9 781780 760773

ISBN 978-1-78076-077-3

www.ibtauris.com

‘It has been years since I have read a bookdealing with the early Nazi years with as much

interest, excitement and admiration.’Robert M. Citino, Central European History

‘A brilliantly researched and highly readable account of the life and death of Horst Wessel, the largely forgotten creator

of the official anthem of National Socialism.’Thomas Weber, author of Hitler’s First War

‘In this masterful book, Daniel Siemens tells the grippingstory of how a small-time SA firebrand became a celebrated Nazi martyr. Beautifully written and assiduously researched,

Siemens provides a penetrating account of politicalradicalism and violence in the Weimar Republic, and ofterror, propaganda and popular mobilization in the Third

Reich. An outstanding work of history.’Nikolaus Wachsmann, Birkbeck, University of London

MAIN FRONT COVER IMAgE: Horst Wessel at the front of an SA Sturm unit at the 4th NSDAP Rally, August 1929, in Nuremburg. Photo: akg-images / ullstein bild

BACK COVER IMAgES: (left to right) Horst Wessel (right) and other young members of Berlin’s ‘Fischerzelle’ SA unit, 1927; A lorry with Nazi activists, 1928; SA propaganda tour with Wessel standing on the far left, 1929. Biblioteka Jagiellonska, Cracow

JACKET DESIgN: www.vaguelymemorable.com

Daniel Siemens is an historian of Modern Central Europe and DAAD Francis L. Carsten Lecturer in Modern german History at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SSEES), University College London. He is also a faculty member of the History Department at Bielefeld University. He contributes to various daily newspapers in germany, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt.

On 14 January 1930, Horst Wessel, a young and ambitious member of the SA, was shot point-blank at his home in Berlin. The crime was never completely solved, but the murder was most likely committed by a group of Communists with close ties to the city’s gangland. Wessel later died from his injuries. Joseph goebbels, who had already singled out Wessel as a possible Nazi leader, was the first to recognize the propaganda potential of the case. ‘A young martyr for the Third Reich’, he wrote in his diary on 23 February 1930 immediately after receiving the news of Wessel’s death. This was the beginning of the mythmaking that transformed an ordinary individual into a masculine role model for an entire generation. Two months later, thousands of people lined the streets for Wessel’s funeral parade and goebbels delivered a graveside eulogy. In the years that followed – and as Nazi power increased – Horst Wessel was turned into the hero of the Nazi movement, with his gravesite quickly becoming a site of pilgrimage. The song Die Fahne Hoch, whose lyrics Wessel had penned himself and which later became known as the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, was chosen as the Nazi Party anthem, and the Berlin district of Friedrichshain, where Wessel was murdered, was renamed Horst-Wessel-Stadt in his honour. Numerous biographies and a feature film followed.

Using previously unseen material, Daniel Siemens provides a fascinating and gripping account of the background to Horst Wessel’s murder, uncovering how and why the Nazis made him a political hero. He examines the Horst Wessel ‘cult’ which emerged in the aftermath of Wessel’s death and the murders of revenge, particularly of Communists, committed by the SA and gestapo after 1933. At the same time, the story of Horst Wessel provides a portrait of the Nazi propaganda machine at its most effective and chilling.

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moanh full cover circ 5.indd 1

Daniel Siemens is an historian of Modern Central Europe and DAAD Francis L. Carsten Lecturer in Modern German History at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SSEES), University College London. He is also a faculty member of the History Department at Bielefeld University. He contributes to various daily newspapers in Germany, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt.

Published in 2013 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU

175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Horst Wessel: Tod und Verklärung eines Nationalsozialisten by Daniel Siemens (copyright holder)

Copyright © 2009 by Siedler Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, Munich, Germany

English translation copyright © 2013 I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

The right of Daniel Siemens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78076 077 3

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Text design, eBook and typesetting by Tetragon Printed and bound in Sweden by ScandBook AB

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for

Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office,

the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements xi

Preface xiii

Part I: From Pastor's Son to Street Fighter 1

1 Murder in Friedrichshain 3

2 Father and Son 19

3 The Young National Socialist 41

4 The SA’s Battle of the Streets 65

5 The Culprits Flee 78

6 Traces to Nowhere 83

7 Sensation in the Criminal Court: 93

The First Horst Wessel Trial (1930)

Part II: The National Socialist Hero, 105

Profiteers and Victims (1930–1945)

8 Cult and Commerce 107

9 With God’s Blessing 126

10 A Hero for German Youth 135

11 Monuments in Stone and Iron 145

12 Exploiting the Myth 165

13 Literary Enlightenment 178

14 Revenge of the Nazis 185

15 Judicial Murder: 203

The Second Horst Wessel Trial (1934)

16 Time of Suffering 212

Part III: The Long Shadow of History (1945–2009) 227

17 Post-war Justice 229

18 ‘Burden Sharing’ 243

19 Belated Justice 247

Notes 251

Archives 295

Select Bibliography 301

Index 307

3

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 news-paper 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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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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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 umbrella-repair 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 appar-ently 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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and, as largely destitute night lodgers and subtenants, found themselves ‘vulnerable, at the mercy of their surroundings’, to use a common expres-sion 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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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 per-sonal 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 sym-pathizers of the KPD.22 Their lives were indicative of their social milieu.

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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, appar-ently 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 lat-ter’s child and possibly some other people were assembled. To the right was

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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

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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 criti-cally 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, con-sidering 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

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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 national-ist 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

Albrecht Höhler, police photo, 1929

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‘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 along-side 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 pro-moting 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

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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 stormtroop-ers 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 […] anti-social 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 essen-tially ‘fair game’. For Der Angriff it was a Communist assassination attempt

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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

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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 enlighten-ment 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

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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 estab-lished 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

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‘mob’ – ‘dehumanized humans’ – was gathering outside the cemetery walls, the mourners at Wessel’s grave were the symbol of the true national com-munity.73

The glorification of Wessel’s death and burial reached almost blasphe-mous 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.

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

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