Trump’s heroization of those who led the attack on the Capitol is eerily similar to tactics used by Hitler in 1923.
By Sasha Abramsky ,
March 27, 2024
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks to a crowd during a "Get Out The Vote" rally at Coastal Carolina University on February 10, 2024, in Conway, South Carolina.
WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES
Backed by overwhelming support from the GOP’s primary voters, and by most Republican congressmembers and senators, former President Donald Trump is now barreling toward the 2024 presidential election as his party’s presumptive nominee.
Usually, at this point in the election process, once the base has been satisfied during the primary season, a candidate starts the long, slow, sometimes awkward pivot back toward the political middle. Trump, by contrast, is veering evermore into the extremes, plunging into political conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric.
He’s repeatedly spoken of immigrants “poisoning” the nation’s blood. He has taken to calling out individuals such as former White House Aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified against him in the congressional hearings into the January attack, arguing that they should be prosecuted for their words. He’s basically invited Russia to take military action against North Atlantic Treaty Organization members who don’t boost their military budgets.
But Trump is, perhaps, at his most incandescently dangerous when talking about the January 6 coup attempt and the efforts by his followers to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Last week, at a rally in Ohio, the crowd was asked to rise to pay tribute to those imprisoned after the events of January 6. Trump got up and gave a salute, while the loudspeakers blared a version of the national anthem recorded by some of these prisoners.
The Washington Post has tracked Trump’s language surrounding the January 6 perpetrators, and recently published a graph showing his increasing usage of the incendiary term “hostages” to describe them. Between November and the third week of March, the paper identified 12 times in which Trump used this term, each time further corroding his base’s trust in the democratic political system.
Trump Says Conviction Will Make Him More Popular. Polls Say Otherwise.
Poll after poll demonstrates that a criminal conviction between now and November makes Trump less popular.
By Chris Walker , TRUTHOUT March 26, 2024
This isn’t accidental. Trump is consciously creating a martyr mythology, a stabbed-in-the-back-by-a-fifth-column storyline. It is the same narrative used by the early Nazis to describe those — including Adolf Hitler — imprisoned by the Weimar state after the failed Munich “Beer Hall Putsch” of November 1923.
In that attempted coup, Hitler and his followers tried to seize power in Munich, to capture government buildings, and from that stronghold to then launch a march on Berlin aimed at creating what Hitler termed a “national revolution.”
After the effort failed, the Nazi leader was arrested, charged with treason, and in a trial the following February, sentenced to five years in prison. He was, however, pardoned after less than a year behind bars. As they say, the rest is history.
In the subsequent Nazi mythology, the men sentenced to prison after the putsch attempt, as well as for various other violent assaults on Weimar leaders and institutions, became martyrs; instead of the malcontents and violent political extremists that in reality they were, they were painted by Nazi propagandists as heroes who had sacrificed their freedom for a noble cause.
The Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, wrote, as the Beer Hall coup was unfolding, that it was aimed at destroying “five years of the most atrocious shame and disgrace perpetrated by Jews and the Jewish regime.” (This, just two years after the industrialist Walter Rathenau, the Weimar state’s foreign minister, was assassinated by nationalist extremists infuriated by his Jewish origins and his internationalist political leanings.)
Nineteen years later, in the depths of World War II, Hitler made a lengthy speech commemorating the uprising that was larded with antisemitic bile. He claimed:
In the beginning I did not have much more to give than faith, the faith that if anyone pursues a just aim with unchanging and undisturbed loyalty and never lets himself be diverted from it, but puts everything into it, then others will be found who are determined to be his followers, and that from this host an ever stronger faith must gradually radiate to the whole people, and that out of this host the worthiest part of the whole people must one day finally find themselves together, and that finally this worthiest part must acquire the power of the state.
In this speech, Hitler denounced Franklin D. Roosevelt for being a “half-Jew,” with a “Jewish brain-trust.” He claimed that Jews controlled the Soviet government, accused wealthy Jews of a conspiracy to control the world, and so on.
