May 1933; Richard Fiedler, ‘Horst Wessel – ewiges Vorbild’, Mitteldeutsche National-Zeitung, 23 February 1939, in: BArch/B, NS 26/1280. See Andrea Löw, Juden im Getto Litzmannstadt. Lebensbedingungen, Selbstwahrnehmung, Verhalten, Göttingen 2006; Alberti, Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Wartheland. StAM, Staatsanwaltschaften, #21798, pp. 9–12; filing card on Richard Fiedler from 30 January 1942, in: BArch/B, NSDAP-Parteikanzlei-Korrespondenz, entry on Richard Kurt Fiedler. See StAM, Staatsanwaltschaften, #21798, ‘DC-Unterlagen’ folder, pp. 6–11; entry on ‘Richard Fiedler’, in: Joachim Lilla et al. (eds), Statisten in Uniform, p. 234f. LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #2166, p. 13f. BArch/K, Z 42 II/1369, pp. 6ff.; information about Willy/Willi Markus provided by the Berlin Document Center on 10 February 1953, in: LAB, B Rep. 031–03–11, #5413, file O 1101. See PA/AA, ZA4–1 SP 6076, vol. 59486; information provided by the Berlin Document Center on 15 May 1958, in: ibid.; record of the declaration of Kurt Wendt in the

284

Notes presence of, Franz Josef Hoffmann, the German Consul General in New York, from 4 February 1959, in: ibid. 41 See LAB, C Rep. 375–01–08, #4370, pp. 7–13. 42 See Führer order #6 of 18 December 1931, in: BArch/B, NS 26/306; Machtan, Kaisersohn, p. 294. 43 LAB, B Rep. 058, #2271, vol. 4, pp. 85ff.; Hanfstaengl, The Unkown Hitler, p. 171. 44 Machtan, Kaisersohn, p. 306. 45 LAB, B Rep. 058, #2271, vol. 5, pp. 30, 107. 46 Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 50–56; Machtan, Kaisersohn, pp. 298–308. 47 See Machtan, Kaisersohn, p. 190; Ewers, Horst Wessel, p. 230. 48 See Kurz, Nationalprotestantisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik, pp. 181–89. For more detail: Werner Freitag, ‘Nationale Mythen und kirchliches Heil: Der “Tag von Potsdam”’, in: Westfälische Forschungen 41 (1991), pp. 379–430, here pp. 396–404. 49 BArch/B, R 187/627, pp. 65, 5. 50 See the memorandum of the Gauschatzmeister (Gau treasurer) of Munich to the NSDAP Gauleitung of Kurmark from 20 September 1935, in: BArch/B, NSDAPParteikanzlei-Korrespondenz, entry on August Wilhelm of Prussia. 51 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 4, p. 13f. and vol. 7, p. 1; LAB, B Rep. 058, #2271, vol. 1, p. 3. 52 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 4, p. 13f. 53 See ibid., p. 14f. 54 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 7, pp. 4ff. 55 See ibid., vol. 8, p. 8 and vol. 7, p. 3. 56 GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, 293, p. 462. 57 Gisevius, Bis zum bittern Ende, p. 49. 58 LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 1, pp. 139ff. 59 See Bahar / Kugel, Der Reichstagsbrand, pp. 640–53. 60 See Bahar / Kugel, Der Reichstagsbrand, pp. 523–31; LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 3, p. 79 and vol. 2, p. 1. 61 See Schilde / Scholz / Walleczek (eds), SA-Gefängnis Papestrasse, p. 10; Gedenkstätte Pape-Strasse, , accessed on 13 August 2008; Gisevius, Bis zum bittern Ende, p. 97. 62 LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 2, p. 57. 63 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 8, p. 9; Sauer, ‘Goebbels’ “Rabauken”’, p. 143. 64 Cited in Kaden / Nestler (eds), Dokumente des Verbrechens, vol. 1, p. 32.

15. Judicial Murder: The Second Horst Wessel Trial (1934) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 6ff.; LHASA, MD, Rep. K 6, VdN Magdeburg, #4906, p. 16f. Felix Halle, Wie verteidigt sich der Proletarier in politischen Strafsachen vor Polizei, Staatsanwaltschaft und Gericht?, Berlin 1924, p. 6; Lübeck, Horst Wessel, p. 134; LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2756, p. 11f. LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8305, pp. 239–44 (BStU pagination); BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 34–56, here pp. 34, 48; BArch/B, R 3001/108644, p. 29. LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8305, pp. 146–50, 239–44 (BStU pagination). LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8309, p. 30f. and #8305, pp. 163–67 (BStU pagination). LHASA, MD, Rep. K 6, VdN Magdeburg, #4906, pp. 7, 12ff. See BArch/B, R 3001/108644, p. 29. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 31f.

285

The Making of a Nazi Hero 10 11 12 13 14

Ibid., p. 20f. See LHASA, MD, Rep. K 6, VdN Magdeburg, #4906, p. 15. LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2756, p. 11f.; BArch/B, SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3/93, p. 248. BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 34–56, here pp. 39ff. Only a copy of the verdict has been preserved in the files of the Berlin Landgericht (Regional Court). 15 See Knobloch, Der arme Epstein, pp. 154ff. 16 Cited in ‘Zwei Todesurteile im Horst-Wessel-Prozess’, Berliner Morgenpost, 16 June 1934. 17 BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 114–28, here p. 126 and p. 135f. 18 Verdict of Schwurgericht II at the Berlin Landgericht against Peter Stoll, Sally Epstein and Hans Ziegler dated 15 June 1934, in: LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #11. 19 Ibid., pp. 22f., 28f. 20 BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 129–33. 21 ‘Die Todesurteile im Horst-Wessel-Prozess’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 189, 16 June 1934, in: BArch/B, 1200010175, #13286; ‘Zwei Todesurteile im Horst-Wessel-Prozess’, Berliner Morgenpost, 143, 16 June 1934. 22 See ‘Der Horst-Wessel-Prozess’ (copy of an article from the Pariser Tageblatt, 20 June 1934), in: BArch/B, 1200010175, box 13286; ‘Die Todesurteile im Horst-Wessel-Prozess’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 189, 16 June 1934, in: ibid. 23 See BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 113–28, 134. 24 Ibid., pp. 108, 121, 127. 25 Ibid., pp. 149, 157f. See also Evans, Rituals of Retribution, p. 648. 26 BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 141–46. 27 See ibid., pp. 17f., 60; in: BArch/B, R 3001/1327, p. 36f. 28 BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 151ff. 29 See ibid., pp. 127, 159. 30 Evans, Rituals of Retribution, p. 662; BArch/B, R 3001/1314, p. 57. 31 See BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 123, 161ff. On the ‘utilization’ of the corpses of execution victims by the anatomy department of Berlin University see Andreas Winkelmann, ‘Wann darf menschliches Material verwendet werden? Der Anatom Hermann Stieve und die Forschung an Leichen Hingerichteter’, in: Sabine Schleiermacher / Udo Schagen (eds), Die Charité im Dritten Reich. Zur Dienstbarkeit medizinischer Wissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus, Paderborn 2008, pp. 105–20. Contrary to the execution report, the department of anatomy and biology at Berlin University was only given the corpse of Ziegler. The foster family of Epstein objected and successfully insisted that the body be handed over to them. It was laid to rest the following day at the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee. (Details in Knobloch, Der arme Epstein, pp. 188–93; BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 154ff.). 32 ‘Der Mord an Horst Wessel gesühnt!’, Völkischer Beobachter (northern German edition), 101, 11 April 1935. 33 LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8307, pp. 350–58 (BStU pagination).

16. Time of Suffering 1 2 3

See Kaden / Nestler (eds), Dokumente des Verbrechens, vol. 1, pp. 53ff. See Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons. Legal Terror in Nazi Germany, New Haven 2004, p. 119; decision of Landgericht I in Berlin on 27 December 1932, in: BArch/B, Dok/k 42 (DZ-Kartei). Letter from Schwerdtfeger dated 23 February 1933, in: BArch/B, Dok/k 42 (DZ-Kartei); letter from Schwerdtfeger dated 21 April 1933, in: ibid.

