Horst Wessel - Posthumous Fame

Posthumous Fame

Wessel was elevated by Goebbels' propaganda apparatus to the status of leading martyr of the Nazi movement. Goebbels himself began the process with his 17 February 1930 account of Wessel's death "Raise High the Flag!" Many of Goebbels's most effective propaganda speeches were made at gravesides, but Wessel received unusual attention among the many unremembered storm troopers.

Wessel was buried on 1 March in the Nikolaifriedhof, in Prenzlauer Allee. It was reported that 30,000 people lined the streets to see the funeral procession. Goebbels delivered the eulogy in the presence of Hermann Göring and Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, son of former emperor Wilhelm II, who had joined the SA. His story was spread over Germany; when Naumann, a student who worked for Goebbels, had attended the funeral and taken the train to Gorlitz, he found that everyone at a Nazi rally was speaking of Wessel, and when they discovered he had attended the burial, insisted on his taking the stage to tell them of it. In an editorial in the Völkischer Beobachter, Alfred Rosenberg wrote of how Wessel was not dead, but had joined a combat group that still struggled with them; afterwards, Nazis spoke of how a man who died in conflict had joined "Horst Wessel's combat group" or were "summoned to Horst Wessel's standard."

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, an elaborate memorial was erected over the grave, and it became the site of annual pilgrimages by the Nazis, at which the Horst Wessel Song was sung and speeches made.

Nazi propaganda glorified his life. The bimonthly Der Brunnen - Für deutsche Lebensart (Frithjof Fischer ed.) in its issue of 2 Jan 1934 declared: "How high Horst Wessel towers over that Jesus of Nazareth - that Jesus who pleaded that the bitter cup be taken from him. How unattainably high all Horst Wessels stand above Jesus!" Wessel was commemorated in memorials, books and films. Hanns Heinz Ewers wrote a novelistic biography of him.