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 Workers’ Party, better known to history as the Nazis. He quickly rose to become a top organizer and leader in the party’s perpetual street fighting with political opponents,

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