A Song for Hitler
Why is the sordid murder of Horst Wessel, a young Nazi storm troop leader in Berlin in early 1930, so important? Nigel Jones recalls his death and the black legend that sprang from it.
On the evening of January 14th, 1930, Frau Elisabeth Salm, a thirty-year-old widow, left her flat at 62, Grosse Frankfurter Strasse, in Berlin’s poverty-stricken eastern side, bent on serious business. Her mission was to sort out the troublesome young man she had sublet a room to the previous September, and who now shared her cramped home together with his girlfriend, an eighteen-year-old former prostitute named Erna Jaenicke. Her twenty-two-year-old tenant was already notorious in the troubled Berlin of those times – especially to the denizens of the drinking dive Der Bar (‘The Bear‘) which doubled as the local HQ of the Communist Red Front Fighters’ League – and which was Frau Salm’s destination that winter evening. His name was Horst Wessel.
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