Background
Horst Wessel was born in Bielefeld on 9 September 1907.
Horst Wessel was born in Bielefeld on 9 September 1907.
He joined the NSDAP in 1926 and composed the simple marching song known as the 'Horst Wessel Lied'. After his death this tune was raised to the status of a national anthem sung at public meetings and used as a musical background to the Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s.
The young storm trooper was killed in a brawl in Berlin on 23 February 1930 and the furore over his death was cleverly manipulated by Goebbels to swing public sympathy in favour of the Nazis and against their enemies on the Left. The unsavoury details of his life were suppressed - Wessel was in reality a cheap pimp - and he was transformed into the ascetic hero of innumerable Kampfzeit epics, film canonizations and commemorative cantatas by the Nazi propaganda machine.