Horst Wessel – the Nazi martyr – Rare publication issued in Warsaw following Nazi pogroms against Jews after the ...

Horst Wessel – the Nazi martyr – Rare publication issued in Warsaw following Nazi pogroms against Jews after the assassination of Horst Wessel

הארסט וועסעל דער נאצישער קדוש  - Horst Wessel – the Nazi Martyr, by Sh.Z. Wolf [Shmuel Wollman]. Warsaw, 1935 – Only edition. Yiddish. A rare publication issued in the midst of Nazi pogroms against Jews following the assassination of Nazi Party member Horst Wessel, and the accusation that Jewish communists were behind the murder. Extremely rare.

Wessel was a member of the Nazi Party in Germany who composed the song "Die Fahne hoch" ("The Flag on High"), which became the anthem of the Nazi Party. Born in 1907, he joined extreme right-wing groups at a young age. In 1926, Wessel began actively targeting opponents of the Nazi Party and organized attacks, especially against Jews. Having gained notoriety as a virulent antisemite, he became a close associate of Joseph Goebbels. His well-known song was written in 1929. The song, which glorified the Nazi SA (Stormtroopers), was published in the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff ("The Attack"). After his death in 1931, the song became the official anthem of the Nazi Party, and was sung alongside the national anthem “Deutschland über alles” at official events, with tens of thousands of Germans chanting lines such as: “When Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then we’ll be joyful and free.” Following World War II, as part of the denazification policy, the performance of the song was banned by law in Germany, under Sections 86 and 86a of the German Criminal Code. Wessel was killed in 1930 after a dispute with his landlady. She contacted communist operatives, who tracked him to his apartment and shot him dead. One of his assassins was Ali Höhler, a Jewish communist thug with underworld connections. Even before Wessel was buried, Goebbels began exploiting the incident to incite hatred against the Jews and to transform Wessel into a "martyr" of the Nazi Party. His funeral became a propaganda spectacle. Each year, around the anniversary of his death, the Nazis used the occasion as a pretext for attacks and pogroms against the Jewish population.

The work before us was published against the backdrop of these pogroms. Its first part focuses on Wessel as an individual, beginning with his youth, and describes his violent tendencies and criminal acts. The second part addresses the details of the event in which he was murdered, identifying the individuals involved and explaining how the Nazi Party manipulated the circumstances of his death as a pretext for revenge against the Jews. The author demonstrates that all those involved in the assassination acted out of personal motives of revenge, rather than from political tensions between Jews and Germans, and shows how the Nazis executed innocent Jews in the months preceding the book’s publication, under the false accusation that they were communists linked to Wessel’s murder. The author also provides a detailed account of the enthusiasm and euphoria that gripped the Nazi masses whenever the "Horst Wessel Song" (quoted in full in the book) was sung at party ceremonies. SS flags were raised high, and each time the Nazis marched and sang the song, news soon followed of pogroms and murders of Jews, portrayed as a direct continuation of the Nazi parade.

Extremely rare. Not listed at all in the WorldCat global library catalog.

62 pages. Spine reinforced with adhesive tape. Page 4 reinforced with tape. Overall good condition.