[3] The Red Front Fighter Alliance was alerted about a rental dispute between the communist affiliated landlord Elisabeth Salm and her tenant Horst Wessel on 14 January 1930.

This action was most likely politically motivated; Horst Wessel was called out as the "murderer of workers" in neighborhood posters put up by the Communist Party.

Wessel was involved in numerous violent actions against communists in Berlin and was well known to Nazi Party Gauleiter (regional leader) Joseph Goebbels.

The official police report to the prosecutor allegedly stated that the transport had been intercepted on the street by a group of seven to eight SA men and that the officers had been forced to surrender Höhler under threat of violence, who had then been abducted with an unknown destination.

When the investigation was reopened by the Berlin prosecutor's office in the 1960s, the true course of events was discovered by interrogating Willi Schmidt and Kurt Wendt (the chauffeur of Karl Ernst).

At that time, Höhler's murderers were identified as Gruppenführer Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia,[5] Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels (who concealed the facts in his memoirs), Karl Ernst, his adjutant Walter von Mohrenschildt, the SA-Standartenführer Richard Fiedler, the Sturmbannführer Willi Markus, the detectives Maikowski and Walter Pohlenz and possibly Gerd Voss, the legal adviser of the SA group in Berlin-Brandenburg.

The investigation of the surviving perpetrators – Schmidt, Pohlenz, Markus, and Fiedler – was finally discontinued in 1969, as the prosecutors could only prove aiding and abetting the murder, for which the statute of limitations had already passed.