The "" (), also known by its incipit "" (, ), was the anthem of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) from 1930 to 1945. From 1933 to 1945, the Nazis made it the co-national anthem of Germany, along with the first stanza of the "".
The "" has been banned in Germany and Austria since the end of World War II unless for artistic or educational purposes.
History
The lyrics to "Horst-Wessel-Lied" were written in 1929 by Sturmführer Horst Wessel, a commander of the Nazi paramilitary "Brownshirts" ( [SA]) in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin, Germany. Wessel wrote songs for the SA in conscious imitation of the Communist paramilitary, the Red Front Fighters' League, to provoke them into attacking his troops, and to keep up the spirits of his men.
Horst Wessel Wessel was the son of a pastor and educated at degree level, but was employed as a construction worker. He became notorious among the Communists when he led a number of SA attacks into the Fischerkiez, an extremely poor Berlin district, which he did on orders from Joseph Goebbels, who was then the Nazi Gauleiter (regional party leader) of Berlin. Several of these incursions were only minor altercations, but one took place outside the tavern which the local German Communist Party (KPD) used as its headquarters. As a result of that melee, five Communists were injured, four of them seriously. Communist newspapers accused the police of letting the Nazis get away while arresting the injured Communists, while Nazi newspapers claimed that Wessel had been trying to give a speech when Communists emerged and started the fight. Wessel's face was printed together with his address on Communist street posters. The slogan of the KPD and the Red Front Fighters' League became "strike the fascists wherever you find them".
Wessel moved with his partner Erna Jänicke into a room on Große Frankfurter Straße. The landlady was the widowed Mrs. Salm, whose husband had been a Communist. After a few months, there was a dispute between Salm and Wessel over unpaid rent. Salm requested Wessel's partner to leave but Jänicke refused. Salm appealed to Communist friends of her late husband for help. Shortly thereafter on 14 January 1930, Wessel was shot and seriously wounded by two Communist Party members, one of whom was Albrecht "Ali" Höhler. Wessel died in hospital on 23 February from blood poisoning, which he contracted during his hospitalisation. Höhler was tried in court and sentenced to six years' imprisonment for the shooting. After the Nazi accession to national power, he was taken out of prison under false pretenses by the SA in September 1933 and shot dead.
Nazi Party anthem Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Gauleiter and owner and editor of the newspaper Der Angriff ('The Attack'), had made several attempts to create Nazi martyrs for propaganda purposes, the first being an SA man named Hans-Georg Kütemeyer, whose body was pulled out of a canal the morning after he attended a speech by Hitler at the Sportpalast. Goebbels attempted to spin this into an assassination by Communists, but the overwhelming evidence showed it to have been suicide, and he had to drop the matter. Thus, Goebbels put considerable effort into mythologizing Wessel's story, even as the man lay dying. He met with Wessel's mother, who told him her son's life story, his hope for a "better world", and his attempt to rescue a prostitute he had met on the street. Goebbels saw Wessel as an "idealistic dreamer".
Wessel himself had undergone an operation at St. Joseph's Hospital which stopped his internal bleeding, but the surgeons had been unable to remove the bullet in his cerebellum. Wessel was brought to his mother's home to die. In his diary, Goebbels described Wessel's entire face as being shot up and his features distorted, and claimed that Wessel told him "One has to keep going! I'm happy!" After a period where his condition stabilized, Wessel died on 23 February.
Goebbels consulted Hermann Göring and others in the party on how to respond to Wessel's death. They declared a period of mourning until 12 March, during which party and SA members would avoid amusements and Wessel's name would be invoked at all party meetings. Wessel's unit was renamed the Horst Wessel Storm Unit 5.
From a mixture of fact and fiction, Goebbels' propaganda created what became one of the Nazi Party's central martyr-figures of their movement. He officially declared Wessel's march, renamed as the "" ("Horst Wessel Song"), to be the Nazi Party anthem, which aided in promoting Wessel as the first of many in the Nazi cult of martyrdom. Wessel was buried on 1 March 1930. Contrary to Nazi claims, there were no attacks on the funeral procession. His funeral was filmed and turned into a major propaganda event by the NSDAP. The "Horst Wessel Song" was sung by the SA at the funeral, and was thereafter extensively used at party functions, as well as sung by the SA during street parades.
According to Austrian historian Oliver Rathkolb, the song was created as a counterweight to the socialist song The Internationale.
Co-national anthem After Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the "Horst Wessel Song" became a national symbol by law on 19 May 1933. The following year, a regulation required the right arm be extended and raised in the "Nazi salute" when the (identical) first and fourth verses were sung. Nazi leaders can be seen singing the song at the finale of Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 film Triumph of the Will. Hitler also mandated the tempo at which the song had to be played. Following Hitler's public speeches, he would exit during the playing of both the national anthem and then the Horst Wessel Song.
