With the killing of Charlie Kirk, followed immediately by blaming of the “radical left,” then by the canonization of the man himself by the right, I was reminded of something that happened in Germany in the pre-Nazi era, something we ought to take note of.

On February 23, 1930, a little-known member of the Nazi Stormtroopers named Horst Wessel was gunned down in the doorway of his home in Berlin.  Wessel was the son of parents who both came from Lutheran pastor families, raised, supposedly, in a highly conservative Christan environment.  It is also interesting to note that the part of Berlin Wessel was raised in was the Judenstrasse, the Jewish section of the city.  He was only 22 when he died, killed by a communist member, but he was soon to become much more than he was in life.  In 1930, Germany was still the battleground between, on the one hand, the Communist/Socialists, and on the other, the National Socialist Germany Workers’ Party, i.e., the Nazi party.  The country, it seems in retrospect, could have gone either way.

Horst Wessel was an active member of the storm troopers (SA) or brown shirts, thugs who roamed city streets in Germany beating up and intimidating anyone who disagreed with them, especially communists and Jews.  Because of several broken bones due to falls from horse-riding, Wessel wasn’t able to participate in the actual violence of the Brown Shirts.  Still he passionately promoted violence through his organizing and speaking abilities, and he felt the hunger for and the almost religious fervor of the Nazi vision.  He was to write in his journal that the Nazis were “a political awakening.”  He came to believe that Germany needed a national revival, one that was based on Germanic masculinity and ethnicity, and attained through the spiritual instruction of its members and their commitment to fighting like hell for it.  Wessel himself described that the final goal of the the Nazis was an “establishment of a national dictatorship.”

Goebbels was his intellectual and spiritual mentor.  Wessel said of his idol Goebbels, “the Party comrades clung to him with great devotion” and “they would have let [themselves] be cut to pieces for him.”1  He attended law school, but he believed that the study of law was for power only, that it wasn’t to be applied fairly; it was simply another means of gaining and sustaining Nazi supremacy.  Impressing the Nazi leaders, he was sent to Vienna to study Nazi tactics.  Returning to Berlin, he felt his mission was to recruit young men and to reorganize the Nazi party in Berlin.  Rising through the ranks of the SA, he quit school and devoted himself to the Nazi vision of full authoritarianism based on ethnic superiority and the suppression of anyone who disagreed with that vision. He impressed Goebbel for his ability to speak in the street, and Wessel gave some 56 speeches to Nazi gatherings in one year alone.2

But it was only because of his murder that he is known to us today.  Goebbels, the greatest propagandist of the era, seized upon his death in 1930 and mined it for all it was worth.   Goebbels had been waiting for a martyr to the Nazi cause and he finally had his man. His funeral was attended by tens of thousands, and he became a cause célèbre for Goebbels and the entire Nazi regime of thugs, racists, and liars.  A song, the Horst Wessel-lied, became the national anthem for the Nazi Party.  Here is the first stanza:

Clear the streets for the brown battalions,

Clear the streets for the storm division man!

Millions are looking upon the swastika full of hope,

The day of freedom and of bread dawns!

Goebbels also wrote a eulogy for Wessel in the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff:

A Christian Socialist! A man who calls out through his deeds: ‘Come to me, I shall redeem you!’ … A divine element works in him, making him the man he is and causing him to act in this way and no other. One man must set an example and offer himself up as a sacrifice! Well, then, I am ready.

Goebbels speaks in messianic language of Wessel, a savior offering redemption and salvation to Germans, when he was, in reality, little more than another street thug.  But his death and the way the Nazi regime seized on it turned that thug into a national martyr.

In our modern era of political violence, we must be very careful about making martyrs out of our enemies.

1,2, Wikipedia