Even as Trump tries in his usual offensive fashion to persuade Jewish voters to elect him (he recently argued that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion”), he has long deployed thinly veiled antisemitic tropes in his speeches. For example, as the Washington Post reported, he has frequently asserted to Jewish Americans that Israel is “your country,” thus essentially accusing them of dual loyalties. Moreover, he has flaunted his friendship with the notoriously antisemitic Kanye West, and after the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, in which fascist participants chanted “Jews shall not replace us,” Trump went out of his way to say there were “very fine people” on the fascist side of the confrontation.
Meanwhile, Trump also deploys dehumanizing, fascistic language to attack his perceived enemies in all quarters. On the campaign trail, for example, he has called his opponents “vermin,” and indicated that he would support executing ex-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley.
Trump’s wholehearted embrace of the January 6 coup leaders and his escalating martyrdom language about their fate are part of this chilling political package. Faced with more than half a billion dollars in court-imposed fines, the possibility of some of his marquis properties being seized and the imminent start of at least one of his four criminal trials, Trump is now marshalling an army of the angry and the conspiracy-minded to serve as a battering ram against the legitimacy of the state itself.
Promising to release violent paramilitary supporters — as Trump routinely does these days when pledging to free the January 6 perpetrators on day one — isn’t politics as usual. Rather, it’s an unprecedented embrace of political violence by a candidate who is, yet again, showing that he has no moral limits.
SASHA ABRAMSKY is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California.
Usually, at this point in the election process, once the base has been satisfied during the primary season, a candidate starts the long, slow, sometimes awkward pivot back toward the political middle. Trump, by contrast, is veering evermore into the extremes, plunging into political conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric.
He’s repeatedly spoken of immigrants “poisoning” the nation’s blood. He has taken to calling out individuals such as former White House Aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified against him in the congressional hearings into the January attack, arguing that they should be prosecuted for their words. He’s basically invited Russia to take military action against North Atlantic Treaty Organization members who don’t boost their military budgets.
But Trump is, perhaps, at his most incandescently dangerous when talking about the January 6 coup attempt and the efforts by his followers to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Last week, at a rally in Ohio, the crowd was asked to rise to pay tribute to those imprisoned after the events of January 6. Trump got up and gave a salute, while the loudspeakers blared a version of the national anthem recorded by some of these prisoners.
The Washington Post has tracked Trump’s language surrounding the January 6 perpetrators, and recently published a graph showing his increasing usage of the incendiary term “hostages” to describe them. Between November and the third week of March, the paper identified 12 times in which Trump used this term, each time further corroding his base’s trust in the democratic political system.
Trump Says Conviction Will Make Him More Popular. Polls Say Otherwise.
Poll after poll demonstrates that a criminal conviction between now and November makes Trump less popular.
By Chris Walker , TRUTHOUT March 26, 2024
This isn’t accidental. Trump is consciously creating a martyr mythology, a stabbed-in-the-back-by-a-fifth-column storyline. It is the same narrative used by the early Nazis to describe those — including Adolf Hitler — imprisoned by the Weimar state after the failed Munich “Beer Hall Putsch” of November 1923.
In that attempted coup, Hitler and his followers tried to seize power in Munich, to capture government buildings, and from that stronghold to then launch a march on Berlin aimed at creating what Hitler termed a “national revolution.”
After the effort failed, the Nazi leader was arrested, charged with treason, and in a trial the following February, sentenced to five years in prison. He was, however, pardoned after less than a year behind bars. As they say, the rest is history.
In the subsequent Nazi mythology, the men sentenced to prison after the putsch attempt, as well as for various other violent assaults on Weimar leaders and institutions, became martyrs; instead of the malcontents and violent political extremists that in reality they were, they were painted by Nazi propagandists as heroes who had sacrificed their freedom for a noble cause.
The Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, wrote, as the Beer Hall coup was unfolding, that it was aimed at destroying “five years of the most atrocious shame and disgrace perpetrated by Jews and the Jewish regime.” (This, just two years after the industrialist Walter Rathenau, the Weimar state’s foreign minister, was assassinated by nationalist extremists infuriated by his Jewish origins and his internationalist political leanings.)
Nineteen years later, in the depths of World War II, Hitler made a lengthy speech commemorating the uprising that was larded with antisemitic bile. He claimed:
In the beginning I did not have much more to give than faith, the faith that if anyone pursues a just aim with unchanging and undisturbed loyalty and never lets himself be diverted from it, but puts everything into it, then others will be found who are determined to be his followers, and that from this host an ever stronger faith must gradually radiate to the whole people, and that out of this host the worthiest part of the whole people must one day finally find themselves together, and that finally this worthiest part must acquire the power of the state.
