Horst Wessel

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Horst Wessel, portrait photo ( Heinrich Hoffmann , 1929)

Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel (born October 9, 1907 in Bielefeld , † February 23, 1930 in Berlin ) was a storm leader of the SA , the paramilitary fighting organization of the NSDAP , in Berlin . After Wessel was killed by KPD members , Nazi propaganda stylized him as a “ martyr of the movement ”.

Wessel was the author of the Horst Wessel song , which shortly after his death became the party anthem of the NSDAP. From 1933 to 1945 it formed the second part of the German national anthem following the Deutschlandlied .

Life

origin

Wessel as a member of the Corps Normannia Berlin (before 1929)

Horst Wessel grew up in a parsonage as the son of the Protestant pastor Wilhelm Ludwig Georg Wessel (1879-1922) and his wife Margarete Wessel (1881 or 1882-1970). His father worked from 1906 to 1908 at the Bielefeld Pauluskirche and from 1913 at the historically important Berlin Nikolaikirche . Even after the November Revolution of 1918, Wessel's parents always remained imperial. The marriage later had two more children: the daughter Ingeborg Wessel (1909–1993) and the son Werner Wessel (1910–1929).

School time and studies

Wessel attended four different high schools in Berlin: from 1914 to 1922 the Kölln high school (up to Untersekunda ), then for a short time the Königstädtische grammar school and the Protestant grammar school for the gray monastery . He spent the last two and a half years of school at the Luisenstädtisches Gymnasium . There he passed his Abitur in the spring of 1926.

From 1922 to 1925 he was a member of the Bismarck Youth, the youth organization of the right-wing conservative DNVP . Already here Wessel belonged to a group that hunted communist and social democratic young people as "Rollkommando Friedrichshain". In the spring of 1924 he took part in a several-week training course of the Black Reichswehr and since then - until these were banned in May 1926 - he was a member of two paramilitary organizations: the Wikingbund and the "sports club" Olympia .

From 1926 he studied four semesters of Law and in 1928 a member of the Corps Normannia Berlin and Alemannia Vienna . In the same year he gave up his studies and worked, among other things, as a taxi driver and shipper in the subway construction.

Leading figure of the Berlin SA

Wessel at the head of his SA storm, Nuremberg 1929

Wessel joined the NSDAP and the SA in 1926 and rose to a leading figure in the Berlin SA until 1928. He acted for some time in SA-Sturm 2 ( Prenzlauer Berg ) and in the spring of 1929 took over Sturm 5 in the working-class district of Friedrichshain , a distinct stronghold of the KPD .

Sturm 5 was regarded as a particularly “brutal group of thugs”, but - at that time only 30 men strong - did not dare to enter most of the streets in the district. Wessel attracted attention here several times because he was in SA uniform - accompanied by SA men in civilian clothes - cycling down the main streets. Provocative “marches” of his storm were accompanied by police officers. From his sponsor Joseph Goebbels he received special permission to build a shawm chapel, although this was a purely communist tradition until then. He then caused confusion with his shawm band.

In 1929 Wessel first published his poem “Die Fahne hoch, die Linien sich!” (Later changed to: tightly closed ) in the National Socialist magazine The Attack , which later became the Horst Wessel song with the melody of a seafarer 's song .

death

The police investigations and the subsequent criminal proceedings showed: Horst Wessel was visited on January 14, 1930 by Albrecht Höhler , an active member of the KPD , and other members of a substitute organization of the then banned Red Front Fighters' Union in his apartment at Grosse Frankfurter Strasse 62, where Albrecht Höhler shot Horst Wessel in the head when opening the door.

The trial observer for the Vossische Zeitung , Moritz Goldstein , reported that the defendants in the trial alleged that Wessel or his SA comrade Richard Fiedler, who had arrived later, had received first aid from the "rushed" Jewish doctor Dr. Max Selo refused. So it took over an hour before another doctor came and Wessel could be transported to the hospital. This was vigorously denied in the process by his then partner Erna Jaenichen . The historian Daniel Siemens considers the portrayal of the accused “not very likely”. At 10:15 p.m., about 15 minutes after the attack, one of the witnesses called the NSDAP district headquarters. At 10:30 p.m., an ambulance alerted there arrived and took Wessel to the municipal hospital in Friedrichshain , where an emergency operation that lasted from 10:50 p.m. to 0:45 a.m. saved his life. Wessel died there on February 23 of blood poisoning .

Question of guilt

Horst Wessels buried in Berlin, 1930

The KPD denied any guilt for the killing of Wessel and stated that it was a private dispute between the landlady Elisabeth Salm and the former prostitute Erna Jaenichen, with whom Wessel lived in her apartment. The party also spread the rumor that Horst Wessel got caught in a shootout between two gangs of pimps and was hit.

