“Clever and persistent use of propaganda can make a nation believe that heaven is hell and, conversely, that the most miserable life is paradise.”
– Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925)
“The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination. It will be the task of some future generation to establish the reasons for this disgraceful capitulation.”
– Joseph Roth (1894-1939)
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In 1930, Friedrichshain—an impoverished, bohemian quarter in eastern Berlin dominated by Communist influence—stood as a squalid neighborhood filled with red-light districts, cheap taverns, and overcrowded tenements; violence was a frequent backdrop to daily life. On the night of January 14, after a few drinks, two young men clashed violently, an incident that reflected the rough nature of the area at the time. One of them was Horst Wessel, a twenty-one-year-old Nazi stormtrooper, the son of a Protestant military chaplain, who had left home and his university studies to live with a young prostitute, Erna Jaenichen. The other man, Albrecht Hohler, thirty, was a Communist member of the Red Front Fighters, known locally as a brutal thug—a petty criminal who had only recently been released from jail.
Despite their political differences, both men earned a precarious living in the same line of work: they were pimps. Yet their confrontation sprang from personal quarrels rather than political or financial tensions. Wessel was behind on rent for the room he shared with Jaenichen on Grosse Frankfurter Strasse (today part of Karl Marx Allee in Berlin Mitte). Hohler knew the room’s landlady, Elizabeth Salm, and had promised to cause Wessel to settle his arrears. When they met around 10 p.m. in the rented space, Wessel refused to hand over the money. According to Hohler’s later testimony to the police, they began fighting; both were armed, but Hohler managed to seize Wessel’s pistol and shoot him in the stomach. Wessel was transported to a hospital, and Hohler was arrested a few days later.
Goebbels knew the value of fake news and was an expert in manufacturing it.
At first glance it was not the stuff of heroic legends. Yet as soon as Goebbels heard the tale, he recognized the propaganda potential it offered. He understood how crucial a martyr could be to the Nazis, and since assuming control of the party’s Berlin branch, he had been searching for a young man whom he could sculpt into a hero who would die for the cause. He chose Wessel and crafted a whole biographical story around him as a “martyr for truth”—conveniently omitting his occupation.
Wessel lingered in hospital for six weeks before dying of sepsis on February 23. In Der Angriff, Goebbels released daily condition reports from the bedside, insisting the death was a murder and an act of terrorism carried out by a “subhuman Communist,” together with another unnamed Leftist accomplice who was never charged. Tales were invented about Wessel’s charitable deeds and his faithful membership in various SA groups. Goebbels even interviewed Wessel’s grieving mother and described Jaenichen and Wessel as childhood sweethearts, as if their story belonged to a romance novel. A diary entry from that period reveals his cold cynicism: “It’s like a Dostoyevsky novel: the fool, the worker, the harlot, the bourgeois family, endless remorse, endless agony, etc.”
Goebbels organized a grand funeral for the “new martyr of the Third Reich,” filmed in a way that exaggerated attendance. He asserted that 30,000 people had shown up, while the actual number was closer to 3,000. A full-page obituary in Der Angriff, written by the Gauleiter himself, was steeped in Christian and Nazi symbolism. It portrayed Wessel as “a man who calls out through his deeds…One man must set an example and offer himself up as a sacrifice…Well he was that man.” On the front page appeared the words of “The Horst Wessel Song,” which would become the Nazis’ official anthem—or, as a satirist put it, “the battle hymn of the anti-republic”:
Oh, raise the flag and close your ranks up tight!
SA men march with bold, determined tread.
Comrades felled by Reds and Ultras in the fight
March ahead by our side, in spirit never dead.
Goebbels knew the value of fake news and was an expert in manufacturing it. He organized, and filmed, staged demonstrations by young Nazis posing as opponents and seeded reports in other papers denouncing Leftists who refused to let “peaceful National Socialists” bury their dead without disruption. Other right-wing outlets carried similar stories, and soon after Wessel’s funeral, foreign diplomats began to voice concern about Germany’s economic distress and the rise of fascism. “No one has any money, the price of bread is not falling, unemployment remains high,” reported the British Ambassador, Sir Horace Rumbold, to the Foreign Office in London. “People see little hope for themselves this winter, and Bruning’s government appears unable to steady the situation.”
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The Communists used spectacle as well, marching under banners and seeking martyrs for their cause with the same ruthlessness and cynicism as the Nazis. They boasted a few hardheaded cynics among them, but no one in the KPD possessed Goebbels’s level of propaganda craft. The KPD gained strength during the Depression as well: the jobless joined in large numbers, and by the summer of 1932, districts such as Hamburg’s poorer areas and the “Red Wedding” zone in Berlin saw only about one in ten known Communists employed. Across Germany, three-quarters of new KPD members were without work. The party’s vote total rose in the 1930 elections to over 4.5 million, just shy of the Nazi tally. The KPD was the dominant political force in Berlin and Hamburg but remained unacceptable to most of the nation, including the middle class and much of the educated class.