286

Notes 4

5

6

7 8

9 10

11 12

13

14 15 16 17

BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 16, 171–75; copy of the cover of Kandulski’s personal file, in: BArch/B, Dok/k 42 (DZ-Kartei). Oddly enough, Kandulski is not on the handwritten ‘List of Personal Files of Prisoners at Brandenburg Penitentiary’ drawn up in 1945 or later, see BArch/B, SAPMO DY 55/V 287/979, collection of material of the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime), pp. 6–27. ITS/ANF/ZNK – Zentrale Namenskartei, entry ‘Josef Kandulski’; Bertrand Perz, ‘Gusen I und II’, in: Wolfgang Benz / Barbara Distel (eds), Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 4: Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Munich 2006, pp. 371–380; Information provided by former prisoner Franz Dahlem, Politische Orientierung im Gestapo-Gefängnis Prinz Albrechtstrasse Berlin und Parteiarbeit im Konzentrationslager Mauthausen (August 1942 bis Mai 1945), typescript, pp. 2–35, here p. 18, in: LAB, E Rep. 200–63, vol. 63a. See Habbo Knoch, ‘Die Emslandlager 1933–1945’, in: Benz / Distel (eds), Der Ort des Terrors, vol. 3: Frühe Lager, Dachau, Emslandlager, Munich 2005, pp. 533–70; Kurt Buck, Auf der Suche nach den Moorsoldaten. Emslandlager 1933–1945 und die historischen Orte heute, Papenburg 2003; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8304, p. 334 (BStU pagination) and #8307, p. 239 (BStU pagination); BArch/B, R 3001/108644, p. 16. ITS/ANF/KLD OCC15/217, binder 298, p. 65; LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #19822, p. 3; letter to the author from Dr Barbara Schätz, archive of KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen (Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial), dated 20 December 2007. See the letter from the International Tracing Service to the director of the Zentralstelle des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen für die Bearbeitung von nationalsozialistischen Massenverbrechen in Konzentrationslagern (International Office of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia for Processing Nazi Mass Crimes in Concentration Camps) dated 5 March 1968, in: ITS, T/D files, 957987; LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2755, p. 14. LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2756, p. 1f.; BStU, MfS achive ASt 527/51, p. 18; LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2756, p. 19f. LAB, C-Rep. 118–01, #2755, p. 7f.; information provided to the author by Astrid Ley of the Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätte (Brandenburg Memorial Foundation), on 2 September 2008; information provided to the author by Sabine Stein of the Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora (Buchenwald and MittelbauDora Memorial Foundation), on 2 April 2009. BStU, MfS archive ASt 527/51, pp. 34–39; LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2755, p. 31. Willi Jambrowski had served his original sentence in Tegel and Plötzensee prisons from 21 April 1931 to 22 November 1932. He was sentenced until 1933, however, for three instances of embezzlement, fraud, and theft, each of which resulted in a prison sentence of several weeks. (LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #11; LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2756, p. 13f.). LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2756, p. 1f., 7–11; information provided to Heinz Knobloch by the special register office of Arolsen on 25 March 1991, in: SBB PK, literary estate 353: Heinz Knobloch, box ‘Der arme Epstein 2’; LBO, reg. #10229, PrV department, p. 4f. See the entries in ITS/ANF/KLD, group P.P., binder 2907, p. 64 and binder 2907E, p. 211f. Letter from Secretariat Geschke to Karl Raddatz dated 13 February 1946, in: LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #A 10202; ITS/ANF/KL Oranienburg, binder 72, p. 27; Lübeck, Horst Wessel, p. 152f. LHASA, MD, Rep. K. MW VdN Magdeburg, #3799, pp. 1f., 6.f.; LHASA, MD, V/10/112/1, p. 13. BArch/B, SAPMO DY 55/V 278/3/212, pp. 11–14, 21–24, 25–28.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Schilde / Scholz / Walleczek, SA-Gefängnis Papestrasse, p. 141; LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2756, p. 5f.; LHASA, MD, V/10/112/1, pp. 2–6; LHASA, MD, Rep. K. MW VdN Magdeburg, #3799. 19 See Lutz Niethammer et al. (eds), Der ‘gesäuberte’ Antifaschismus. Die SED und die Roten Kapos von Buchenwald. Dokumente, Berlin 1994, pp. 42–55, 296; Karin Hartewig, ‘Wolf unter Wölfen? Die prekäre Macht der kommunistischen Kapos im Konzentrationslager Buchenwald’, in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung in Norddeutschland, vol. 4: Abgeleitete Macht – Funktionshäftlinge zwischen Widerstand und Kollaboration, Bremen 1998, pp. 117–22. 20 BArch/B, R 3001/108644, pp. 59, 164f.; ITS/ANF/KLD group p.p., binder 2907D, p. 152; ITS/ANF/KLD, Landshut prison, entry #423; ITS/ANF/KLD group p.p., binder 2907E, p. 268f.; LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #8307, p. 349 (BStU pagination). 21 StAD, G 27 Darmstadt, vol. 887, pp. 5–11, here p. 7. 22 Ibid., pp. 5–11. 23 ITS D/P files, 797879; information provided to the author in writing by Bernd Horstmann of the Stiftung niedersächsische Gedenkstätten (Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation), Bergen-Belsen memorial site, on 6 November 2007. 24 See Institut für die Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (ed.), In den Fängen des NKWD, p. 204; ITS/ANF/KLD – Gestapo files, Frankfurt, file of Hermann Schmidt; Reinhard Müller, Menschenfalle Moskau. Exil und stalinistische Verfolgung, Hamburg 2001; idem, ‘Denunziation und Terror: Herbert Wehner im Moskauer Exil’, in: Jürgen Zarusky (ed.), Stalin und die Deutschen. Neue Beiträge der Forschung, Munich 2006, pp. 43–57, here p. 46. 25 See Institut für die Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (ed.), In den Fängen des NKWD, p. 129; ITS/ANF/ZNK, file of Hermann Kupferstein; ITS T/D files, 320520. 26 See LHASA, MD, Rep. K 6, VdN Magdeburg, #4906; p. 8f.; BArch/B, R 3001/108644, p. 204; ITS/ANF/KLD Brandenburg-Görden penitentiary, binder 3124, p. 150 and binder 3158, p. 44. 27 See Kessler / Peter, Wiedergutmachung im Osten Deutschlands, pp. 25ff. 28 LHASA, MD, V/10/112/1, pp. 2–6; Schilde / Scholz / Walleczek, SA-Gefängnis Papestrasse, p. 141. 29 See LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2756, pp. 3, 24; Kessler / Peter, Wiedergutmachung im Osten Deutschlands, pp. 63–89, 142. 30 See the letter from Willi Jambrowski in: LBO, reg. #10229. 31 File memo of 15 May 1954, in: LBO, reg. #10229. See also the correspondence between Jambrowski’s lawyers and the authorities, in: LAB, A Rep. 358–01, #11. 32 Memorandum of the Compensation Office of 16 June 1954, in: LBO, reg. #10229. 33 Goschler, Wiedergutmachung, p. 316f. 34 See LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #2755, pp. 23, 26, 40, 54f.; Susanne zur Nieden, ‘“L. ist ein vollkommen asoziales Element…” Säuberungen in den Reihen der “Opfer des Faschismus” in Berlin’, in: Annette Leo / Peter Reif-Spirek (eds), Vielstimmiges Schweigen. Neue Studien zum DDR-Antifaschismus, Berlin 2001, pp. 85–108, here p. 106; idem, Unwürdige Opfer, pp. 56–61. 35 See Stoll’s Berlin ‘Opfer des Faschismus’ file: LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #4384; as well as information in LHASA, MD, Rep. K 6, VdN Magdeburg, #4906; Rep. M 16, #208. 36 See LHASA, MD, Rep. K. MW VdN Magdeburg, #3799, p. 1f.; ibid., Rep. K 6, VdN Magdeburg, #4906; p. 2. 37 LAB, C Rep. 118–01, #19822, p. 7f.; letter from the central committe for ‘Opfer des Faschismus’ to Hildegard Rückert, in: ibid. 18

