#Soldatenlieder lyrics english how to#

#Soldatenlieder lyrics english how to#

Goebbels consulted Hermann Göring and others in the party on how to respond to Wessel's death. 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. Wessel was brought to his mother's home to die. Joseph's Hospital which stopped his internal bleeding, but the surgeons had been unable to remove the bullet in his cerebellum. Wessel himself had undergone an operation at St. Goebbels saw Wessel as an 'idealistic dreamer'. 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. Thus, Goebbels put considerable effort into mythologizing Wessel's story, even as the man lay dying. 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. 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. He was taken out of prison under false pretenses by the SA and shot dead three years later, after the Nazi accession to national power in 1933. Höhler was tried in court and sentenced to six years' imprisonment for the shooting. Wessel died in hospital on 23 February from blood poisoning, which he contracted during his hospitalisation. Shortly thereafter on 14 January 1930, Wessel was shot and seriously wounded by two Communist Party members, one of whom was Albrecht 'Ali' Höhler. Salm appealed to Communist friends of her late husband for help. Salm requested Wessel's partner to leave but Jänicke refused. After a few months there was a dispute between Salm and Wessel over unpaid rent. The landlady was the widowed Mrs Salm, whose husband had been a Communist. Wessel moved with his partner Erna Jänicke into a room on Große Frankfurter Straße. The slogan of the KPD and the Red Front Fighters' League became 'strike the fascists wherever you find them.' Wessel's face was printed together with his address on Communist street posters. 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. As a result of that melee, five Communists were injured, four of them seriously. 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.

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. Wessel was the son of a pastor and educated at degree level, but was employed as a construction worker. 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. The lyrics to 'Horst-Wessel-Lied' were written in 1929 by Sturmführer Horst Wessel, the commander of the Nazi paramilitary 'Brownshirts' ( Sturmabteilung or 'SA') in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin. Horst Wessel, credited as writing the lyrics of the 'Horst Wessel Song'