Horst Wessel was the son of a Lutheran minister, a law student enrolled at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and something of a musician and lyricist. But he led a double life, also hanging out in bars and flophouses, and later took up with a former prostitute from the slums of Germany’s capital city. He was also attracted to political extremism and fascinated by violence. Throughout the 1920s, Wessel drifted into several right-wing extremist organizations, and then drifted out again when he found them insufficiently militant. He eventually discovered a group more to his liking: the National Socialist German...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