In this speech, Hitler denounced Franklin D. Roosevelt for being a “half-Jew,” with a “Jewish brain-trust.” He claimed that Jews controlled the Soviet government, accused wealthy Jews of a conspiracy to control the world, and so on.
Even as Trump tries in his usual offensive fashion to persuade Jewish voters to elect him (he recently argued that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion”), he has long deployed thinly veiled antisemitic tropes in his speeches. For example, as the Washington Post reported, he has frequently asserted to Jewish Americans that Israel is “your country,” thus essentially accusing them of dual loyalties. Moreover, he has flaunted his friendship with the notoriously antisemitic Kanye West, and after the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, in which fascist participants chanted “Jews shall not replace us,” Trump went out of his way to say there were “very fine people” on the fascist side of the confrontation.
Meanwhile, Trump also deploys dehumanizing, fascistic language to attack his perceived enemies in all quarters. On the campaign trail, for example, he has called his opponents “vermin,” and indicated that he would support executing ex-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley.
Trump’s wholehearted embrace of the January 6 coup leaders and his escalating martyrdom language about their fate are part of this chilling political package. Faced with more than half a billion dollars in court-imposed fines, the possibility of some of his marquis properties being seized and the imminent start of at least one of his four criminal trials, Trump is now marshalling an army of the angry and the conspiracy-minded to serve as a battering ram against the legitimacy of the state itself.
Promising to release violent paramilitary supporters — as Trump routinely does these days when pledging to free the January 6 perpetrators on day one — isn’t politics as usual. Rather, it’s an unprecedented embrace of political violence by a candidate who is, yet again, showing that he has no moral limits.
SASHA ABRAMSKY is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California.
Donald Trump’s Horst Wessel moment | Will Bunch Newsletter
Plus, Merrick Garland’s Neville Chamberlain moment.
by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published Mar. 19, 2024
Plus, Merrick Garland’s Neville Chamberlain moment.
by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published Mar. 19, 2024
PHILEDELPHIA INQUIRER
I know this will probably shock a lot of people, but for once I identify with Donald Trump. On Monday, his lawyers said posting the whopping $465 million bond on his New York State fraud judgment is a “practical impossibility.” It would be for me, too. Of course, I’m not a billionaire. Maybe the media should come to realize the financial wizard behind Trump Vodka and Trump University isn’t one, either.
Where did Trump learn to turn thugs into heroic martyrs? Try 1930s Germany.
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I know this will probably shock a lot of people, but for once I identify with Donald Trump. On Monday, his lawyers said posting the whopping $465 million bond on his New York State fraud judgment is a “practical impossibility.” It would be for me, too. Of course, I’m not a billionaire. Maybe the media should come to realize the financial wizard behind Trump Vodka and Trump University isn’t one, either.
Where did Trump learn to turn thugs into heroic martyrs? Try 1930s Germany.
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally Saturday, March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio.
Jeff Dean / AP
Those of us who’ve had the misfortune of chronicling the Donald Trump Era in America have learned by now never to characterize any comment or political rally, no matter how vile, as “a new low,” because the next bottomless pit is always just around the corner. That said, Saturday’s Trump rally in Dayton, Ohio was a dark abyss that the media is still exploring days later.
The never-ending debate over what the 45th president truly meant when he promised a “bloodbath” — maybe just for the auto industry, but maybe for a nation already fearful of a civil war — obscured all the other shocking things the presumptive GOP nominee for a second, non-consecutive term in the White House said that were unambiguous. Like claiming there won’t be another election in America if he loses. Or saying some refugees at the southern border are “not people.”
Then there was the start of the rally, with a version of the National Anthem so horrific that it gets Roseanne Barr off the hook for the worst ever. Heck, Barr’s shrieked ballpark version sounded like Maria Callas compared to this weekend’s opening act in Dayton.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages,” boomed a man who sounded like a baritone NBA arena announcer tied up and forced to read a ransom note handwritten by Trump himself. What followed was an altered “Star Spangled Banner” as rendered by the so-called J6 Choir — insurrectionists who violently overran the U.S. Capitol and injured scores of police officers on Jan. 6, 2021 and who are held in the D.C. jail, most awaiting felony trials.
