Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Stormtroopers
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1975
WEBSITE:
CITY: Newcastle upon Tyne
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: German
Telephone: +44 191 208 6493
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2007131057
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2007131057
HEADING: Siemens, Daniel
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PERSONAL
Born 1975.
EDUCATION:Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, teaching assistant, 2006; Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany, lecturer, 2006, senior lecturer, 2017; University College London, School of Slavonic and East European History, DAAD Francis L. Carsten Lecturer in Modern German History, 2011-14; Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, professor of European history, 2017–.
AWARDS:Berliner Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, Erhard-Hoepfner-Prize, 2003; Franz Steiner Prize for Transatlantic History, 2006; Prize ‘Geisteswissenschaften International’ for Horst Wessel: Tod und Verklaerung eines Nationalsozialisten, 2010; BBC History Magazine “Book of the Year,” for The Making of a Nazi Hero, 2013;
Recipient of fellowships, including LMU Munich, Center for Advanced Studies, visiting fellow, 2015; University of Bologna, DAAD visiting professorship, 2016; Hebrew University Jerusalem, Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History, Stavenhagen Guest-Professorship, 2018.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
German writer Daniel Siemens, a professor of European history at Newcastle University in England, has published numerous books on European and U.S. history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With a Ph.D. in modern history from Humboldt University in Berlin, Siemens was a teaching assistant at Humboldt University, senior lecturer at Bielefeld University in Germany, and the DAAD Francis L. Carsten Lecturer in Modern German History at University College London.
The Making of a Nazi Hero
In 2013, Siemens published The Making of a Nazi Hero: The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel, in which he describes the life of Wessel, an ambitious member of the SA Brown Shirt and rank-and-file Stormtrooper who was killed on January 14, 1930 outside his home in Berlin by a member of the Communist Party and whose death Joseph Goebbels used as propaganda for the Third Reich. Martyred, Wessel became a hero for the Nazi movement and the song about him, “Die Fahne Hoch” (“The Flag on High”), also known as the “Horst Wessel Song,” became the official Nazi party anthem. Siemens examines the Nazi propaganda machine, its chilling effectiveness, and how the Nazi’s turned murder into myth which was central to National Socialist identity and rule. Rather than an assassination, Wessel was actually killed in a dispute over a prostitute.
Siemens also delves into the political violence of the Weimer Republic, the political vengeance of the Third Reich, and Germany’s legal system before and after 1933. In World War II, Dennis Showalter praised the book, saying: “Siemens rises to the challenge of integrating and contextualizing these narratives. Masterfully combining exhaustive archival research with scholarly literature, he reconstructs how a criminal case metastasized into a cultural and political phenomenon.”
In Roger Moorhouse’s critique of the book in the BBC History Magazine website, he noted a minor complaint about the social science jargon, which might befuddle non-specialist readers, and Siemen’s archly critical tone with a few prejudicial asides. Nevertheless, Moorhouse praised Siemen’s examination: “Siemens expertly dissects Wessel’s brief life and his later myth, producing a highly scholarly yet thoroughly readable text, which tells its complex story with considerable élan. …His approach is rigorous and comprehensive, with liberal use of the original documents, some of which are apparently examined for the first time.”
Stormtroopers
In 2017, Siemens published Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts, a chronicle of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (SA) thugs from 1921 to 1945. Known for wearing brown shirts, swastika armbands, and hobnailed boots, the SA perpetrated a campaign of intimidation and violence across Germany beginning in the 1920s. The SA was a social movement that used violence and populist appeal to destroy the Weimar Republic. In 1934, Hitler initiated the “Night of the Long Knives” in which he ordered the assassination of SA leaders, including Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm. The SA remained in force, working for the Third Reich. Siemens describes the history of the SA, its ideology and culture, its activities in German-occupied regions during World War II, its recruitment of young men for the military, and its role in the Holocaust.
Siemens described the SA culture of militant masculinity as an emotional shelter for its members with a lifestyle based on extreme partisan views not subject to factual accuracy. These young men felt relevant in a hostile environment that struggled against traditional leaders, and found a family in a surrogate organization. “It rejected democracy, especially the divisiveness of political parties representing differing class and economic interests, in the name of a unity of race and conviction embodied in the bond between the people and the charismatic leader,” explained Christopher R. Browning online at New York Review of Books.