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Notes

17. Post-war Justice Hanauske, Dieter (ed.), Die Sitzungsprotokolle des Magistrats der Stadt Berlin 1945/46, part 1, p. 286. 2 Saehrendt, Der Stellungskrieg der Denkmäler, p. 142. Self-professed ‘autonomous gravediggers’ claimed to have dug up the skull of Wessel in 2000 in order to prevent the site from turning into a memorial for right-wing extremists. The senior public prosecution of Berlin claimed to know nothing when asked about it, and said there were no investigations into the desecration of graves at the cemetery in recent years. 3 Ibid., p. 178. 4 For an overview of the judicial and political background, see see Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland, pp. 43–47. 5 On the Felseneck trial see Hett, Crossing Hitler, pp. 134–50. 6 See Alf Lüdtke, ‘Einleitung: Herrschaft als soziale Praxis’, in: idem (ed.), Herrschaft als soziale Praxis. Historische und sozial-anthropologische Studien, Göttingen 1991, pp. 9–63, here pp. 44f. 7 See BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 2, pp. 20–30, here pp. 23–28. According to a memo of the Potsdam State Prosecutor’s Office, Pohlenz did not become a member of the NSDAP until February 1935. See LAB, C Rep. 375–01–08, vol. 10058/A 16. 8 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 2, pp. 20–30. 9 Cited in Wieland, ‘Deutsch-deutscher Rechtsverkehr’, p. 355. 10 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 2, pp. 122–27. 11 Letter to Pohlenz from his girlfriend, Basdorf, dated 7 July 1948, in: BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 9. 12 Indictment of the Potsdam senior state prosecutor, Bartsch, against Walter Pohlenz from 13 September 1950, in: ibid., vol. 2, p. 29. 13 See the memoranda of senior criminal secretary Krüger from 27 July 1948, in: LAB, C Rep. 901, vol. 569. 14 Ibid. 15 Report of the regional authority of the Volkspolizei (People’s Police) in Brandenburg to Volkspolizei headquarters dated 12 December 1949, in: LAB, C Rep. 375–01–08, vol. 10058, A 16. 16 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 2, p. 7; memorandum of the Brandenburg state criminal police to the Soviet Military Administration dated 23 July 1949, in: LAB, LAB, C Rep. 375–01–08, vol. 10058, A 16. 17 Letter from Pohlenz to ‘Frau Tilitsky’ in Basdorf, Berlin, dated 27 June 1948, in: BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 9. 18 Letter to the chief state prosecutor of the state of Brandenburg dated 17 August 1951, in: ibid., vol. 2, p. 44. 19 See ibid., vol. 2, p. 49. 20 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 2, p. 17; Wieland, ‘Deutsch-deutscher Rechtsverkehr’, p. 355. 21 Report of the regional authority of the Volkspolizei in Brandenburg from 12 December 1949, in: LAB, C Rep. 375–01–08, vol. 10058, A 16. 22 Decision of the Grosse Strafkammer (Grand Criminal Court) of the Potsdam Landgericht (Regional Court) from 1 March 1951, in: BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 1; copy of the order to stay proceedings from 4 April 1951, in: ibid., vol. 2, p. 42. 23 For more detail see Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland. 24 Memorandum of the Celle chief state prosecutor to the Potsdam senior state prosecutor from 29 November 1952, in: BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 3; decision of the Bezirksgericht (District Court) from 7 February 1953, in: ibid., vol. 2. 1

289

The Making of a Nazi Hero 25 See Helge Grabitz, ‘Die Verfolgung von NS-Verbrechen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, der DDR und Österreich’, in: Rolf Steininger (ed.), Der Umgang mit dem Holocaust. Europa – USA – Israel, Cologne 1994, pp. 198–220, here p. 214; Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland, p. 73. 26 BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 9, p. 1. 27 LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 3, p. 39; letter to the author from the Bobingen register office dated 11 April 2008. 28 Record of the interrogation of Walter Pohlenz on 30 August 1968, in: LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 3, pp. 67–71. On the ‘Zentrale Stelle’ see most recently Annette Weinke, Eine Gesellschaft ermittelt gegen sich selbst. Die Geschichte der zentralen Stelle Ludwigsburg 1958–2008, Darmstadt 2008. 29 LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 1, pp. 1–38; Diels, Lucifer ante portas; Gisevius, Bis zum bittern Ende. 30 See Hans-Ulrich Thamer, ‘Der deutsche Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus in der Nachkriegszeit’, in: Bayerische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung (ed.), Geschichtsdeutungen im internationalen Vergleich, Munich 2003, pp. 9–21, here p. 12; Goschler, Wiedergutmachung, pp. 206–11; Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik. 31 HAB, collection 2/12–183. Himmler’s daughter Gudrun Burwitz is to this very day an active member of the association Stille Hilfe für Kriegsgefangene und Internierte (Silent Assistance for Prisoners of War and Interned Persons), which concerns itself with the welfare of the last remaining ‘Brown comrades’ and entertains relations with the right-wing extremist scene. See Oliver Schröm / Andrea Röpke, Stille Hilfe für braune Kameraden. Das geheime Netzwerk der Alt- und Neonazis, Berlin 2006, pp. 11–18. 32 Letter from Rudolf Hardt about ‘Frau Himmler in Bethel’ (‘not to be published’) dated 2 August 1947, in: HAB, collection 2/12–183; letter from Hardt to the Gerlach company in Bentheim near Hanover dated 3 April 1947, in: ibid. 33 Peter Burke, ‘Geschichte als soziales Gedächtnis’, in: Aleida Assmann / Dietrich Hardt (eds), Mnemosyne. Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen Erinnerung, Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 289–304, here p. 299. 34 Gerhard Pauli, ‘Die Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen in Ludwigsburg. Entstehung und frühe Praxis’, in: Justizministerium des Landes NRW (ed.), Die Zentralstellen zur Verfolgung nationalsozialistischer Gewaltverbrechen, Düsseldorf 2001, pp. 45–62, here p. 61. 35 See Miquel, Ahnden oder amnestieren?; Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland. 36 Decision of the Bezirksgericht (District Court) from 7 February 1953, BLHA, Rep. 161, ZC 19839, vol. 2. 37 LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 2, p. 109. 38 Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 207–32. 39 Gisevius, Bis zum bittern Ende, p. 50. 40 LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 4, pp. 207–32, here p. 228f. 41 See Kerstin Freudiger, Die juristische Aufarbeitung von NS-Verbrechen, Tübingen 2002, pp. 259–62; Miquel, Ahnden oder amnestieren?, p. 158f. On investigations into those pulling the levers behind the scenes at the Reich Security Main Office see Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland, pp. 170–79, 287–313. 42 See Miquel, Ahnden oder amnestieren?, pp. 198–207; Adalbert Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen vor Gericht. Versuch einer Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Heidelberg 1984, p. 331; Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland, p. 164. 43 LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 2, p. 110 and vol. 4, pp. 12–24; information provided by Hartwig Stamer in a conversation with the author on 6 November 2008. 44 LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 2, pp. 104–109.

