Horst Wessel (9 October 1907-23 February 1930) was a German Sturmabteilung (SA) assault leader whose murder by communists in 1930 made him a martyr for the Nazi cause.
Biography[]
Horst Wessel was born in Bielefeld, Westphalia, German Empire in 1907. He became a student at Friedrich Wilhelm University in 1926, and he actively supported the DNVP before joining the Viking League in 1923 and leading far-right youths in street battles with young SPD and KPD supporters. In 1926, he joined the NSDAP's Sturmabteilung paramilitary along with two-thirds of his Viking League comrades, and Joseph Goebbels mentored Wessel and sent him to recruit local youths into NSDAP cells in Berlin, modeled after the KPD's cell structure. Wessel rose to be an SA district leader, but he entered into a relationship with a 23-year-old ex-prostitute, Erna Jänicke. When Wessel resisted the landlady's attempts to evict the prostitute, the landlady persuaded her late husband's communist associates, including the pimp Albrecht Hoehler, to remove the two from the apartment. On 23 February 1930, Hoehler and Erwin Ruckert knocked on Wessel's door, and Wessel, expecting the men to be from the SA, opened the door, enabling the two communists to shoot him dead. Goebbels turned Wessel into a martyr for the Nazi cause, and the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" was adopted as a co-national anthem of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.
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