Some Nazis were extremely sensitive about the uses to which the "Horst Wessel Song" was put. For instance, a bandleader who wrote a jazz version of the song was forced to leave Germany, and when Martha Dodd, the daughter of William E. Dodd, at the time the US ambassador to Germany, played a recording of an unusual arrangement of the song at her birthday party at the Ambassador's residence in 1933, a young Nazi, who was a liaison between the German Foreign Ministry and Hitler's Chancellery, turned off the record player, announcing "This is not the sort of music to be played for mixed gatherings and in a flippant manner."Larson, Erik (2011) In the Garden of Beasts New York: Broadway Paperbacks pp. 146–47; 396 n.147 citing Dodd, Martha (1939) Through Embassy Eyes New York: Harcourt Brace, p. 67, and Kater, Michael H. (February 1989) "Forbidden Fruit? Jazz in the Third Reich", The American Historical Review v. 94 no. 1, p. 23. The song was played in some Protestant places of worship, because some elements of the Protestant Church in Germany had accepted the Horst Wessel cult, built as it was by Goebbels on the model of Christian martyrs of the past.
Post-World War II With the end of the Nazi regime in May 1945, the "Horst Wessel Song" was banned. The lyrics and tune are now illegal in Germany, with some limited exceptions. In early 2011, this resulted in a Lower Saxony State Police investigation of Amazon.com and Apple Inc. for offering the song for sale on their websites. Both Apple and Amazon complied with the government's request and deleted the song from their offerings."LKA ermittelt gegen Apple und Amazon" , Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 February 2011
A special marine commando unit within the Chilean Navy uses the same melody as the Horst-Wessel-Lied with different lyrics called "Himno de la Agrupación de Comandos IM no. 51".
Lyrics The words to the "Horst Wessel Song" were published in September 1929 in the Nazi Party's Berlin newspaper, Der Angriff ('The Attack') which Joseph Goebbels owned and ran.
German originalEnglish translationLepage, Jean-Denis (2016) Hitler's Stormtroopers: The SA, The Nazis' Brownshirts, 1922–1945. Frontline Books. pp. 57–58 Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen! SA marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt. 𝄆 Kam'raden, die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen, Marschier'n im Geist in unser'n Reihen mit.𝄇
Die Straße frei den braunen Bataillonen. Die Straße frei dem Sturmabteilungsmann! 𝄆Es schau'n aufs Hakenkreuz voll Hoffnung schon Millionen. Der Tag für Freiheit und für Brot bricht an!𝄇
Zum letzten Mal wird Sturmalarm geblasen! Zum Kampfe steh'n wir alle schon bereit! 𝄆Schon flattern Hitlerfahnen über allen Straßen. Die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit!𝄇Raise the flag! The ranks tightly closed! The SA marches with calm, steady step. Comrades shot by the Red Front and reactionaries March in spirit within our ranks.
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!
For the last time, the call to arms is sounded! For the fight, we all stand prepared! Already Hitler's banners fly over all streets. The time of bondage will last but a little while now!
The Rotfront, or "Red Front", was the Rotfrontkämpferbund, the paramilitary organization of the Communist Party of Germany. The Nazi SA (also known as the "brown shirts" after their uniforms) and the Communist Red Front fought each other in violent street confrontations, which grew into almost open warfare after 1930. The "reactionaries" were the conservative political parties and the liberal democratic German government of the Weimar Republic period, which made several unsuccessful attempts to suppress the SA. The "time of bondage" refers to the period after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, in which the victorious powers imposed huge reparations on Germany, stripped it of its colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean, some of which became League of Nations mandates, gave parts of Germany to Belgium, Denmark, France, Poland, and Lithuania, and occupied the Rhineland.
The line is technically ambiguous. It could either mean Kameraden, die von Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen wurden ("Our comrades who were shot dead by the Red Front and Reactionaries") or Kameraden, welche die Erschießung von Rotfront und Reaktion durchführten ("Our comrades who have shot the Red Front and Reactionaries dead"). Despite this obvious syntactic problem, which was mentioned by Victor Klemperer in his LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii, the line was never changed. The following line (March in spirit within our ranks), however, indicates that the aforementioned comrades are deceased, advocating the first interpretation.
Some changes were made to the lyrics following Wessel's death:
Stanza 1, line 2 SA marschiert mit mutig-festem Schritt SA marschiert mit ruhig festem SchrittThe storm battalion march with bold, firm step. The stormtroopers march with calm, firm step.Stanza 3, line 1 Zum letzten Mal wird nun Appell geblasen! Zum letzten Mal wird Sturmalarm geblasen!The call is sounded for the last time! The last sound to charge is blown!Stanza 3, line 3 Bald flattern Hitlerfahnen über Barrikaden Schon/bald flattern Hitler-Fahnen über allen StraßenSoon Hitler's banners will flutter above the barricades Already/Soon Hitler's banners will flutter above all streets
Following Wessel's death, new stanzas were added, composed in his honour. These were frequently sung by the SA but did not become part of the official lyrics used on party or state occasions.
Receive our salute; you died an honorable death! Horst Wessel fell, but thousands newly arise The anthem roars ahead of the brown army The storm divisions are ready to follow his path.
The flags are lowered before the dead who still live The storm division swears, with hand clenched in a fist, That the day will come for revenge, no forgiveness, When Heil and Sieg will ring through the fatherland.
Melody