I

The young brownshirt activist Horst Wessel had made himself thoroughly hated by Berlin’s Communist paramilitaries by 1930. Idealistic, intelligent and well educated, he had caught the attention of Joseph Goebbels, who had sent him to study the well-organized Nazi youth movement in Vienna in the first half of 1928. Back in Berlin, Wessel had quickly risen to a position of local prominence in the brownshirt organization in the Friedrichshain district, where he led a ‘storm’ or branch of the Nazi paramilitaries. He proceeded to unleash a particularly energetic and provocative campaign on the streets, including a brownshirt attack on the local Communist Party headquarters, in which four Communist workers were seriously injured. Heinz Neumann, known as the Goebbels of the Communist Party, and Berlin editor of the Communist daily, The Red Flag, responded with a new slogan issued to party cadres: ‘Beat the fascists wherever you find them!⁸¹

It was in this atmosphere that Wessel’s landlady, the widow of a Communist, went to a tavern in the area on 14 January 1930 to ask for help in dealing with her tenant, who, she said, had not only refused to pay rent for his live-in girlfriend but had also responded to the landlady’s demands by threatening her with violence. Whether or not this was true was another matter, for there was evidence that the real cause of the dispute was her attempt to raise Wessel’s rent. The landlady was also afraid that, if the girlfriend did not move out, she would lose her legal right to the flat, which she did not own, but rented herself, not least because the girlfriend was a prostitute (whether or not she was still working subsequently became the subject of heated and somewhat prurient debate). The key factor here was the widow’s connection to the Communist Party. Despite their disapproval of the landlady’s insistence at the time of her husband’s death on giving him a church funeral, the Communists decided to help her deal with her tenant. Only the previous day, they claimed, a local Communist had been shot in a fight with the brownshirts. The dispute offered an ideal opportunity to get even. Conscious of the likelihood that Wessel would be armed, they sent to a nearby tavern for a well-known local tough, Ali Höhler, who was known to possess a gun, to provide the muscle in a punitive expedition to Wessel’s flat. Hohler was not only a member of the neighbouring branch of the Red Front-Fighters’ League, but also had convictions for petty crimes, perjury and pimping. A member of one of Berlin’s organized crime syndicates, he illustrated the connections between Communism and criminality that were likely to be forged at a time when the party based itself in the poor districts and ‘criminal quarters’ of Germany’s big cities. Together with the Communist Erwin Rückert, Hohler climbed the stairs to Wessel’s flat, while the others stood watch outside. As Wessel opened the door, Höhler opened fire. Wessel fell, badly wounded in the head, and lingered on in hospital for a few weeks before he finally died from his injury on 23 February.⁸²

When the Communists mounted a hurried propaganda campaign to depict Wessel as a pimp and Höhler’s deed as part of an underworld dispute unconnected with the Red Front-Fighters’ League, Goebbels went into overdrive to present him as a political martyr. He interviewed Wessel’s mother, and extracted from her a portrait of her son as an idealist who had rescued his girlfriend from a life of prostitution and sacrificed himself out of missionary zeal for the cause of the Fatherland. The Communists, by contrast, Goebbels trumpeted, had shown their true colours by enrolling a common criminal like Höhler in their ranks. Wessel was hardly cold in his grave before Goebbels began work on blowing his memory up into a full-scale cult. Innumerable articles in the Nazi press all over the country praised him as a ‘martyr for the Third Reich’. A solemn funeral procession was staged - it would have been much bigger but for police restrictions on its size—and watched, so Goebbels claimed, by up to 30,000 people lining the streets on the way to the church. Chants, attacks and attempts at disruption by the Red Front-Fighters’ League led to wild and violent scenes on the fringes of the ceremony. At the graveside, while Goring, Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia and various other dignitaries looked on, Goebbels praised Wessel in terms that deliberately recalled Christ’s sacrifice for humankind - ‘Through sacrifice to redemption’. ‘Wherever Germany is,’ he declared, ‘you are there too, Horst Wessel!’ Then a choir of stormtroopers sang some verses that Wessel himself had written a few months earlier:

The flag’s held high! The ranks are tightly closed!
SA men march with firm courageous tread.
Together with us, marching in our ranks in spirit, are those
Comrades Red Front and Reaction shot dead!

Clear the streets for the brown battalions,
Clear the streets for the Storm Division man!
The swastika’s already gazed on full of hope by millions.
The day for freedom and bread is at hand!