The deceased husband of the landlady Salm had been an active member of the KPD, and so the landlady turned to her husband's party friends with the request for solid support in the dispute with the friend of the avowed National Socialist Wessel. An act of retaliation by the communists against Wessel - because on the same day Camillo Roß, a 17-year-old young communist, was shot by SA men and Wessel, as the SA leader, was one of the better-known people of the local NSDAP - may have played a role.

Albrecht Höhler and his accomplices were arrested shortly after the crime. Höhler was sentenced to six years and one month in prison for manslaughter. Another two people involved received prison sentences, ten defendants received prison sentences. The Red Aid supported the defendants in their defense, Elisabeth Salm, for example, was defended by KPD lawyer Hilde Benjamin , but the KPD distanced itself from them. After Hitler came to power, some high-ranking SA members and at least one Gestapo officer murdered Höhler during a fake prison transport in September 1933. Two other people involved, Sally Epstein and Hans Ziegler , were sentenced to death in another trial in 1934 and executed in 1935 .

Stylization as a martyr

Horst Wessels buried in Berlin, 1930
SA standard "Horst Wessel" (1933)

The NSDAP used Wessel's death for propaganda purposes : he was stylized as a “ martyr of the movement ” . After the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Berlin district of Friedrichshain was renamed “Horst-Wessel-Stadt” (from 1936 “Horst-Wessel”) and carried this “ NS honorary title ” until 1945. The hospital on the edge of the Friedrichshain park , in which Wessel died, was named "Horst Wessel Hospital". Bülowplatz (today Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz ) in Berlin-Mitte was renamed “Horst-Wessel-Platz”, which is why the local underground station “Schönhauser Tor” (today underground station Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz ) also received this name . The Volksbühne and today's Karl-Liebknecht-Haus also bore the name Wessels. Many other squares and streets in Germany were named after him, including today's August-Bebel-Straße in his native Bielefeld , where the Pauluskirche, where his father used to work, is located. A division of the Waffen SS , the 18th SS Volunteer Panzer Grenadier Division , was given the nickname "Horst Wessel" and on March 24, 1936, the Luftwaffe's 134th Jagdgeschwader 134 . On September 17, 1934, the Old Town boys' vocational school was opened as the "Horst Wessel School" in Dresden with great propaganda effort. As part of the blood-and-soil policy of the Nazis was a newly embanked Koog on the peninsula Eiderstedt with Horst Wessel Koog (today Norderheverkoog ) named. The second sail training ship of the Kriegsmarine was also named Horst Wessel (today: Eagle , United States Coast Guard ).

Apart from the fact that the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Goebbels , politicized the killing of Wessel as part of NSDAP propaganda and made him a National Socialist hero, the fate of the former student was described by the well-known writer Hanns Heinz Ewers in the novel Horst Wessel ( Stuttgart: Cotta, 1932). This was filmed in 1933, whereby the name of the protagonist was changed to Hans Westmar for legal reasons . Excerpts of this Nazi propaganda film that are in circulation, which show the alleged disruption of the funeral procession and the desecration of the coffin decorations by communists, are not authentic.

The song Der kleine Trompeter from 1925 was rewritten to Horst Wessel and became a battle song of the National Socialist movement.

In the Dachau concentration camp , prisoners had to erect a Horst Wessel memorial in 1933 and from then on had to pull their hats as they walked past. The inauguration took place on August 4, 1933: Röhm , Himmler , Heydrich , Hermann Esser , Hans Frank and Robert Wagner with entourage as well as a hundred of the police took part in the celebration.

dig

Former grave of Horst and Werner Wessel and their father in the St. Nikolai cemetery (2010)

The joint grave of Horst and Werner Wessels and their father was on the St. Marien and St. Nikolai Cemetery I in Berlin in the Prenzlauer Berg district . Soldiers of the Red Army leveled it in 1945 on the orders of the Soviet occupying forces , but left the part of the stone with the inscription for the father.