During the Depression, the KPD staged almost daily demonstrations and “hunger marches.” They frequently ended in clashes with the Brownshirts, the police, and occasionally both sides. The growing rift between the KPD and the SPD widened as the years passed. The martyrdom of Luxemburg and Liebknecht served as a symbol at nearly every KPD rally. Young Communists, often armed, gathered at the Lustgarten, a grassy space near the former Royal Palace (modernly called Museum Park). “The Soviet standard is saluted with reverence. Long processions proceed here from every corner of the city, led by peculiar instruments: trumpets with many bells, jazz tubas, African drums,” wrote Franz Hessel. “These fighters are uniformed just as those they seek to displace, and the grey shirts and brown tunics are belt-fastened in military fashion. The processions are coordinated by the red armbands of their leader.” The Red Front Fighters’ League and its successor, the Combat League Against Fascism, matched the SA in passion, though they were far less numerous and lacked substantial combat training; at least some Nazis had prior experience with Freikorps units.
The most important struggle in German politics was not between the Nazis and the KPD, but between the socialists and the Communists.
Yet the real failure of the KPD lay in its ideology. It adopted a malleable stance that followed successive Kremlin directives after about 1929, effectively siding with whatever Stalin dictated. For German Communists, the SPD were labeled “social fascists” and deemed as dangerous as the Nazis, if not more so—“because if the Nazis happen to win power, they cannot hold it, and then our moment will arrive,” argued Die Rote Fahne in December 1932. Occasionally there were mentions of an “anti-fascist front” with the SPD, but neither side truly meant it. Their factions fought one another mercilessly on the streets. The most significant political struggle in Germany was not between the Nazis and the KPD, but between socialists and Communists.
Until the end, the Communists relentlessly attacked the SPD as the “gravediggers of socialism.” The Soviet Politburo issued a directive in February 1928, reaffirmed to its German client party, the KPD, in the summer of 1932, that “the principal enemy of the workers’ movement in Germany remains the Social Democratic Party.” Members of the party’s armed wing were required to pledge—“I promise at all times to fight unceasingly for the Soviet Union and the victorious world revolution, and to always be a pioneer of irreconcilable class hatred within all proletarian mass organizations, trade unions and the workplace.” Despite the misery at the bottom and the rapidly rising popularity of the Nazis, the socialists and Communists, for their own reasons, never found a way to cooperate—or even to halt their street clashes. A fatal error, as it left the Far Right free to manipulate the situation to its advantage.
In the eyes of most Germans—including many in the moderate Left—the KPD looked like the agent of a foreign power, the Soviet Union. The party could endure only with help from Moscow. It relied on meager subscriptions as much of its base was unemployed from early 1930 onward, and it received little support from wealthy backers—the notable exception being Willi Munzenberg. Yet the KPD employed more than 200 full-time staff and ran twenty-seven party newspapers nationwide, all financed by Moscow and routed through various Russian trading firms. It also held a stockpile of weapons provided by the Soviets. The Comintern’s agitprop apparatus ran a number of “front” organizations—Peace Aid, the Anti-Fascist League, and others—alongside the formal Far Left factions like International Workers’ Aid, Red Aid, and the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition.
For the middle class and liberal center, the Communists were seen as terrorists and a more immediate threat to the state than the Nazis. KPD paramilitaries repeatedly attacked police, killing eleven and wounding 1,153 in Prussia during the winter of 1930–1931, largely through rooftop snipers targeting officers below. One strike, on August 9, 1931, drew widespread attention when two senior police detectives were murdered and three others injured outside the Babylon Cinema in Bulowplatz. The assassination was reportedly ordered by Walter Ulbricht, the Berlin Communist Party chief, a claim that was widely circulated at the time and later denied. KPD support fell in its wake, even in the so-called “Red” Berlin.
The Nazis killed Communists, socialists, liberals, and Jews, but they were careful not to attack the police, state militias, or “organs of the state.” They were determined to present themselves as the guardians of law and order and avoided provoking the middle classes, whose support they needed—the people who could believe that the violence and chaos came solely from the Left.
The Nazis, in particular, did not want any direct clash with the military or to appear to be plotting a coup or armed insurrection. This is why Hitler took the Ulm affair extremely seriously. In October 1930, a month after the Nazis’ electoral surge, three junior officers were charged with violating the rule against soldiers joining political parties or campaigning openly for them. The trio had been traveling the country, recruiting fellow officers and other ranks to join the NSDAP and circulating party literature. The army protested because it feared any hint of close ties with the Nazis would tarnish the Reichswehr’s reputation. The state prosecutors pursued the case. Richard Scheringer, Friedrich Wendt, and Hans Ludin were ultimately charged with the grave offense of “Preparing to Commit High Treason,” and were accused of being in the early stages of planning a coup. A ten-day trial in Leipzig followed. Hitler appeared as a witness and claimed he did not know the three lieutenants, that he had no involvement in their actions, and that the party had operated legally since 1923. He added a warning: “When our Party emerges victorious—by legal means—a new Supreme Court will replace this one…and the criminals of November 1918 will find their reward. Then heads will roll.”
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From Weimar Germany: The Death of a Democracy by Victor Sebestyen. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Victor Sebestyen.
