Although the fallen of the NSDAP during the “time of struggle” were honoured in the Third Reich as martyrs, few details of these men and women are remembered today. Horst Wessel, Albert Leo Schlageter and Herbert Norkus are exceptions. The hundreds of others who made the ultimate sacrifice have no markers or plaques.
The struggle for Germany between the National Socialists on the one side and the German Communist Party and its socialist allies on the other, was a battle for the future of Europe. The KPD (Kommunistische Partie Deutschland) was the largest Communist party in Europe, and Stalin believed that Germany was the key to open up Europe to a communist revolution. If the German domino fell, it would topple all the others.
In 1926, when Dr. Joseph Goebbels was sent to conquer the red capital, the NSDAP had less than 1,000 active members in Greater Berlin, the KPD had over 60,000. Vicious street battles between members of the KPD and the SA were common, especially during the depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of October 1929.
In a new series on the BM Northern website, we will be highlighting the life and death of the ordinary SA and SS men, as well as those from the Hitler Youth (HJ), up to January 31, 1933. We will be publishing the biographical details, along with photographs and newspaper obituaries, of these National Socialist martyrs. In some cases, we will publish the crime scenes down to the street and house number. We have the details of over 200 martyrs, including 21 from the HJ.
Each post in the series will focus on one of these martyrs, showing how and when they fell, their funeral and also the civil war-like conditions that existed during Germany’s Weimar Republic. Our series will cover the years from 1922, with the first deaths, up to the political murder victims in Berlin and Lübeck on the night of the National Socialist takeover of power on January 30, 1933.
We hope in a small way this series will help to keep alive the memory of the blood martyrs who died to save Europe.
‘ONLY THE FORGOTTEN ARE DEAD’
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