The site was the goal of individual or, from 1997 at the latest, collective hero worship by right-wing extremists, such as B. through free comradeships . In 2000, on the 70th anniversary of Horst Wessel's death, neo-Nazis wanted to carry out a demonstration including the laying of a wreath with 500 participants at the cemetery; the police forbade this. In 2002 a group called “Autonomous Gravedigger” dug up the supposed skull of Horst Wessel and threw it into the Spree . According to the police, digging was only superficial at the time; it seems doubtful that a skull was actually excavated. In September 2003, strangers rioted at the grave and knocked over tombstones. In June 2013, the cemetery management had the remains of the tombstone removed.

literature

Web links

Commons : Horst Wessel  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Daniel Siemens : Horst Wessel: Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist, Siedler Verlag, 2010, p. 11 [1]
  2. ↑ Landesarchiv Berlin: Digitized directory of names of the death register of the registry office Berlin VIII for the year 1930, p. 141: death register number 1930/414 .
  3. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Siedler, Munich 2009, pp. 46, 51.
  4. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Siedler, Munich 2009, pp. 47, 50.
  5. ↑ Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Siedler, Munich 2009, pp. 52, 55.
  6. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 7 , 461a; 131 , 187
  7. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Siedler, Munich 2009, p. 94.
  8. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Siedler, Munich 2009, p. 91.
  9. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Siedler, Munich 2009, p. 88.
  10. ↑ Heinz Knobloch: The poor Epstein, as well as The phenotypical Nazi: Horst Wessel Schalmeien and the struggle for Kiez bars from Johannes Willms Süddeutsche Zeitung May 17, 2010
  11. ^ National Socialist cult figure Horst Wessel "Lift him up, the dead" by Manfred Gailus Der Tagesspiegel September 26, 2013
  12. ↑ a b Heinz Knobloch: Poor Epstein: How death came to Horst Wessel. Berlin 1996, pp. 9-48.
  13. ↑ Bernd Kleinhans: Horst Wessel (1907–1930) on shoa.de. Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist . Munich 2009.
  14. ↑ a b Jay W. Baird: To Die for Germany. Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon. Bloomington (Ind.) 1990, pp. 80 ff.
  15. ↑ a b c Marianne Brentzel: The power woman. Hilde Benjamin 1902–1989. Berlin 1997, p. 38 ff.
  16. ↑ Heinz Knobloch: Poor Epstein: How death came to Horst Wessel. Berlin 1996, pp. 49-51
  17. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Siedler, Munich 2009, p. 23, there also references to the time information in the diary of the telephone exchange of the NSDAP Gauleitung and in the invoice for the rescue operation.
  18. ↑ Heinz Knobloch: Poor Epstein: How death came to Horst Wessel. Berlin 1996, pp. 63-65.
  19. ↑ so still in 1943 in: JO Reichenheim: Der Mythos Horst Wessel. In: Die Zeitung No. 347 v. October 29, 1943, p. 4 (facsimile in the ZVDD ).
  20. ↑ Heinz Knobloch: Poor Epstein: How death came to Horst Wessel. Berlin 1996, p. 106.
  21. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Siedler, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-88680-926-4 , pp. 211-225.
  22. ^ New trial for the murder of Horst Wessel. In: Völkischer Beobachter No. 857 BC. December 23, 1933; A new trial for the murder of Horst Wessel. In: Frankfurter Zeitung No. 883 v. December 23, 1933; Three murderers Horst Wessels before the jury. In: Völkischer Beobachter. No. 164 v. June 13, 1934 (facsimiles in the joint press archive of HWWA and IfW in the Central Library for Economics (ZBW), Neuer Jungfernstieg in Hamburg).
  23. ^ Atonement for the murder of Horst Wessel! In: Völkischer Beobachter. No. 168 v. June 17, 1934.
  24. ↑ Alleged Horst Wessel murderer executed.] In: Pariser Tageblatt. Volume 3, 1935, No. 485 (April 11, 1935), p. 2.).
  25. ↑ Heinz Knobloch: Poor Epstein: How death came to Horst Wessel. Berlin 1996, pp. 145-187.
  26. ^ History of the BSZ for Agriculture "Justus von Liebig"
  27. ^ History of the vocational school center for technology "Gustav Anton Zeuner" Dresden
  28. ^ Stanislav Zámečník: (Ed. Comité International de Dachau): That was Dachau. Luxemburg 2002, ISBN 2-87996-948-4 , p. 56.
  29. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Siedler, Munich 2009, p. 255
  30. ↑ a b Looking to the right : Theo Schneider: Right death cult. In: look to the right. August 8, 2013. Retrieved August 8, 2013 .
  31. ↑ Claudia Naujoks: Horst Wessel: "Martyrs of the Movement" headless in the grave? In: Zeit Online. February 24, 2009, accessed January 6, 2012 .
  32. ↑ Report berliner-kurier.de of August 30, 2013: Horst-Wessel-Grab leveled , information from the capital portal Berlin.de .
  33. ↑ See review by Jörn Retterath in H-Soz-u-Kult , May 5, 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Wessel, Horst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wessel, Horst Ludwig Georg Erich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SA storm leader and student of law
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Bielefeld
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1930
Place of death Berlin