It wasn’t the first time that Trump had launched a major rally with the jazz of these felonious punks. In fact, the wannabe 47th president is featured as a voice on the record, renamed ”Justice For All” and briefly boosted to No. 1 on the iTunes chart with help from the king of schlock marketing. The latest airing comes as Trump’s re-framing of hundreds arrested for their riotous activities on Jan. 6 as unfairly treated “hostages” — an insult to the world’s too-many actual hostages from Gaza to Moscow, where U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich has been locked up for a year — is gaining steam from formerly mainstream Republicans like Rep. Elise Stefanik, now a veep hopeful.
Indeed, Trump’s increasingly forceful promise to abuse the powers of the president to pardon the Capitol Hill insurrectionists — rioters he calls “patriots” because they were willing to upend the peaceful transfer of presidential power on his behalf — is rightly considered as Exhibit A in the ways that a second Trump term would upend 237 years of constitutional norms and plunge America’s shaky democracy into an Orbán-esque form of dictatorship.
But there’s something else about about Trump’s rhetoric, his J6 Chorus, and the revamped national anthem that I find even more disturbing. It’s just the latest incident that makes you wonder how much Trump — who was given a book of Adolf Hitler speeches in the 1980s and later praised some “good things” about the German dictator to his top aide — and his team are modeling the authoritarian rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, either consciously or unconsciously.
Trump’s literal salute to those willing to commit violence on behalf of his MAGA movement — both the arrestees he now calls “hostages” and the slain rioter Ashli Babbitt, hailed by the ex-president as a martyr — is very much in line with the way that Nazis, led by their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, invoked slain or jailed thugs as heroes to rally their followers.
This included the victims of Hitler’s own initial insurrection aimed at gaining power — the notorious Munich beer hall putsch of 1923 that killed 16 early Nazis and four police officers. But the most famous Nazi martyr was Horst Wessel, a young member of the Nazis’ paramilitary force officially called the SA, but better known as “the brownshirts” who brawled in the streets with their leftist enemies.
Wessel’s frequent denunciations of the rival Communist Party and his involvement in violent raids into Berlin’s working-class neighborhoods raised his profile among the pro-Hitler brownshirts but made mortal enemies on the far left. On Jan. 14, 1930, on the eve of the Nazi rise to power, Wessel was shot by two Communist Party members under very murky circumstances and later died. Goebbels seized on his death as an invaluable propaganda tool.
The future Nazi minister hailed Wessel in an article as a good Christian who “offer[ed] himself up as a sacrifice,” then lured as many as 30,000 movement members to march through the streets for his funeral and filmed the event. But Wessel and the rallying effect of his supposed martyrdom primarily lived on through music. A marching fight song that Wessel himself composed was given new lyrics and redubbed as “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” meaning “The Horst Wessel Song.”
“The Horst Wessel Song” became not just a Nazi Party anthem, but later the co-national anthem of Germany (along with the “Deutschland über Alles” version of the current anthem) after Hitler took power in 1933. It was even played in churches as Goebbels forged his own version of Christian nationalism. In 1934, as the dictator consolidated his grip, legendary filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl filmed the party’s massive Nuremburg rally for her documentary, Triumph of the Will. The movie starts with “The Horst Wessel Song” as the swastika-painted plane carrying the Führer circles the massive throng before a dramatic landing.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the New York University historian who authored Strongmen, about the commonalities of authoritarians up through Trump, wrote after Trump’s 2022 campaign kickoff in Waco that fascists use rallies and “propaganda to change the public’s perception of violence, associating it with patriotism and national defense against internal and external enemies.” To Ben-Ghiat, the historical line from “The Horst Wessel Song” to the J6 Chorus is especially striking. She writes: “The Nuremberg rally enshrined victimhood and mourning into regime ritual and justified Nazi violence as national defense.”
Triumph of the Will supposedly survived as a cautionary tale about propaganda and mass manipulation, but apparently it’s now an instructional video for a new generation of Hitler clones. The ritual fetishizing of today’s brownshirts who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 would be alarming if it were the only party-like-it’s-1934 flashback from the Trump campaign. Instead, it’s just one more sour Wagnerian note, along with calling enemies “vermin,” dehumanizing migrants, and agreeing that he’ll be a dictator, but “only for a day.”