290

Notes 45

Information provided by Bernhard Seiffert, Berlin, in a conversation with the author on 6 February 2008. 46 LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 4, pp. 207–32, here p. 230. 47 Michael Wildt, ‘Differierende Wahrheiten. Historiker und Staatsanwälte als Ermittler von NS-Verbrechen’, in: Norbert Frei / Dirk van Laak / Michael Stolleis (eds), Geschichte vor Gericht. Historiker, Richter und die Suche nach Gerechtigkeit, Munich 2000, pp. 46–59, here p. 56. 48 LAB, B Rep. 058, 2271, vol. 4, p. 89 and vol. 5, pp. 50–56, here p. 51. 49 See the certificate issued by the Baden ministry of the interior on 19 July 1951, in: PA/AA, ZA4–1 SP 6076, vol. 59486. 50 Declaration of Kurt Wendt on 20 July 1961, in: ibid. 51 Affidavit of Kurt Wendt from 10 June 1958, in: ibid. 52 Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, p. 86. For a comprehensive look at the question of continuity and change in the foreign office before and after 1945 see Hans-Jürgen Döscher, Verschworene Gesellschaft. Das Auswärtige Amt unter Adenauer zwischen Neubeginn und Kontinuität, Berlin 1995. 53 PA/AA, ZA4–1 SP 6076, vol. 59486, p. 48. 54 Ibid., p. 50. 55 Ibid., p. 54f. 56 See PA/AA, ZA2 SP 214, vol. 55624, pp. 1, 8–11; statement made by Dr Adolph Reifferscheidt to the foreign office on 7 March 1952, in: ibid., ‘Parteizugehörigkeit’ folder. 57 Entry on ‘Georg Federer’, in: Auswärtiges Amt, Historischer Dienst (ed.): Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes 1871–1945, vol. 1: A–F, Paderborn 2000, p. 545f.; PA/AA, ZA4–1 SP 6076, vol. 59486, p. 56f. 58 PA/AA, ZA4–1 SP 6076, vol. 59486, p. 58f. 59 Ibid. 60 See ibid., p. 81, as well as the memorandum of the foreign office in Berlin to the foreign office in Bonn from 21 July 1966, in: ibid. 61 File memo of the foreign office of 8 November 1967, in: ibid.; certificate of receipt of Kurt Wendt from 18 January 1968, in: ibid. 62 Obituary of Kurt Wendt, Bonner Generalanzeiger, 17 July 1970, in: PA/AA, ZA4–1 SP 6076, vol. 59487. 63 BArch/K, Z 42 II/1369, pp. 6ff. 64 Ibid., p. 35f. 65 Ibid., pp. 44–47. 66 Ibid., pp. 53–57. 67 Memorandum of the senator for internal affairs to the Spruchkammer (Denazification Court) in Berlin dated 21 January 1953, in: LAB, B Rep. 031–03–11, #5413, O 1101; memorandum of the Berlin Verwaltungsgericht (Administrative Court) from 14 April 1954, in: ibid. 68 BArch/K, Z 42 II/1369, p. 65. 69 Knobloch, Der arme Epstein, p. 57. 70 Information provided to the author by Sylvia Schwärzler, Oberstaufen Registration Office, on 9 September 2008. 71 StAM, Staatsanwaltschaften, #21798, pp. 9–12. 72 Ibid., p. 2f. 73 Ibid., p. 19f. 74 BArch/K, Z 42 II/1369, p. 35f. 75 Richard Fiedler, fragment of a situation report of SS-Abschnitt 41 to Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer (Higher SS and Police Leader) Wilhelm Koppe dated 30 September 1941, cited in Alberti, Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung, p. 376f.

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The Making of a Nazi Hero 76 On the Einsatzgruppen see Klaus-Michael Mallmann / Jochen Böhler / Jürgen Matthäus (eds): Einsatzgruppen in Polen. Darstellung und Dokumentation, Darmstadt 2008, pp. 42–46. 77 StAM, Staatsanwaltschaften, #21798, pp. 21–24. 78 LAB, B Rep. 058 vorl. #2271, vol. 5, p. 24. 79 Entry on ‘Richard Fiedler’, in: Joachim Lilla et al. (eds), Statisten in Uniform, p. 234f.

18. ‘Burden Sharing’ 1 2

BArch/Bay, ZLA1/5822815, pp. 4–11, here p. 7. See also the letter from Margarete Wessel to the Protestant Church of Hanover dated 8 October 1951, in: AEKR, Ostpfarrerversorgung files, #350. 3 Certificate of the State Health Office of the Municipal District of Hamelin and the Rural District of Hamelin-Pyrmont from 14 May 1947, in: NLA – HStA Hannover, Nds.171 Hannover #22133. 4 See NLA-StA Aurich, Rep. 251, #1461, pp. 295ff., 428, 490–97; settlement verdict of the Wiedergutmachungskammer (Compensation Court) of the Osnabrück Landgericht (Regional Court) from 19 April 1956, in: ibid., #1463; Information provided to the author by Heino Rector, land registry of the Norden Amtsgericht (Local Court) on 18 November 2008. 5 Or so it says in Inge Sanders’s denazification questionnaire from 9 February 1948, in: NLA-HStA, Nds.171 Hannover #22133. 6 See NLA-StA Aurich, Rep. 251, #1461, p. 446f. 7 Ibid., p. 425f. [emphasis in original]. 8 Ibid., p. 434. 9 The only speculation on the matter I am aware of is from journalist Johannes Lübeck, who maintains that Horst Wessel’s maternal grandfather, a certain Hermann Wilhelm Erich Richter, born on 17 May 1841, was an illegitimate child of Welf king George V of Hanover, and that the Welf family therefore supported subsequent generations of the Richter and Wessel families. According to Lübeck, Wessel’s elderly sister confirmed in the early 1990s that she was related to the Welfs in this manner. Heinrich, Prince of Hanover, on the other hand, said when asked that he had never heard of his family holding a protective hand over the Wessel family, and that the claim that King George V of Hanover had had an illegitmate child was likewise ‘utter nonsense’. See Lübeck, Horst Wessel, pp. 4–8; information provided to the author by Heinrich, Prince of Hanover on 20 February 2009. 10 Denazification decision in the verbal proceedings against Dr Inge Sanders on 8 August 1949, in: NLA-HStA, Nds.171 Hannover #22133. 11 Enforcement order against Dr Inge Sanders of 7 June 1951 as well as a file memo of the bailiff of Bad Pyrmont from 22 June of the same year, in: ibid. 12 BArch/Bay, ZLA1/5822815, p. 74. 13 Ibid., p. 88. 14 See the correspondence in: AEKR, Ostpfarrerversorgung files, #350. 15 Letter from Dr Ingeborg Sanders to the Evangelische Kirche im Rheinland (Protestant Church in the Rhineland) dated 3 May 1970, in: ibid.; information provided to the author in writing by Regina Schmidt of the town council of Moers on 18 June 2008. 16 Letter from Horst Sanders to the author dated 6 August 2008.

292

Notes

19. Belated Justice 1 See Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages, 13. Wahlperiode, vol. 599, Drucksache 13/9747; ibid., Drucksache 13/9774; Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages, 13. Wahlperiode, vol. 601, Drucksache 13/10013; Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages, 13. Wahlperiode, vol. 611, Drucksache 13/10848. 2 Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages, 13. Wahlperiode, vol. 191, p. 20,193f. 3 See ITS, T/D files, 485614, 932501 and 932504; ITS, T-78796; ITS, T-78798; ITS, T-78799. 4 Letter to the author from Berlin senior state prosecutor Jörg Raupach dated 9 February 2009 (Berlin State Prosecutor’s Office, reversal decision 2 P Aufh. 1/08).

293

Archives

AEKR

Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland [Archives of the Protestant Church in the Rhineland], Düsseldorf Ostpfarrerversorgung [Provision Fund for Eastern Church Ministers], #350

AT-OeStA/AdR

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv / Archiv der Republik [Austrian State Archives / Archive of the Republic], Vienna 02/BKA/SR, 22/Nö, —1928, box 5076–77 —1929, box 5078 —1930, box 5060 ‘Bürckel’ / Materie, box 38, folder 1772

BArch/B

Bundesarchiv [German Federal Archives], Berlin-Lichterfelde Dok/k 42 NS 18, #661 NS 23, #224, 236, 305 NS 26, #304, 1370a, 1280 NS 31, #81 NSDAP-Parteikanzlei-Korrespondenz [NSDAP Party Chancellery correspondence] R 43 II, #388 R 58, #R 172, 499, 3026 R 187 #374, 627 R 3001 #1327, 108644, 107960 1200010175 #13286 SAPMO RY 1/I 2/3, #47, 48, 82, 93 SAPMO DY 55/V #278/3/212, 278/6/340, 287/979

BArch/Bay

Bundesarchiv-Lastenausgleichsarchiv [German Federal Archives, Burden-Sharing Archive], Bayreuth ZLA1/5822815

295

The Making of a Nazi Hero BArch/K

Bundesarchiv [German Federal Archives], Koblenz Z 42 II/1369

BLHA

Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv [Main Regional Archives of Brandenburg], Potsdam Rep. 161, ZC 19839

BPolW

Bundespolizeidirektion Wien, Referat 7 – Bibliothek und Archiv [Federal Police Headquarters, Vienna, Department 7 – Library and Archive] Box entitled ‘NSDAP 1920–1947’

BStU

Die Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik [Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives of the Former German Democratic Republic] Berlin MfS archive, #ASt 527/51

DMA

Deutsche Nationalbibliothek – Deutsches Musikarchiv, Berlin [German National Library – German Music Archive], Berlin Commemorative gramophone record for Horst Wessel, NS-Schallplatten, c. 1930 ‘Milva’ (CD)

DVA

Deutsches Volksliedarchiv, Institut für Internationale Popularliedforschung [German Folk Song Archive, Institute for International Popular Music Research], Freiburg im Breisgau Folder entitled ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’, F004418

