I suspect most Americans have never heard of Nazi martyr Horst Wessel. The slain storm trooper is back in the news because some people, notably conservative lawyer George Conway, are comparing his murder to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old rightwing activist, influencer, provocateur, and MAGA loyalist whom Donald Trump eulogized as “a martyr for truth and freedom.”
Trump friend-turned-foe Conway has enraged the MAGA right by charging on X, “They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then [with Horst Wessel], and what Trump and MAGA are doing today [with Kirk], are striking, chilling – and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook.”
Others are echoing Conway. “Within hours of Kirk’s death, people were comparing him to the young Nazi activist whose 1930 murder turned him into a martyr for Adolf Hitler’s movement,” Benyamin Cohen and Hannah Feuer wrote in Forward.
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s top propagandist, transformed “Wessel into a martyr behind whom he wanted the Nazis to rally,” wrote Klaus Marre in Who, What, Why online.
“Now, nearly a century later, another authoritarian movement and a new demagogue are getting ready to turn Charlie Kirk into a martyr behind whom the MAGA movement can rally, and whose death can be used to crack down on those who oppose it. … Just like Wessel’s death in 1930, for an authoritarian movement, this is an opportunity that is too good to pass up.”
Predicted Marre: “First, Republicans will lionize Kirk and castigate anybody who points out that he held some pretty reprehensible views on a wide range of issues. You can expect the party’s performance artists to come up with all kinds of plans to memorialize Kirk.
We’re already seeing this with proposals to have him lie in state or to put a statue of him in the Capitol.”
Paul Waldman, writing on Substack, similarly maintained that “the moment Charlie Kirk was shot, the American political right swung into action.
What they accomplished over the ensuing days was a masterclass in propaganda, demonstrating how well they deploy the media machine they built and how powerful that machine can be.
“People in the conservative movement were unquestionably shocked, saddened, and angered by Kirk’s murder. But since they are part of a political movement, they instantly turned those emotions to political purpose.
And there’s something else we can’t ignore: They could not be more excited. This isn’t to say they aren’t grieving, or that they wanted this particular murder to occur. But they’ve been waiting for a moment like this one.”
The right is fuming at the comparison between the Wessel and Kirk martyrdoms. “But it’s apt,” said Dr. David Pizzo, a Murray State University history professor and an authority on Nazi Germany. “Martyrs are useful to authoritarian movements, right-wing and left.”
Pizzo is hardly alone in his assessment of how martyrs are useful for extremist political groups and movements.
Kirk’s “murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr,” Chris Hedges wrote in Consortium News online:
From our research on extremism, it’s clear that the president’s and [White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen] Miller’s assertions about political violence from the left are not based on actual facts.” wrote University of Dayton sociology professors Art Jipsom and Paul J. Becker in The Conversation online.
“Based on our own research and a review of related work, we can confidently say that most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.”
Pizzo also said that because Communists shot Wessel, his murder became part of the Nazi “stabbed in the back” myth. Hitler insisted that Germany didn’t lose World War I on the battlefield.
Rather, he blamed defeat on Jews and leaders of the German left, basely claiming that they traitorously undermined the war effort at home. Trump devised his version of the myth right after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, according to New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
Democrat Joe Biden Trump defeated Trump at the polls. But Trump, without evidence, said Biden won only by massive voter fraud.
Trump and his lawyers got busy concocting their own “stabbed in the back” fantasy to discredit Biden, Stephens wrote on Nov. 23, 2020. “… The aim is clear: to treat the Biden presidency as a product of treachery by a political order that is so comprehensively corrupt that it will require far tougher means than the ones Trump employed to root out.”
In the same conspiratorial vein, the Trump administration today is suggesting “that a secret network of violent left-wing extremists was behind the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk,” wrote Christian Orozco of NBC news, adding that such a claim stands “in stark contrast to the evidence presented by law enforcement.
Text messages from the suspect, Tyler Robinson, to his roommate revealed a confession and an explanation, officials said, but made no link to any groups. In the string of text exchanges, Robinson wrote that he ‘had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred,’ and that ‘Some hate can’t be negotiated.’
