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Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Gauleiter and owner and editor of the newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack), had made several attempts to create Nazi martyrs for propaganda purposes, the first being an SA man named Hans-Georg Kütemeyer, whose body was pulled out of a canal the morning after he attended a speech by Hitler at the Sportpalast.
The song was written by Horst Wessel, a party activist and SA leader, who was killed by a member of the Communist Party of Germany. After his death, he was proclaimed a "martyr" by the NSDAP, and his song gained widespread popularity among Nazi Party followers. [3]
Nazi propaganda depicted Communism as an enemy both within Germany and all of Europe. Communists were the first group attacked as enemies of the state when Nazis ascended to power. [3] According to Hitler, the Jews were the archetypal enemies of the German Volk, and no Communism or Bolshevism existed outside Jewry. [73]
One group who understood the role that music played in spreading their political message was the Nazis in Hitler's Germany. Clearly understanding the link between music and political warfare, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels once stated: "Music affects the heart and emotions more than the intellect.
[3] Genres include Nazi punk, Rock Against Communism, National Socialist black metal, [2] and fashwave. [4] [5] Barbara Perry writes that contemporary white supremacist groups include "subcultural factions that are largely organized around the promotion and distribution of racist music."
Stahlgewitter is a controversial German hard rock and Rock Against Communism group founded in 1995. [2] Despite the genre's name, RAC song lyrics rarely focus on the specific topic of anti-communism. Rather, RAC lyrics typically feature nationalist themes.
The song was performed the next year in the First International Workers Music Olympiad held in Strasbourg by a choir of 3,000 workers. [1] Its first record was printed in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, performed by communist actor and singer Ernst Busch. [2] It was later published in Brecht's 1939 collection Svendborger Gedichte. [3]
Cultural Bolshevism (German: Kulturbolschewismus), sometimes referred to specifically as art Bolshevism, music Bolshevism or sexual Bolshevism, [1] was a term widely used by state-sponsored critics in Nazi Germany to denounce secularist, modernist and progressive cultural movements.