ELAB

Evangelisches Landeskirchliches Archiv [Protestant State Church Archives], Berlin Konsistorialakten [consistory files], #14/24377, 14/24675, 14/3333, 14/3340

GStA PK

Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz [Secret State Archives of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation], Berlin I. HA, Rep. 84a Justizministerium, #51633, 51596, 54969, 55212, 124821 Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, 4043, #2, 18, 119, 260, 283, 293, 302, 385, 415, 423 Rep. 90 Staatsministerium, Annex P Geheime Staatspolizei, #87/2

HAB

Hauptarchiv der v. Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten [Main Archive of the von Bodelschwingh Foundation], Bielefeld-Bethel Collection 2/12–183

296

Archives HHI

Rheinisches Literaturarchiv im Heinrich-Heine-Institut [Rhineland Literature Archive, Heinrich Heine Institute], Düsseldorf Literary estate of Hanns Heinz Ewers

HU/UA

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Universitätsarchiv [Humboldt University, Berlin, University Archive] ‘Rektor und Senat’ collection, 574 Faculty of medicine collection, 1053 Student directory of Berlin University

ITS

International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen T/D files, 310470, 320520, 485614, 932501, 932504, 957987 D/P files, 797879 T files, 78796, 78798, 78799 ANF/ZNK – Zentrale Namenskartei [Central Name File] ANF/KL Oranienburg, binder 72 ANF/KLD OCC15/217, binder 298 ANF/KLD Gruppe P.P., binders 155, 822, 2353, 2907, 2907D, 2907E ANF/KLD Landshut prison ANF/KLD Gestapo files, Frankfurt ANF/KLD Brandenburg-Görden penitentiary, binders 3124, 3158

JBK

Jagiellonian-Bibliothek, Krakau – Handschriftenabteilung [Jagiellonian Library, Cracow – Manuscript Department] Horst Wessel, Meine Fahrten und Reisen (Ms. Germ. Oct. 761) Horst Wessel, Politika (Ms. Germ. Oct. 762)

LAB

Landesarchiv Berlin [Berlin State Archives] A Rep. 001–02, vol. 483 A Rep. 358–01, #11, 695, 2165, 2166, 2506, 8245, 8303–10 A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, #7545, 7569, 21598, 21680 A Rep. 020–11, vol. 1, 16, 24, 31 B Rep. 031–03–11, #5413 B Rep. 058. 2271 C Rep. 118–01 #2755–56, 4384, 10202, 19822 C Rep. 375–01–08, #4370, 10058, A 16 C Rep. 900–01, 106 C Rep. 901, vol. 569 E Rep. 200–63, vol. 63a

LAV NRW R

Landesarchiv NRW, Abteilung Rheinland [Regional Archives of North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland Department] Regierung Düsseldorf, #40041

297

The Making of a Nazi Hero LBO

Landesamt für Bürger- und Ordnungsangelegenheiten (formerly the Entschädigungsamt von West-Berlin) [State Office for Citizens’ and Regulatory Issues, formerly the Compensation Office of West Berlin], Berlin Reg. 10229

LHASA, MD

Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt [Main State Archive of SaxonyAnhalt], Magdeburg V/10/112/1 Rep. K. MW VdN Magdeburg, #3799 Rep. K 6, VdN Magdeburg, #4906

LkA EKvW

Landeskirchliches Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche von Westfalen [Protestant State Church Archives of Westphalia], Bielefeld Depositum Johannes Kuhlo, collection 3, #16, vol. 4, 75

Monacensia

Monacensia, Literaturarchiv und Bibliothek [Monacensia Literature Archive and Library], Munich Klaus Mann collection: KM 561

NLA-HStA

Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv – Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover [State Archives of Lower Saxony – Main State Archive, Hanover] Nds.171 Hanover #22133 Hann. 122A, #3511

NLA-StA Aurich

Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv – Staatsarchiv Aurich [State Archives of Lower Saxony – Aurich State Archive] Rep. 251, #1461–1463

NLA-StA Oldenburg

Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv – Staatsarchiv Oldenburg [State Archives of Lower Saxony – Oldenburg State Archive] Collection 131, #442

PA/AA

Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes [Political Archives of the German Foreign Office], Berlin ZA4–1 SP 6076, vol. 59486, 59487 ZA2 SP 214, vol. 55624

SBB PK

Handschriftenabteilung der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz [Manuscript Department of the Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation] Literary estate 353: Heinz Knobloch, boxes ‘Der arme Epstein’ 1–3 Cod. Simul. 190 (originally Mp. Germ. 762) PSB III C 1 vol. 27

298

Archives SBG/AS

Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten, Archiv Sachsenhausen [Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, Sachsenhausen Archive] D 1 A, #1020, 1024, 1196

StA Bi

Stadtarchiv und Landesgeschichtliche Bibliothek [State Archives and Regional History Library], Bielefeld Collection 250,1/NSDAP, #1, 14 Collection 400,3/photos

StA H

Stadtarchiv Hannover [Hanover State Archives] Residents’ registration archive HR 16 SB 46 Personal file 3194

StA HM

Stadtarchiv Hameln [Hamelin State Archives] Acc. 1 #599, 770, 1001 Collection 140.2, #34

StA MH

Stadtarchiv Mülheim an der Ruhr [Mülheim an der Ruhr State Archives] Newspaper-clipping collection

StA-L

Sächsisches Staatsarchiv [Saxon State Archives], Leipzig Amtsgericht [District Court] Leipzig HRB 768, vol. 1–2

StAD

Hessisches Staatsarchiv [Hessian State Archives], Darmstadt G 27 Darmstadt, Bd. 887

StAM

Staatsarchiv München [Munich State Archives] Staatsanwaltschaften [Public Prosecutor’s Office], #21798

WStLA

Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv [City and Regional Archives of Vienna] M. Abt. 119, A 32: 308/1942 M. Abt. 119, A 32: Zl.: 2323/1925

299

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Index References to illustrations are shown in italics

alcohol 49–50, 70 Alliance ’90/The Greens 247 Allied Control Council Law 232, 242 Angriff, Der 56, 62, 66, 75, 114, 149 and anti-Semitism 44, 103 and Wessel murder 13–14, 95, 110, 186, 203 Anlauf, Paul 151 Anschluss 47, 141, 194 anti-Bolshevism 27, 143, 147 anti-capitalism 48 anti-liberalism 66 anti-Semitism 16, 23, 43–44, 66, 103, 156 and Austria 46 and the church 127–28 and Wessel cult 143 see also Jews Apfel, Alfred 85, 94–95, 209 Arndt, Adolf 248 Arnswaldt, Werner Konstantin von 157 August Wilhelm, Prince of Prussia 16, 114, 190, 195–97, 234 Auschwitz concentration camp 191, 193 Austria 44–47, 141 authoritarianism 111

Bade, Wilfrid 17, 85–86, 110 Baer tavern 6, 7, 10, 204 Barmat, Julius 43 Bartel, Ewald 9, 84–85 ‘Battle for Berlin’ xiii, 68 BDM see League of German Girls Becher, Johannes R. 95 Beer Hall Putsch 63, 66 Benjamin, Hilde 95 Bergen-Belsen concentration camp 219–20 Berlin-East Social Working Group 59 Berlin-Mitte Communist stormtroopers 8, 13, 203–4, 206–7 and Wessel murder 6–7, 12, 88 Berliner Arbeiter-Zeitung 13, 47, 103 Berliner Börsen-Courir 94 Berliner Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt 128, 132 Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger 97–98 Berliner Tageblatt 102 Bernhard, Georg 208 Best, Werner 65 Bethel seminary 133 Bettauer, Hugo 46 Bielefeld xiii, 3, 22–24, 131–32, 153–56, 158, 163

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Conti, Leonardo 11 copyright case 168–70 Corps Alemannia 47, 141, 147, 150 Corps Hilaritas 141 Corps Normannia Berlin 41–42, 112, 147, 150 Corps Saxonia 141 crimes against humanity 224, 229, 232 Crohne, Wilhelm 205 Crossener Tageblatt 187, 188 cult of the dead 108, 110–11, 123, 126, 132–33, 145–46 Czech-Jochberg, Erich 137

