Horst-Wessel-Lied

The story

The "Horst-Wessel-Lied" was the anthem of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) from 1930 to 1945, and from 1933 to 1945 the Nazi regime made it Germany's second national anthem, sung after the first stanza of the "Deutschlandlied". Its words were written in 1929 by Horst Wessel, a Sturmführer of the party's paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA, the "Brownshirts") in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin, and were published in September 1929 in Der Angriff, the Berlin party newspaper owned and run by Joseph Goebbels. Wessel wrote songs for the SA in conscious imitation of the Communist Red Front Fighters' League, to provoke its members into attacking his men and to keep up their spirits. On Goebbels's orders he led SA attacks into the Fischerkiez, a very poor Berlin district; in one, outside the tavern the local Communist Party used as its headquarters, five Communists were injured, four seriously.

On 14 January 1930 Wessel was shot and seriously wounded at his lodgings by two Communist Party members, one of them Albrecht Höhler, after a dispute with his landlady over rent; he died on 23 February of blood poisoning. Höhler was sentenced to six years in prison; after the Nazis took power, the SA took him out of prison under false pretences in September 1933 and shot him dead. Goebbels, who had earlier tried and failed to present the suicide of an SA man as a Communist murder, built Wessel into the movement's central martyr from a mixture of fact and fiction. He declared Wessel's march, renamed the "Horst-Wessel-Lied", to be the party anthem. The SA sang it at Wessel's funeral on 1 March 1930, which the party filmed and turned into a major propaganda event, and afterwards at party functions and in street parades. The historian Oliver Rathkolb describes it as created as a counterweight to "The Internationale".

After Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, a law of 19 May 1933 made the song a national symbol. A regulation of the next year required the raised-arm Nazi salute while its first stanza was sung, and Hitler fixed the tempo at which it had to be played; Nazi leaders sing it at the close of Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will (1935). Officials policed its use: a bandleader who wrote a jazz version was forced to leave Germany, and in 1933 a young Nazi official switched off an unusual arrangement played at a party given by Martha Dodd, daughter of the US ambassador. Some Protestant churches that had accepted Goebbels's Wessel cult, modelled on Christian martyrs, played it in worship. Wessel was officially credited with the music too, though German critics pointed out before 1933 that the melody had a long history; after 1933 such criticism was taboo and risked severe punishment. Its most likely direct source is a First World War navy song, the "Königsberg-Lied"; in 1936 the critic Alfred Weidemann traced the tune to a song of 1865 by Peter Cornelius, who called it a Viennese folk tune.

Fascist movements elsewhere took up the tune in the 1930s and 1940s: the British Union of Fascists, the Spanish Falange, the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism in Vichy France, the All-Russian Fascist Organisation of émigrés in the United States and Finland's Lapua Movement and Patriotic People's Movement. Its opponents parodied it: before 1933 Communists and Social Democrats sang rival versions in their street battles with the SA, versions banned once those parties were prohibited; under the regime underground parodies mocked the corruption of Nazi leaders; Brecht and Eisler wrote the "Kälbermarsch" (Calves' March) for Brecht's play Schweik in the Second World War (1943); and Oliver Wallace's "Der Fuehrer's Face" for a 1942 Donald Duck cartoon was Spike Jones's first hit record.

With the end of the Nazi regime in May 1945 the song was banned. Its words and tune are illegal in Germany and in Austria today, except for artistic or educational purposes. In early 2011 a Lower Saxony police investigation led Amazon and Apple to remove it from their stores. Far-right groups still use it: in Croatia an adaptation is an unofficial anthem of several far-right movements, and in Greece the Golden Dawn party has sung it with Greek words at its gatherings. A unit of the Chilean Navy's marine commandos uses the melody with other words. Composers have quoted it to evoke the regime, among them Karlheinz Stockhausen in Hymnen (1967) and Lukas Foss in his Elegy for Anne Frank (1989).

What it says

A marching song of the Nazi SA, presenting the party's street fighters and its dead as a cause to follow; aggressive and martial.

The words

The words of this song are not printed here. They are in the public domain, but as a symbol of the Nazi regime the song is banned in Germany and Austria, outside teaching, research and the arts.