Trump is currently flying high and humming his own Horst Wessel song all the way to the White House. When will Americans wake up and hear the music?
Those of us who’ve had the misfortune of chronicling the Donald Trump Era in America have learned by now never to characterize any comment or political rally, no matter how vile, as “a new low,” because the next bottomless pit is always just around the corner. That said, Saturday’s Trump rally in Dayton, Ohio was a dark abyss that the media is still exploring days later.
The never-ending debate over what the 45th president truly meant when he promised a “bloodbath” — maybe just for the auto industry, but maybe for a nation already fearful of a civil war — obscured all the other shocking things the presumptive GOP nominee for a second, non-consecutive term in the White House said that were unambiguous. Like claiming there won’t be another election in America if he loses. Or saying some refugees at the southern border are “not people.”
Then there was the start of the rally, with a version of the National Anthem so horrific that it gets Roseanne Barr off the hook for the worst ever. Heck, Barr’s shrieked ballpark version sounded like Maria Callas compared to this weekend’s opening act in Dayton.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages,” boomed a man who sounded like a baritone NBA arena announcer tied up and forced to read a ransom note handwritten by Trump himself. What followed was an altered “Star Spangled Banner” as rendered by the so-called J6 Choir — insurrectionists who violently overran the U.S. Capitol and injured scores of police officers on Jan. 6, 2021 and who are held in the D.C. jail, most awaiting felony trials.
It wasn’t the first time that Trump had launched a major rally with the jazz of these felonious punks. In fact, the wannabe 47th president is featured as a voice on the record, renamed ”Justice For All” and briefly boosted to No. 1 on the iTunes chart with help from the king of schlock marketing. The latest airing comes as Trump’s re-framing of hundreds arrested for their riotous activities on Jan. 6 as unfairly treated “hostages” — an insult to the world’s too-many actual hostages from Gaza to Moscow, where U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich has been locked up for a year — is gaining steam from formerly mainstream Republicans like Rep. Elise Stefanik, now a veep hopeful.
Indeed, Trump’s increasingly forceful promise to abuse the powers of the president to pardon the Capitol Hill insurrectionists — rioters he calls “patriots” because they were willing to upend the peaceful transfer of presidential power on his behalf — is rightly considered as Exhibit A in the ways that a second Trump term would upend 237 years of constitutional norms and plunge America’s shaky democracy into an Orbán-esque form of dictatorship.
But there’s something else about about Trump’s rhetoric, his J6 Chorus, and the revamped national anthem that I find even more disturbing. It’s just the latest incident that makes you wonder how much Trump — who was given a book of Adolf Hitler speeches in the 1980s and later praised some “good things” about the German dictator to his top aide — and his team are modeling the authoritarian rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, either consciously or unconsciously.
Trump’s literal salute to those willing to commit violence on behalf of his MAGA movement — both the arrestees he now calls “hostages” and the slain rioter Ashli Babbitt, hailed by the ex-president as a martyr — is very much in line with the way that Nazis, led by their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, invoked slain or jailed thugs as heroes to rally their followers.
This included the victims of Hitler’s own initial insurrection aimed at gaining power — the notorious Munich beer hall putsch of 1923 that killed 16 early Nazis and four police officers. But the most famous Nazi martyr was Horst Wessel, a young member of the Nazis’ paramilitary force officially called the SA, but better known as “the brownshirts” who brawled in the streets with their leftist enemies.
Wessel’s frequent denunciations of the rival Communist Party and his involvement in violent raids into Berlin’s working-class neighborhoods raised his profile among the pro-Hitler brownshirts but made mortal enemies on the far left. On Jan. 14, 1930, on the eve of the Nazi rise to power, Wessel was shot by two Communist Party members under very murky circumstances and later died. Goebbels seized on his death as an invaluable propaganda tool.
The future Nazi minister hailed Wessel in an article as a good Christian who “offer[ed] himself up as a sacrifice,” then lured as many as 30,000 movement members to march through the streets for his funeral and filmed the event. But Wessel and the rallying effect of his supposed martyrdom primarily lived on through music. A marching fight song that Wessel himself composed was given new lyrics and redubbed as “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” meaning “The Horst Wessel Song.”
