[10] Wessel soon began to frequent bars and hang out in flophouses,[12] and also founded his own youth group, the Knappschaft, the purpose of which was to "raise our boys to be real German men".

[13] He also joined the Wiking Liga ("Viking League"), a paramilitary group founded by Hermann Ehrhardt – the stated goal of which was to effect "the revival of Germany on a national and ethnic basis through the spiritual education of its members" – near the end of 1923.

Realizing the League would not achieve its self-defined mission and was moving in the direction of tolerating the parliamentary political system, Wessel resigned from it on 23 November 1926 at age 19.

... Street demonstrations, recruiting drives in the press, propaganda trips into the provinces creating an atmosphere of activism and high political tension that could only help the movement.

[10]It was Goebbels who had created this atmosphere, which prompted right-wing youth to leave organizations they felt had let them down for the excitement of the Nazi Party's highly visible activism.

[10] For a few years Wessel lived a double life, as a middle-class university law student and as a member of the primarily working-class SA, but in some ways the two worlds were converging in ideology.

At university, Wessel joined a dueling society dedicated to "steeling and testing physical and moral fitness" through personal combat, while with the SA, which was always interested in a good street fight, he was immersed in the antisemitic attitudes typical of the extreme right-wing paramilitary culture of the time.

His study of jurisprudence at school was seen through the filter of his belief that the application of the law was primarily an instrument of power; and his personal beliefs, already geared toward anti-Jewish attitudes, were further hardened by the novel From Double Eagle to Red Flag by White emigre General Pyotr Krasnov, which is set between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Red Guards' victory at the end of the Russian Civil War, and which was first published in the Weimar Republic in 1922.

[25][26] He returned to Berlin in July 1928 to recruit local youths, and was involved in helping to implement a reorganization of the NSDAP in the city into a cell-structure similar to that used by the German Communist Party (KPD).

[2] Wessel wrote songs for the SA in conscious imitation of the Communist paramilitary, the Red Front Fighters' League – in fact, the music to Die Fahne hoch!"

[29] Wessel was recognized by Goebbels and the Berlin Nazi hierarchy as an effective street speaker;[12] in the first 11 months of 1929, for instance, he spoke at 56 separate NSDAP events.

One of his men described the way they fought against the Communists (KPD): Horst made Adolf Hitler's principle his own: terror can be destroyed only by counterterror ...

The places where the KPD met were often visited by a mere handful of loyal supporters, and our standpoint was made unequivocally clear to the landlord and all who were present.

Goebbels' violent approach was appreciated by Wessel, who preferred it to the official restraint he experienced as a member of the Bismarck Youth and the Viking League.

[25][39][40] On 1 November, she moved into his room on the third floor of 62 Große Frankfurter Straße (today Karl-Marx-Allee),[41] which he sublet from 29-year-old Elisabeth Salm,[42] whose late husband had been an active Communist Red Front Fighter, although she described herself as apolitical.

Salm stated that after having a “quiet word” with Wessel, she agreed to have the couple move out by February 1st, but then changed her mind and wanted the two tenants out immediately.

[38][25][42] At first, the Communists were not interested in helping Salm, as she was not well-liked by them because she had given her husband a church funeral[45] instead of allowing the KPD to give him the standard burial rite used for members of the Red Front Fighters' League.

[46] Knowing they needed muscle, they sent word to a nearby tavern for Albrecht "Ali" Höhler, an armed pimp, perjurer and petty criminal.

[45][49] At around 10 p.m. on 14 January 1930, Höhler and Erwin Rückert, another member of the KPD, knocked at the door of the room where Wessel and Jänicke lived, while the remainder of the gang of at least a dozen men waited on the street outside.

The attackers searched the room, removed a pistol from the wardrobe and a rubber truncheon, and fled the scene, returning to the rest of the men in the street.

[51] Even as Wessel was lying seriously wounded in hospital, Goebbels was already releasing reports asserting that those who had carried out the attack were "degenerate communist subhumans".

[56] Three years later, after the Nazi ascension to national power in 1933, Höhler was taken out of prison under false pretenses by then Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels[48] and members of the SA, and illegally executed.

[66] In attendance at Wessel's funeral were Goebbels, who delivered the eulogy, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, Hermann Göring, and Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia.

[70] Sixteen thousand members of the Berlin and Brandenburg SA and SS marched past the Communist Party headquarters on Bülowplatz (now the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz) – the Karl Liebknecht House – in a deliberately provocative act that Goebbels was very proud of having staged, calling it a "terrible defeat" for the Communists and "a proud and heroic victory of the SA on behalf of the party".

"[72][68] That night, Hitler addressed a memorial service at the Berlin Sportpalast, at which the "Funeral March" from Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung was played, and the stage was set as an altar made from "laurel trees, branches, candelabra and a larger-than-lifesize portrait of Wessel".

At the 1934 Nuremberg Party Rally, a group of Hitler Youth sang an anti-Christian song which included the lines "We don't need any Christian truth ... We follow not Christ but Horst Wessel".

For example, a wartime article from the Nazi-owned Völkischer Beobachter newspaper called Wessel "the hero of the Brown Revolution" and referred to his "sacrificial death" that "passionately inflamed millions who followed".

[78] Wessel played the schalmei (Martinstrompete), a brass instrument[79] which featured in groups called Schalmeienkapellen ("Schalmeien orchestras or bands"), and which is still used in folk celebrations.

[82] Part of the problem with the film was that the authentic depiction of stormtrooper brutality, including violent clashes with Communists, did not fit the more reasonable tone the Nazis initially attempted to present after coming to power; unlike Wessel, Westmar preaches class reconciliation and does not alienate his family.

[7] Examples of German military units adopting the name of this Nazi-era "martyr" in World War II include the 18th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division, known as the "Horst Wessel" Division, and the Luftwaffe's 26th Destroyer (or heavy fighter) Wing Zerstörergeschwader 26, as well as its successor day fighter unit Jagdgeschwader 6, which was similarly named the "Horst Wessel" wing.