Bismarck League 37–38, 176, 191 and Wessel 30–34, 36, 41, 60 Black Reichswehr 37 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 127 Bonus, Arthur 23 Bormann, Albert 171 Bormann, Martin 65, 191 Brandt, Wilhelm 133 Braun, Werner von 65 Brecht, Bertolt and ‘The Horst Wessel Legend’ 178, 181–83 Breuer, Hans 51 Broh, James 95 Brüning, Heinrich 59 Buchenwald concentration camp 216–18, 221, 240 Büchsenschütz, Gustav 176–77 Bundestag 247–48 Bürckel, Josef 141

Dachau concentration camp 186, 217, 240 Daluege, Kurt 191, 193 Danube National Socialists 45 Darré, Richard Walther 121 Däubler-Gmelin, Herta 248 Day of Potsdam 197 DDP see German Democratic Party de-Nazification 118, 230, 236, 239, 244–45 Dettmann, Ludwig 150 Deutsche Christen 127–29, 133–34 Deutsches Diakonen-Blatt 132 Deutsches Tageblatt 149 Dibelius, Otto 127–28 Diels, Rudolf 189–91, 200, 233–34 discipline 23, 31, 38, 50, 61, 68–69, 141, 147, DNSAP see German National Socialist Workers’ Party DNVP see German National People’s Party Döblin, Alfred 184 Dömske, Kurt 101 Dönitz, Karl 144 Drewnitzki, Viktor 80–81, 98, 212, 221–22, 225 imprisonment of 217–19 Düning, Hans-Joachim 140 Dürr, Dagobert 14

Catholic Centre Party 43 Catholic Church 126 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 23 Christian Social Party 43 Christianity 23, 25, 58–59, 126–29, 233 class issues 48–49, 51–52, 59, 68 Cohn, Else 7–10, 98–99 murder of 187–88, 199, 205, 209–10, 229 Cold War 232 Communist Party of Germany (KPD) 6–8, 57, 146, 150–51 and concentration camps 218, 221–22 and elections 39, 56 and first trial 95, 96–97, 100 and second trial 203–4 and violence 62, 72 and Wessel murder 11–14, 79, 80, 81–82, 86–88 Communist Youth Association of Germany (KJVD) 8, 99 Communist Youth International 59 Communists 4, 14, 34, 46, 186 attacks against 67–68, 71, 229–30 and justice system 101–2 and martyrs 108 compensation 222–23, 245, 247 concentration camps 133, 212–12 see also individual camps

East Germany see German Democratic Republic Ebert, Herbert 207

308

Index Freisler, Roland 200, 209 Frenssen, Gustav 23 Frey, Erich 95 Frick, Wilhelm 148 Friedensburg, Ferdinand 152 Friedrichshain xiii, 3–10, 34, 57–59, 70, 73–74, 149, 156, 229

economic crisis 5, 73, 94 Ehrhardt Freikorps Brigade 36 Eichendorff, Joseph von 52 Eichhorn, Emil 27 Eichmann, Adolf 65 Einsatzgruppen 241 Elgersburg 56, 153–54, 163 Enabling Act (1933) 200 Engelbrecht, Ernst 13 Engels, Friedrich 7 Epp, Franz Ritter von 146 Epstein, Sally 202, 203–4, 205, 206, 209, 247–49 sentencing of 181, 207, 208 execution 210 Ernst, Karl 56, 147, 152, 190–91, 195, 234 Erzberger, Matthias 35 Eschmann, Ernst Wilhelm 49, 50 ethnic cleansing 127 euthanasia 11 Evangelical Foundation of St John 133 Ewers, Hanns Heinz and Horst Wessel novel 50, 84, 111–16, 119, 122, 124, 137, 178, 180, 181 and Hans Westmar film 119–21, 122, 123, 143, 193 and Wessel funeral 147, 150 Ewers, Josephine 112–13

Galsk tavern 8, 13, 78 Gaumer, Carl Otto 168–69 GDR see German Democratic Republic Geis, Nobert 248 genocide xv, 143, 241 German Democratic Party (DDP) 95, 152 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 80, 95, 108, 222, 225, 231–32, 234 German National People’s Party (DNVP) 27, 30, 39 German National Socialist Workers’ Party (DNSAP) 45 German National Synod 127 German Supreme Command 25 German University Ring 141 Geschke, Ottomar 79–80, 217 Gestapo 115, 124, 171–72, 186, 212, 216 and Höhler 189, 199–200 and post-war investigations 229–30, 232 ghettos 193, 241 Gisevius, Hans Bernd 115, 199, 200, 231, 233–34 Godowski, Karl 81–82, 98 Goebbels, Joseph xiii, xv, 44, 47, 110, 143, 145 and Christian symbolism 109, 111, 129 and ‘Horst Wessel Song’ 169–70 and violence 58, 66 and Wessel 15–16, 59–60, 69, 115, 144, 186 and Wessel family 94, 165–66 and Wessel film 119, 120–21 and Wessel memorials 146, 148–49, 156 and Wessel murder 14, 95 and Wessel novel 114, 124 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 135, 154

Farm Workers’ Union 8 Feder, Gottfried 53 Federal Republic of Germany 96, 177, 222–23, 232–34, 237 Federer, Georg 237–38 Felseneck attacks 230 Fiedler, Richard 6, 9–10, 49, 84, 125, 195, 210 career of 190, 191–94 and post-war life 236, 239–42 Firearms Law (1928) 101 First World War 8, 29–30, 65, 108, 142 Fischer, Dr 95, 98 flags 53, 62–64, 137–38, 144, 146–47, 184 Flex, Walter 34–35 Flut, Hans 75–76 Frauenfeld, Alfred 141–42

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The Making of a Nazi Hero and Communists 72, 186 and cult status 107 and ‘Day of Potsdam’ 197 and Goebbels 41 and rise to power 66, 115 and Wessel 111–12, 209–10 and Wessel memorials 146–48, 161–62 and youth movements 49–50 Hitler salute 108, 123 ‘Hitler Song’ 129–31 Hitler Youth 44–45, 141, 146–47, 151, 171 and ideologies 33–34, 49 Hitlerjunge Quex 123, 135, 137 Hoelz, Max 20, 95 Hoffmann, Adolf 27 Hoffmann, Paul 67 Höhler, Albrecht ‘Ali’ 8–9, 11, 12–15, 78–83, 85–91, 92, 206–7 and first trial 95, 96, 97–98, 99, 101 murder of 189, 190–91, 197–200, 205, 209–10, 212 post-war investigations 229, 231, 232, 233, 234–36, 242 homosexuality 127, 183, 223 Honecker, Erich 57 Horst Wessel (Ewers novel) see Ewers, Hanns Heinz Horst Wessel (Mann manuscript) see Mann, Klaus ‘The Horst Wessel Legend’ (Brecht essay) see Brecht, Bertolt ‘Horst Wessel Song’ 3, 60–64, 108, 118–19, 129, 144, 186 alterations to 131–33, 170–73, 175–76, 184 banning of 174–75 and copyright 166–70 and schools 136–37, 138–39, 148 Höss, Rudolf 191 Hossenfelder, Joachim 129 Huchel, Peter 65 Huizinga, Johan 111 Humburg, Paul 129, 131

Goldstein, Moritz 6, 95 Göring, Hermann 16, 123, 129, 148, 185–86, 209, 211 and Communism 62, 200–1 and Höhler 188–89, 199 Great War see First World War Gröpler, Carl 210 Grummert, Kurt 173 Gründel, Ernst Günther 48–49 Gruson, Paul 150–51 Grzesinski, Albert 72, 74, 102 Gürtner, Franz 188, 200, 209 Hädelmayer, Roman 167 Haenisch, Konrad 27 Haffner, Sebastian 29, 183 Halle, Felix 96, 203 Hamelin 22, 159–62, 243 Hanfstaengl, Ernst 120, 167 Hans Westmar (film) see Ewers, Hanns Heinz Hanussen, Erik Jan 199 Hardt, Rudolf 233 Heath of the Mark 131, 176–77 Heimatblätter 160 Heinrich Schliemann Gymnasium 135, 139, 148, 152 Helene Schaufuss KG 168–69 Helldorf, Wolf-Heinrich Count von 146–47, 193, 199 Heller, Leo 4, 13 heroism xiii, xv, 3, 15, 25, 28, 33, 36, 41, 43, 47, 60–61, 68, 84, 93, 108–9, 111, 113–18, 121, 123, 126, 129, 134–36, 143–44 see also martyrs Heydrich, Reinhard 212 Hiemisch, Max 155 Hildebrandt, Paul 35 Himmler, Heinrich 145, 147, 152 Himmler, Margarethe 233 Hinckeldey, Ernst Paul 156, 158 Hindenburg, Oskar von 148 Hindenburg, Paul von 16, 25, 27–28, 159, 197 Hinkel, Hans 119 Hitler, Adolf 16, 40, 47–48, 60, 129, 145, 179 and the church 131, 134

