Charlie Kirk is not the first -- totalitarian regimes have long understood how to build myths on violence

Creation of a political martyr: The dark history behind this moment
Charlie Kirk is not the first — totalitarian regimes have long understood how to build myths on violence

By Mike Lofgren
Contributing Writer
Published September 28, 2025 6:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) 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, especially socialists and communists. He was also notable as a recruiter of aimless youths who wanted to be tough guys; for them the Nazi Storm Trooper units were the place to cast off the shackles of civilized inhibitions.

....(snip)....

Sordid circumstances notwithstanding, the Nazis made a highly choreographed spectacle of Wessel’s death. Although they had already sought to mythologize in the past the supposedly noble sacrifice of Nazi activists killed in street fighting, Wessel was the first to be elevated to supreme martyr status. The religious overtones were unmistakable in Joseph Goebbels’ eulogy:



Whatever his organizational contributions may have been, Horst Wessel was of far greater use to the Nazi leadership as a dead martyr than as a living party member. This exploitation was of course opportunistic in the extreme, but it also revealed something fundamental about totalitarian psychology. Hitler biographer Joachim Fest described Nazism as a death cult, a nihilistic movement that didn’t celebrate life, let alone try to preserve it, but instead wallowed in death and the morbid state of mind induced by solemn commemorations. They even had a “day of the dead” in imitation of Christianity, another movement fueled by apocalyptic associations and martyrology. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/09/28/the-creation-of-a-political-martyr-theres-history-behind-this-moment/