“The Horst Wessel Song” became not just a Nazi Party anthem, but later the co-national anthem of Germany (along with the “Deutschland über Alles” version of the current anthem) after Hitler took power in 1933. It was even played in churches as Goebbels forged his own version of Christian nationalism. In 1934, as the dictator consolidated his grip, legendary filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl filmed the party’s massive Nuremburg rally for her documentary, Triumph of the Will. The movie starts with “The Horst Wessel Song” as the swastika-painted plane carrying the Führer circles the massive throng before a dramatic landing.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the New York University historian who authored Strongmen, about the commonalities of authoritarians up through Trump, wrote after Trump’s 2022 campaign kickoff in Waco that fascists use rallies and “propaganda to change the public’s perception of violence, associating it with patriotism and national defense against internal and external enemies.” To Ben-Ghiat, the historical line from “The Horst Wessel Song” to the J6 Chorus is especially striking. She writes: “The Nuremberg rally enshrined victimhood and mourning into regime ritual and justified Nazi violence as national defense.”
Triumph of the Will supposedly survived as a cautionary tale about propaganda and mass manipulation, but apparently it’s now an instructional video for a new generation of Hitler clones. The ritual fetishizing of today’s brownshirts who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 would be alarming if it were the only party-like-it’s-1934 flashback from the Trump campaign. Instead, it’s just one more sour Wagnerian note, along with calling enemies “vermin,” dehumanizing migrants, and agreeing that he’ll be a dictator, but “only for a day.”
Trump is currently flying high and humming his own Horst Wessel song all the way to the White House. When will Americans wake up and hear the music?
THE BROWN SHIRTS WERE HITLERS PROUD BOYS
FILM NEWS OF THE GERMAN CAPITAL; The Widely Read Story of Horst Wessel, the Nazi Movement's Almost Legendary Hero, Reaches the Screen
Feb. 4, 1934
VIEW ON TIMESMACHINE
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
WHEN in the Summer the first announcement came that the Volksdeutsche Film Company had bought the rights to the popular story "Horst Wessel," by Hans Heinz Ewers, the rest of the film producers were kicking themselves for having slipped up on this fireproof chance. For at that time no one foresaw the changes in the development of the national government which were to come later. In those early days everything Nazi in book, theatre, film, was necessary propaganda. Quantity alone could give weight to the political steam roller. The making of a "Horst Wessel" film would surely have full governmental support. Was he not their officially sanctioned idol? Did not the mediocre song he had composed become their revolutionary chant? The program proves that earlier support: Supervision and music, Ernst Hanfstaengl (Hitler's press chief); SA adviser, Richard Fielder (Nazi organizer); a number of Nazi military organizations and, above all, the actual police force.Then about six weeks ago came the previewing of the film by a Nazi compendium with Dr. Goebbels at its head. One could now afford to be fastidious—the film was forbidden "for the heroic figure of Horst Wessel was incompetently interpreted, thereby endangering the interest of State and German prestige." Two weeks ago the film censor announced his okay on "Hans Westmar" (phonetic substitute for "Horst Wessel"), yesterday we had the première at the Capitol and today it has the unreserved approbation of the government. It proved to be a hundred percenter.Jazz and Communism.It shows the student, Hans Westmar, returning from a genial waltz loving Vienna to an objectionably international Berlin, where, in a bar, a Negro jazz band plays havoc with the martial rhythms of "Die Wacht am Rhein" and a Spanish dancer toys with the morals of a somewhat less martial burgher of the democratic year 1929. It shows communism as a corroding force and its head, a Russian, a serf to Moscow. Hans Westmar sees delivery from all this and more in the tenets of National