Illustrierter Beobachter 56 Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) 27

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Index Klemperer, Victor xiii Klose, Rudolf 211 Knappschaft 34–35 Knobloch, Heinz 125, 206, 239 KPD see Communist Party of Germany Krasnov, Pyotr Nikolayevich 43–44, 60 Kuhlo, Johannes 131 Kullak, Max 75 Kulmhof concentration camp 193 Kupferstein, Hermann 7, 12–13, 100, 103, 220–21 and first trial 96–98 and second trial 204, 206 Kutisker, Iwan 43

intellectualism 66, 139–40, 178 International Red Aid 80 Jackel, Gerhard 209 Jaenichen, Erna 4–6, 73, 75, 83–85, 91–92, 152 and first trial 14, 97–98 and later life 124–25 and Wessel murder 9, 10, 86–87 Jagiellonian Library 19 Jambrowski, Max 7–8, 10–12, 98–99, 204 imprisonment of 215–16 and victim status 223–24 Jambrowski, Walter 7–8, 98, 204 imprisonment of 216–17 Jambrowski, Willi 7–8, 203–4, 206, 215–17 and compensation 222–23 and trial 98–99 Jews xv, 24, 35, 43–44, 102, 127, 193, 240–41 and Austria 46 and Wessel 53, 143 see also anti-Semitism JN see Young National Democrats Jugendbuch von Horst Wessel, Das 137 Juhre, Alfred 63 Junek, Walter 7–8, 98–99, 217 Jungbürger 59 Jünger, Ernst 20, 25, 110 justice system 93, 101–3, 207–9 and post-war 229, 247–49

Lagarde, Paul de 23, 133 Landshoff, Fritz 178–79 Lange, Ernst 89–92 Law for the Protection of National Symbols 119 League of German Girls (BDM) xiii League of Nations 64 Lenin, Vladimir 7 Lenk, Franz 151 Lichtenburg concentration camp 216–18 Lichterfelde Ost attack 67–68 Liebknecht, Karl 7 Lippert, Julius 149, 151 Löns, Hermann 34 Löwenthal, Fritz 95–96 Lower Saxony 157, 159, 162, 245 Ludendorff, Erich 25 Lutze, Viktor 142, 161 Luxemburg, Rosa 7

‘Kampfzeit’ 20, 63, 121, 123, 140, 194, 196, 240 Kandulski, Josef ‘Piepel’ 7–9, 88, 92 and first trial 98–99, 101 imprisonment of 213–14 Karl Liebknecht House 11, 14, 79, 81, 147, 150, 207 Kelter, Will 128–29 Kirchenkampf 133 Kirchner, Anton Adolf 72 KJVD see Communist Youth Association of Germany Klabuhn, Franz 174 Klabund (Alfred Henschke) 35

Maikowski, Hans Eberhard 38, 129 Mainz 153, 219 Malicious Practices Act 173–74, 219–20 Mann, Klaus 22, 28, 50, 66, 93, 159–60 and Horst Wessel manuscript 178–80, 181, 182–83 March of the Calves 175, 183 Marenholtz, Freiherr von 10 Markus, Willi 150, 190, 194–95, 210, 241 and post-war life 235–36, 238–39

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The Making of a Nazi Hero National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) 10–11, 47–48, 123, 171, 192 and Austria 45 elections 73, 93–94 and Goebbels 41 and martyrs 108 and memorials 147–48 and violence 14, 66–67 and Wessel 15–17, 20, 40, 88 and Wessel family 118 National Socialist German Workers’ Youth (NSDAJ) 45 National-Zeitung 23 Natusch, Bruno 211 Nazis see National Socialism neo-Nazis xiv, 229 Neue Zürcher Zeitung 208 Neumann, Heinz 8 Neusustrum concentration camp 214–15 Nicolai Cemetery 145–49, 151, 174, 229 Nicolai Church 22, 24, 27, 149 Niemöller, Martin 127 ‘Night of the Long Knives’ 133, 192, 237 November Revolution 27 NPD see National Democratic Party of Germany NSDAJ see National Socialist German Workers’ Youth NSDAP see National Socialist German Workers’ Party Nuremberg rallies 51, 53, 60–61, 107, 117, 129

martial arts 55–56 martyrs 107, 108, 111, 126, 148 Marx, Karl 7 Marxism 128, 137 Mauthausen concentration camp 213–15 media attention 94–95, 97–98, 208 Mehring, Walter 178 Meier, Edgar 101 Mein Bruder Horst (I. Wessel) see Wessel, Ingeborg Meissner, Otto 148 Mennenöh, Siegfried 143 Meyer, Alfred 156 Meyer-Erlach, Wolf 139–40 Meyer-Pyritz, Martin 146 Mielke, Erich 151 Milva 175–76 Mohrenschildt, Walter von 190, 234 Möller, Hugo 155 Montag Morgen, Der 103 ‘Monument to the Murdered of the Movement’ 146 Moringen concentration camp 219 mother cult 113–14 Müller-Blattau, Josef 166 Müller, Ludwig 127 Münzenberg, Willi 59–60 music 23, 57–58, 68, 118–20, 139, 166–69, 184 see also singing Mussolini, Benito 115, 117, 156 National Citizens’ Council 27–28 National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) xiv National Socialism xiv, xv, 20, 39, 171–74, 183 and anti-Semitism 44 and the church 126–28 and education 140 and justice system 101–2 post-war investigations 232–35, 247 sacralization of 107, 110 and violence 66 and Wessel family 4, 118, 150 and youth movements 33 National Socialist German Students’ League 33, 140–41, 193

‘Old Guard’ 156, 191 Olden, Rudolf 102 Olympia German Association for Physical Training 38–39 Oranienburg concentration camp 186, 217–18 Organization Consul (OC) 35, 37 Pädagogische Warte 137 Paetel, Karl 20

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Index Reich Labour Service 159–60 Reich Propaganda Administration 123 Reich Supreme Court 169–70, 207–8, 235 Reichsbanner 34, 38 Reichstag 73, 79, 93, 95, 159, 185, 192, 217 Reichstag fire 199, 216–17 Reichswehr 36–37, 67 Reifferscheidt, Adolph 236–37 Reinhard Regiment 38 Reinhart, Walter 47, 50 Reitmann, Erwin 57, 116 Rentmeister, Walter 46 reparations 247 Revolutionary Union Opposition (RGO) 8 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 148 Ringvereine 12–13, 94 Röhm, Ernst 70, 114, 124, 133, 145–46, 171 Röpe, Fritz 160 Rosenberg, Alfred 53, 157 Ross, Camillo 7, 88, 96 Rossbach Freikorps 191 Rote Fahne, Die 8, 13, 73, 96, 102–3, 192 Rote Führer, Der 12 Rückert, Erwin 13, 78–80, 206, 225 and first trial 92, 96, 98–101 imprisonment of 214–15 and Wessel murder 8–9, 91, 205, 207 Rückert, Hildegard 215, 225 Ruhnke, Georg 83–87, 124 Rust, Bernhard 35, 121, 161

Papen, Franz von 148 Pariser Tageblatt 208 Paulus, Friedrich 144 People’s Police 231–32 Pieck, Wilhelm 80 Pietrzack, Wilhelm 89–91 pimping 14, 73, 79, 83, 87–88 and Wessel xv, 13, 84–85, 174, 181–82 Plasch, Richard 124–25 Platzeck, Matthias 177 Pohlenz, Walter 190–91, 198, 229–33 Poland xv, 156, 193, 241 Politika (Wessel) see Wessel, Horst Prague 80–81, 217 Priemer, Emil 217–18 propaganda xiv-xv, 6, 8, 10, 27–28, 72, 157 and dead heroes 108 and education 140–41 and film 123, 135 and Wessel 15–17, 44–45, 111, 115, 142–44 Propaganda Ministry 17, 169–70 Protestant Church 22–23, 25, 27–28, 126–34, 148 Prüfke, Heinz 101 Prussian State Library 19, 165 ‘Raise the Flag!’ xiv, 3, 61–64, 146–47, 165 see also ‘Horst Wessel Song’ Rall, Adolf 199–200 Rathenau, Walther 35 Ravensbrück concentration camp 216, 220 Red Aid 8, 78–81, 97, 204 and first trial 95–96 Red Front Fighters’ League 6–8, 13, 57, 137, 203–4 attacks against 67–68 and Austria 46 and propaganda 96 and violence 72 Rehfeld, Klara 6, 9–10, 91 Reich Chamber of Music 171 Reich Criminal Code 99–101 Reich, Das 143 Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival 156, 161