The last time now there sounds the call to meet!
For struggle we are standing all prepared at last!
Soon Hitler flags will flutter over every street.
Our servitude will very soon be past!⁸³

The song had already gained some currency in the movement, but Goebbels now publicized it far and wide, prophesying that it would soon be sung by schoolchildren, workers, soldiers, everyone. He was right. Before the year was over, it had been published, issued on a gramophone record and turned into the official anthem of the Nazi Party. After 1933 it became in effect the national battle hymn of the Third Reich, alongside the old-established Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles (‘Germany, Germany before all’).⁸⁴ Wessel became the object of something like a secular religious cult propagated by the Nazis, celebrated in film, and commemorated in countless ceremonies, memorials and sites of pilgrimage.

That such an open celebration of brutal physical force could become the battle hymn of the Nazi Party speaks volumes for the central role that violence played in its quest for power. Cynically exploited for publicity purposes by manipulative propagandists like Goebbels, it became a way of life for the ordinary young brownshirt like Wessel, as it was for the young unemployed workers of the Red Front-Fighters’ League. Other songs were more explicit still, such as the popular ‘Song of the Storm Columns’, which was chanted by marching brownshirts on the streets of Berlin from 1928 onwards:

We are the Storm Columns, we put ourselves about,
We are the foremost ranks, courageous in a fight.
With sweating brows from work, our stomachs without food!
Our calloused, sooty hands our rifles firmly hold.

So stand the Storm Columns, for racial fight prepared.
Only when Jews bleed, are we liberated.
No more negotiation; it’s no help, not even slight:
Beside our Adolf Hitler we’re courageous in a fight.

Long live our Adolf Hitler! We’re already marching on.
We’re storming in the name of German revolution.
Leap onto the barricades! Defeat us only death can.
We’re Storm Columns of Hitler’s dictatorship of one man.⁸⁵

This kind of aggression found its outlet in constant clashes with rival paramilitaries on the streets. In the middle period of the Republic, beginning in 1924, all sides did indeed draw back from political violence on the scale of the January uprising of 1919, the Ruhr civil war of 1920 or the multiple conflicts of 1923, but if they put away their machine guns, it was only to replace them with rubber truncheons and knuckledusters. Even in the relatively stable years of 1924-9, it was claimed that 29 Nazi activists had been killed by Communists, while the Communists themselves reported that 92 ‘workers’ had been killed in clashes with ‘fascists’ from 1924 to 1930. Twenty-six members of the Steel Helmets were said to have fallen in the fight against Communism and 18 members of the Reichsbanner in various incidents of political violence from 1924 to 1928.⁸⁶ These were only the most serious consequences of the continual fighting between rival paramilitary groups; the same sources counted injuries sustained in the battles in the thousands, many of them more serious than mere bruises or broken bones.

In 1930 the figures rose dramatically, with the Nazis claiming to have suffered 17 deaths, rising to 42 in 1931 and 84 in 1932. In 1932, too, the Nazis reported that nearly ten thousand of their rank-and-file had been wounded in clashes with their opponents. The Communists reported 44 deaths in fights with the Nazis in 1930, 52 in 1931 and 75 in the first six months of 1932 alone, while over 50 Reichsbanner men died in battles with the Nazis on the streets from 1929 to 1933.⁸⁷ Official sources broadly corroborated these claims, with one estimate in the Reichstag, not disputed by anybody, putting the number of dead in the year to March 1931 at no fewer than 300.⁸⁸ The Communists played their part with as much vigour as the Nazis. When the sailor Richard Krebs, leader of a detachment of a hundred members of the Red Front-Fighters’ League, was instructed to break up a Nazi meeting in Bremen addressed by Hermann Göring, for instance, he made sure that ‘each man was armed with a blackjack or brass knuckles’. When he rose to speak, Goring ordered him to be thrown out after he had said only a few words; the brownshirts lining the hall rushed to the centre, and:

A terrifying mêlée followed. Blackjacks, brass knuckles, clubs, heavy buckled belts, glasses and bottles were the weapons used. Pieces of glass and chairs hurtled over the heads of the audience. Men from both sides broke off chair legs and used them as bludgeons. Women fainted in the crash and scream of battle. Already dozens of heads and faces were bleeding, clothes were torn as the fighters dodged about amid masses of terrified but helpless spectators. The troopers fought like lions. Systematically they pressed us towards the main exit. The band struck up a martial tune. Hermann Goring stood calmly on the stage, his fists on his hips.⁸⁹

Scenes like this were being played out all over Germany in the early 1930s. Violence was particularly severe at election-time; of the 155 killed in political clashes in Prussia in the course of 1932, no fewer than 105 died in the election months of June and July, and the police counted 461 political riots with 400 injuries and 82 deaths in the first seven weeks of the campaign.⁹⁰ The task of curbing political violence was not helped by the fact that the political parties most heavily implicated got together at intervals and agreed on an amnesty for political prisoners, thus releasing them from prison to engage in a fresh round of beatings and killings. The last such amnesty came into effect on 20 January 1933.⁹¹