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The Making of a Nazi Hero: The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel. By Daniel Siemens. Translated by David Burnett. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Pp. xii + 316. Cloth $28.00. ISBN 978-1780760773.
The name Horst Wessel is well known to historians of the Third Reich, but as Daniel Siemens explains, it is the myth rather than the man that has been often passed down in history. To remedy this situation, Siemens provides an exhaustive analysis of the various Horst Wessels of modern German history: the Nazi convert, the Nazi agitator, the murdered "martyr," and the postwar burden. In the process, the author offers answers to many of the major questions of the Nazi period: Why did young men join the Nazi party in the period before 1933? What was the relationship between political violence and propaganda as practiced by the Nazis and Communists in the years before the Nazi seizure of power in 1933? How and why did Wessel ascend to the pantheon of Nazi heroes? And what was the fate of the myth of Wessel in postwar Germany?
Siemens begins his investigation with the murder of Wessel in Berlin on January 14, 1930, a tale shrouded in many layers of mystery and propaganda. The Nazi narrative, honed by Joseph Goebbels, is that Wessel died at the hands of Communists who were keen on...