Socialism. He becomes active. His organizing gifts are extraordinary, but he believes the party's growth to be in the masses. So he gives up his studies and becomes a manual laborer. He goes to live in the East of Berlin, the stronghold of the Communists. They plot against him, for he succeeds in winning over too many of their members. He is shot, and, though he lingers on a few days, the wound is fatal—he dies.Emil Lohkamp, who takes the title part, has the physical propensities of a fanatic. His abrupt manner of acting and speech underlines this to an almost unsympathetic degree. This must have been the cause of Dr. Goebbels's unfavorable verdict. Irmgard Willers, as the submissive creature of the Communists in love with Hans West-mar, outlines figure of such frail intensity in this first screen appearance that one may hopefully add her to the scant list of the more personal film faces. There are tow parts taken by Jews: a university professor advocating internationalism, which Siegmund Nunberg plays with direct simplicity; the other, a Communist leader and member of the Reichstag, is mugged by Hugo Döblin, who invests this rôle with all the approved bugbear characteristics — a contemptible performance. Neither of these two actors is mentioned in the program. The audience found cause for a laugh when the screen showed two bearded Jews watching a street fight, their whole attitude expressing a childlike and worried wonder at these combative doings—a reaction unthinkable outside the Reich's border.There is an intensely dramatic but very much abbreviated shot of a "Mensur," the German student's sabre practice, with the opponents standing close, deftly parrying heavy blows. A close-up shows their cheeks pouted. I take it this is to protect their teeth in case of cuts, which are frequent. But it did look comical and little in keeping with the seriousness of the situation and the dangerousness of this drill, which has caused the loss of so many lives. The ban which since the war had been put on this "exercise" has recently been lifted. Another one of the numerous Nazi reversions to pre-war practices.The most realistic and therefore the most vital parts of this picture are its mass scenes. The supposed to be historically exact street fight as the funeral cortège passes the Karl Liebknecht house, the Communist headquarters, is brutally convincing and gives one the sensation of an eyewitness. In the transition from "Horst Wessel" to "Hans Westmar" the film loses continuity and takes a knowledge of the book too much for granted. Because of this and in spite of an overabundance of close-ups, the intent of the picture is reversed—the story of Hans Westmar merely becomes background to a forcefully documented national movement."Bedside," which is about an X-ray photographer and the fortune he made by cultivating his professional manner, will be turned loose on Broadway soon by First National. It features Warren William and Jean Muir."The Heir Chaser," James Cagney's latest film, will be released by Warner Brothers under the title, "Blondes and Bonds." This is scheduled for an early Broadway showing. Bette Davis and Alice White are the women in it. Out in Hollywood Mr. Cagney is preparing to begin work with Joan Blondell in "Without Honor," which marks the first Cagney-Blondell collaboration since "Blonde Crazy." Most of the action takes place in a small fishing village and Lloyd Bacon, the director, has been hunting good location scenes along the California coast.Harry Wilcoxon, the young English actor, has gone to Hollywood to become Marc Antony in Cecil B. De Mille's "Cleapatra." Although he planned to spend several days in New York seeing plays and the sights, the studio demanded his presence and he sternly boarded a plane for the Coast. Mr. Wilcoxon holds a British aviation pilot's license and plans to do all his traveling in this far-flung country by plane. Just before leaving England, he played the leading rôle opposite Evelyn Laye in a British film, "Princess Charming."
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 4, 1934 of the National edition with the headline: FILM NEWS OF THE GERMAN CAPITAL; The Widely Read Story of Horst Wessel, the Nazi Movement's Almost Legendary Hero, Reaches the Screen.