The exchange was among the evidence that Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray used to charge Robinson with aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and several other counts. Officials said they would seek the death penalty.”
Kirk often praised Israel. Rightwing Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, a Trump ally, praised him as a “tremendous friend of Israel” who defended Western values, according to The Economic Times.
Yet Kirk “was often accused of antisemitism, defending a statement in 2023 that Jewish communities have been ‘pushing’ hatred against whites,” PJ Grisar wrote in Forward. “The conservative activist organization he founded and led, Turning Point USA, features in the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism’s ‘Glossary of Extremism and Hate,’ which notes that white nationalists often attend TPUSA events and that Kirk endorses Christian nationalism. (Kirk always insisted that, as an evangelical Christian and supporter of Israel, he was not antisemitic.)”
Kirk also charged that “Jews have been some of the largest funders of cultural Marxist ideas and supporters of those ideas over the last 30 or 40 years,” according to Snopes.com. “‘Cultural Marxism’ has long been an antisemitic trope used by white evangelicals and Christian nationalists,” wrote Snopes researcher Anna Rascouët-Paz. “The implication is that this ideology is a Jewish conspiracy designed to undermine U.S. Christian values. Further, many evangelicals in the U.S. support Israel because of the theological belief that Jews must own the land of Israel in order to facilitate the second coming of Jesus Christ.”
Nazism was an atheistic doctrine, though Hitler co-opted the established German Catholic and Protestant churches. “Kirk — who rallied his millions of online followers to vote for Trump in the 2024 election — declared that God was on the side of American conservatives and that there was ‘no separation of church and state,’”
Hailey Branson-Potts wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “He was also known for his vitriol against racial and religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people, childless women, progressives, and others who disagreed with him.“
Kirk called transgender people ‘a throbbing middle finger to God.’ He said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was ‘a huge mistake’ and called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘awful.’
On his podcast, he called with a smirk for ‘some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area [who] wants to really be a midterm hero’ to bail out of jail the man who attacked then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in their home in 2022.“
In 2023, Kirk sat on the stage of Awaken Church in Salt Lake City and said: ‘I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the 2nd Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.’”
Wessel was a leader in the Sturmabteilung, SA for short, Adolf Hitler’s paramilitary organization. Dubbed “Brownshirts” for their dress, they were notorious for terrorizing and beating up anti-Nazi Germans, especially Jews. “During the years of the Weimar Republic, extremist political parties in Germany frequently engaged in violence,” explains the Holocaust Encyclopedia online. “Wessel and his group of SA men in Berlin often fought with local Communists.”
Some Communists, armed with pistols, fatally shot Wessel on January 14, 1930. “The group may have been motivated by personal as well as political reasons,” according to the Encyclopedia. Wessel succumbed to his wounds on February 23.
The Nazis propagandized Wessel’s slaying as purely political and made him their best known martyr, says the Encyclopedia. “Wessel was celebrated in several propagandistic books, films, and public ceremonies. In addition, Wessel had written lyrics to a song that became the Nazi Party anthem after his death.
The Nazis used Wessel’s legend to celebrate their ideals of political violence and self-sacrifice – and to encourage others to fight and die for the Nazi movement. His death was also used to rationalize attacks on Communists and other targets of the Nazi Party.”
Conservative evangelicals are joining the elevation of Kirk to Christian martyr status. “His message will not be stopped. His testimony will not be snuffed out,” Pastor David Engelhardt of Manhattan’s Kings’ Church, a Turning Points board member, said in a Fox News interview. “His memory will be championed.
We encourage every patriot to be galvanized to lift their voice against the tide of darkness that attempts to destroy our fragile republic and the particular gifts our Creator has granted us here in these United States.”
Standing next to Wessel’s deathbed, Goebbels, the chief architect of the Storm Trooper’s martyrdom, said, “Horst Wessel has passed away. His earthly remains lie here mute and silent. But I feel it in my bones — I’m absolutely sure of it — his soul was resurrected, to live among us all … he is marching in our columns!”