SA (stormtroopers) xv, 7, 11, 38, 41, 69, 76, 171 and the church 133 divisions 9, 51, 57–58, 62, 101, 150 and Ewers 124 and executions 200 and heroes 146–47 and hostels 70–71 and propaganda 55 and violence 66–68, 72–74, 186, 212 and Wessel xiii, 16, 42, 70 and Wessel murder 88 SA-Mann Brand 123, 135 Sachsenhausen concentration camp 173, 216 Salm, Anna 6

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Salm, Elisabeth 14–15, 86, 88 and first trial 91–92, 95, 98–99 imprisonment of 152, 219–20 as landlady 4–7, 73, 85, 87 and Wessel murder 8–10, 187, 205–207 Salomon, Franz Pfeffer von 16, 67 Sander, Wilhelm 79, 98, 217 Sanders, Ewald 116, 245–46 Sanders, Inge see Wessel, Ingeborg Schemm, Hans 127 Schirach, Baldur von 33, 114 Schlageter, Albert Leo 113, 126, 135 Schmidt, Hermann 78, 98–99, 220 Schmidt, Käthe 79, 99, 220 Schmidt, Willi 189–91, 196, 198–199, 234–35 Schulz Group 45 Schumann, Erich 101 Schwebel, Hans 148 Schweitzer, Hans ‘Mjölnir’ 74 Second World War 19, 95, 115, 141–43, 162, 183, 218, 237 SED see Socialist Unity Party of Germany Seldte, Franz 121 Selenowski, Albert 101 Selo, Max 10 shawm bands 57–58, 149 Sieveking, Hermann Otto 30 singing 35, 47, 57, 62–63, 68, 108, 119, 138–39, 173, 184 Six, Franz Alfred 65 Sobański, Antoni 107, 140 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 27, 39, 43, 155, 183, 247–48 Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) 57, 221–22, 224–25 ‘Song of the Germans’ 3, 47, 119, 129 ‘Song of the Little Bugler, The’ 108–9, 185 Sonnenburg concentration camp 215–16 Sonnenschein, Carl 59 Soviet Military Administration 229 Soviet Union 143, 220–21 Spandau 133, 222 Spartacist Uprising 8, 27

SPD see Social Democratic Party of Germany Speer, Albert 161 Sprengel, Albert 84 SS (Schutzstaffel) xv, 147, 150, 171, 186, 193, 238 and concentration camps 216–18 Stahlhelm 36, 38–39, 150, 186 Stalin, Josef 96, 220 Stalingrad 143–44 Stamer, Hartwig 235 Stange, Erich 128 Stasi (East German State Security) 83, 232 Stiewe, Willi 29–30 Stoecker, Adolf 43 Stoll, Peter 203–8, 212, 214 imprisonment of 221 rehabilitation of 247–49 and victim status 224–225 Stolpe, Manfred 176 storm taverns 70, 71, 99 Strasser, Gregor 47 Strasser, Otto 47 Strauch, Prof. 10 street violence 12, 41, 95, 101–102, 129 and National Socialists 54–55, 63–64, 73, 108 Stresemann, Gustav 64 Stürmer, Karl 86 Sulistava, Karoline 81 Sunnwend-Verlag GmbH 166, 168–70 Süntel 156–57, 159–64 swastika xiii, 15, 63, 68, 88, 90, 113, 137, 146, 150, 153–56, 160, 162–63, 185 Tag, Der 103 Tat, Die 65 Teichmann, Chief Inspector 4, 88, 97 Thälmann, Ernst 108 Thälmann Pioneers 108–9 Third Reich xiii-xvi, 15, 19, 22, 88, 107–11, 115, 121, 140, 142, 144, 154, 169, 172, 174, 186, 201, 210, 216–217, 220, 234, 242–43, 245–47 and the church 127, 129, 134 see also National Socialism Thomas, State Prosecutor 102, 205, 208

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Index Wessel, Horst xiii-xvi, 4–7, 37, 40, 73–74, 75, 76–77 and anti-Semitism 43–44, 46, 143 and Austria 45–47 and class 51–52, 59 and cult status xii–xv, 107, 144, 178–83, 191, 193, 196–97 and education 42–44, 49–50 and family 21–22, 24, 26–30, 118 and film 119–23 funeral of 15–17, 94 and Goebbels 59–60, 109–11 memorials to 125, 146–63, 164 and military training 36–38 murder of 3–4, 9–11, 13–15, 79, 83–92, 100, 205–7, 248 and National Socialists 41, 50–51, 53–54, 57–58, 60–61, 69–70 political awakening of 30–33, 34–36, 39–40, 48 and Politika 18–21, 35, 42–43, 45, 53–56, 60, 68, 165, 176 post-war rejection 229 and Protestant Church 126, 128–29, 131–33, 134 and violence 54–56, 68 writings of 18, 19–21, 165 and youth influence 135–37, 139–41 see also Horst Wessel (Ewers) Wessel, Ingeborg (sister) 22, 35, 50, 62, 72, 94 and Mein Bruder Horst 115, 118, 180 and memorials 150, 156, 159 post-war life 243–45, 246 and schools 136, 138 and Wessel cult 115–19, 147, 165–66, 168 and writings 28–29, 34, 43 Wessel, Ludwig 21–28, 29, 64, 146 Wessel, Margarete 21–22, 28, 94, 113–14 and memorials 150, 153, 156, 159, 161 post-war life 243, 245–46 and Wessel cult 115, 117–18, 121, 147, 165–66, 168 Wessel, Werner 22, 31, 146, 148–49 death of 75, 85, 94 West Germany see Federal Republic of Germany

Thuringia 56 Tolk, Judge 95 Toller, Ernst 35 torture 70, 186, 189, 199, 206, 212, 229–32 Treaty of Versailles 30, 36, 64 Tucholsky, Kurt 183 Ulrich, Curt von 62 unemployment 42, 56, 70, 73, 76, 81 Union of Catholic German Student Associations 126 universities 37, 41–42, 47, 49, 59, 76, 109, 116, 139–41, 174, 210, 246 Unruh, Fritz von 35 USPD see Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany ‘Victim of Fascism’ status 222–25 Vienna 44–47, 49–50, 71–72, 80, 84, 139, 141, 167 Viking League 20, 35–36, 38–39, 41, 55, 60, 68–69 völkisch nationalism 22, 23, 66, 126, 127, 132, 176 and Austria 46–47 and youth 31, 34, 137 Völkischer Beobachter 53, 103, 156 Volksgemeinschaft 16, 32, 48, 59, 64, 121, 127, 133 von Bodelschwingh Institution 132–33, 155, 233 Vossische Zeitung 6, 35, 208 Wehrmacht 142–144, 161, 175, 219, 224 Weidemann, Heinz 129, 134 Weimar Republic 12, 16, 27, 31, 34, 38, 41, 43, 53, 63, 65, 107, 148, 151, 183, 191, 201, 209–10, and the church 128 and Communists 12, 96, 101–2 and violence xiii-xvi, 65 Weineck, August Friedrich ‘Fritz’ 108–9 Weiss, Bernhard 12, 16, 118 Weltbühne, Die 178 Wendt, Kurt 190, 195–96, 235–38 Werfel, Franz 35

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The Making of a Nazi Hero Westdeutscher Beobachter 16 Will, Theodor 79, 80–81, 98, 217

Zehrer, Hans 65 Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 137 Ziegler, Hans 181, 202, 204–9 execution 210–11 rehabilitation of 247–49 Ziemer, Erich 151 Zühlsdorf, Walter 209–10

Young Pioneers 108–9 Young National Democrats (JN) xiv youth movements 20, 30–31, 33–36, 42, 50 and Vienna 44–45

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