Feb. 4, 1934
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
February 4, 1934,
See the article in its original context from
February 4, 1934,
VIEW ON TIMESMACHINE
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WHEN in the Summer the first announcement came that the Volksdeutsche Film Company had bought the rights to the popular story "Horst Wessel," by Hans Heinz Ewers, the rest of the film producers were kicking themselves for having slipped up on this fireproof chance. For at that time no one foresaw the changes in the development of the national government which were to come later. In those early days everything Nazi in book, theatre, film, was necessary propaganda. Quantity alone could give weight to the political steam roller. The making of a "Horst Wessel" film would surely have full governmental support. Was he not their officially sanctioned idol? Did not the mediocre song he had composed become their revolutionary chant? The program proves that earlier support: Supervision and music, Ernst Hanfstaengl (Hitler's press chief); SA adviser, Richard Fielder (Nazi organizer); a number of Nazi military organizations and, above all, the actual police force.Then about six weeks ago came the previewing of the film by a Nazi compendium with Dr. Goebbels at its head. One could now afford to be fastidious—the film was forbidden "for the heroic figure of Horst Wessel was incompetently interpreted, thereby endangering the interest of State and German prestige." Two weeks ago the film censor announced his okay on "Hans Westmar" (phonetic substitute for "Horst Wessel"), yesterday we had the première at the Capitol and today it has the unreserved approbation of the government. It proved to be a hundred percenter.Jazz and Communism.It shows the student, Hans Westmar, returning from a genial waltz loving Vienna to an objectionably international Berlin, where, in a bar, a Negro jazz band plays havoc with the martial rhythms of "Die Wacht am Rhein" and a Spanish dancer toys with the morals of a somewhat less martial burgher of the democratic year 1929. It shows communism as a corroding force and its head, a Russian, a serf to Moscow. Hans Westmar sees delivery from all this and more in the tenets of National Socialism. He becomes active. His organizing gifts are extraordinary, but he believes the party's growth to be in the masses. So he gives up his studies and becomes a manual laborer. He goes to live in the East of Berlin, the stronghold of the Communists. They plot against him, for he succeeds in winning over too many of their members. He is shot, and, though he lingers on a few days, the wound is fatal—he dies.Emil Lohkamp, who takes the title part, has the physical propensities of a fanatic. His abrupt manner of acting and speech underlines this to an almost unsympathetic degree. This must have been the cause of Dr. Goebbels's unfavorable verdict. Irmgard Willers, as the submissive creature of the Communists in love with Hans West-mar, outlines figure of such frail intensity in this first screen appearance that one may hopefully add her to the scant list of the more personal film faces. There are tow parts taken by Jews: a university professor advocating internationalism, which Siegmund Nunberg plays with direct simplicity; the other, a Communist leader and member of the Reichstag, is mugged by Hugo Döblin, who invests this rôle with all the approved bugbear characteristics — a contemptible performance. Neither of these two actors is mentioned in the program. The audience found cause for a laugh when the screen showed two bearded Jews watching a street fight, their whole attitude expressing a childlike and worried wonder at these combative doings—a reaction unthinkable outside the Reich's border.There is an intensely dramatic but very much abbreviated shot of a "Mensur," the German student's sabre practice, with the opponents standing close, deftly parrying heavy blows. A close-up shows their cheeks pouted. I take it this is to protect their teeth in case of cuts, which are frequent. But it did look comical and little in keeping with the seriousness of the situation and the dangerousness of this drill, which has caused the loss of so many lives. The ban which since the war had been put on this "exercise" has recently been lifted. Another one of the numerous Nazi reversions to pre-war practices.The most realistic and therefore the most vital parts of this picture are its mass scenes. The supposed to be historically exact street fight as the funeral cortège passes the Karl Liebknecht house, the Communist headquarters, is brutally convincing and gives one the sensation of an eyewitness. In the transition from "Horst Wessel" to "Hans Westmar" the film loses continuity and takes a knowledge of the book too much for granted. Because of this and in spite of an overabundance of close-ups, the intent of the picture is reversed—the story of Hans Westmar merely becomes background to a forcefully documented national movement."Bedside," which is about an X-ray photographer and the fortune he made by cultivating his professional manner, will be turned loose on Broadway soon by First National. It features Warren William and Jean Muir."The Heir Chaser," James Cagney's latest film, will be released by Warner Brothers under the title, "Blondes and Bonds." This is scheduled for an early Broadway showing. Bette Davis and Alice White are the women in it. Out in Hollywood Mr. Cagney is preparing to begin work with Joan Blondell in "Without Honor," which marks the first Cagney-Blondell collaboration since "Blonde Crazy." Most of the action takes place in a small fishing village and Lloyd Bacon, the director, has been hunting good location scenes along the California coast.Harry Wilcoxon, the young English actor, has gone to Hollywood to become Marc Antony in Cecil B. De Mille's "Cleapatra." Although he planned to spend several days in New York seeing plays and the sights, the studio demanded his presence and he sternly boarded a plane for the Coast. Mr. Wilcoxon holds a British aviation pilot's license and plans to do all his traveling in this far-flung country by plane. Just before leaving England, he played the leading rôle opposite Evelyn Laye in a British film, "Princess Charming."
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 4, 1934 of the National edition with the headline: FILM NEWS OF THE GERMAN CAPITAL; The Widely Read Story of Horst Wessel, the Nazi Movement's Almost Legendary Hero, Reaches the Screen.