Post-war, the SA claimed they were not a criminal organization due to being stripped of most of their power after the 1934 killings of their leadership, and the International Military Tribunal in 1945-46 agreed, allowing many members to go free. Siemens “has corrected this fallacy—and with it our understanding of the SAs significance to the Nazi movement—in this book, which is, quite simply, the best history of Hitler’s stormtroopers to date,” noted Brian K. Feltman writing in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. “While prone to jargon … and not easily accessible to the general reader, this diligent study should remain required reading for years to come,” according to William John Sheperd in Military History. Sheperd appreciated Siemens’ extensive endnotes, enumerated plates, photographs, drawings, bibliography, and appendices. Writing in Kirkus Reviews, a contributor observed that the book, filled with Teutonic compound nouns, is not a pop culture history, but rather “It is a scholarly work, assiduously researched and filled with illustrative examples and case studies covering the development of the SA, its role in a fight against Versailles and Weimar,” as well as its cruelties and legacy today.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2017, review of Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts.
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, spring, 2018, Brian K. Feltman, review of Stormtroopers, p. 93.
Military History, May, 2018, William John Shepherd, review of Stormtroopers, p. 72.
World War II, November-December, 2013, Dennis Showalter, review of The Making of a Nazi Hero: The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel, p. 75.
ONLINE
BBC History Magazine, https://www.historyextra.com/ (June 1, 2018), Roger Moorhouse, review of The Making of A Nazi Hero.
New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/(April 5, 2018), Christopher R. Browning, review of Stormtroopers.
Professor Daniel Siemens
Professor of European History
Email: daniel.siemens@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 191 208 6493
Address: Room 1.22a
School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Armstrong Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
Background
Research
Teaching
Publications
After having studied history, literature and law in Potsdam, Montpellier and Berlin, I received my doctorate in modern history from Humboldt University Berlin 2006, where I have also started to teach as a teaching assistant. I was appointed lecturer in Modern History at Bielefeld University in the fall of 2006. From 2011-14 I served as the DAAD Francis L. Carsten Lecturer in Modern German History at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European History (UCL-SSEES). Subsequently, I returned to Bielefeld University, where I submitted my habilitation thesis in 2016. I received the venia legendi in early 2017 and was promoted to the position of senior lecturer. In October 2017 I joined Newcastle University as professor of European history.
Roles and Responsibilities at Newcastle University
Postgraduate research selector (from 2017, with Violetta Hionidou)
Honours and Awards
Stavenhagen Guest-Professorship at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History, Hebrew University Jerusalem (2018)
DAAD Visiting professorship at the University of Bologna (2016)
Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies, LMU Munich (2015)
BBC History Magazine "Book of the Year" for The Making of a Nazi Hero (2013)
Prize 'Geisteswissenschaften International' for Horst Wessel: Tod und Verklaerung eines Nationalsozialisten (2010)
Member of the Junges Kolleg, a research network for excellent young researchers and scholars based at the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts, Duesseldorf (2009-2012)
Franz Steiner Prize for Transatlantic History (2006)
Erhard-Hoepfner-Prize by the Berliner Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (2003)
Research Grants
from Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Stiftung Mercator, German Historical Institute Washington DC, UCL, Bielefeld University, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung
Languages
German, English, French (active)
Spanish, Latin (passive)
Print Marked Items
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's
Brownshirts
William John Shepherd
Military History.
35.1 (May 2018): p72+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 World History Group, LLC
http://www.historynet.com/magazines/military_history
Full Text:
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts, by Daniel Siemens, Yale University Press, New
Haven, Conn., 2017, $32.50
In pop culture mention of the word Stormtroopers evokes images of the menacing white-clad imperial
soldiers immortalized in the Star Wars film franchise. For historians it calls to mind Nazi Fuhrer Adolf
Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA) thugs, wearing brown shirts, swastika armbands and hobnailed boots as the
ugly face of Germany's Third Reich, among the worst regimes in the sad history of humankind. Author
Daniel Siemens, a professor of European history at Newcastle University, claims his is the first
comprehensive account of the SA, spanning from 1921 to 1945, whereas most stop at 1934, when Hitler
purged the SA leadership in the infamous "Night of the Long Knives."
Siemens argues the SA was a social movement that used violence and populist appeal to destroy the Weimar
Republic and advance the Nazis to political power. Although reined in by Hitler, the SA remained a bulwark
of the Third Reich, especially as a feeder of its thousands of individual members into the German military
(Wehrmacht). The SA was also active in Eastern Europe, integrating ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) into
the Reich, pressuring allied regimes like Slovakia to round up Jews and supporting occupation forces (the
Gestapo and SS) in Poland, especially in putting down the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. On the home front SA
members engaged in worker education, as air raid wardens and as a last-ditch home guard (Volkssturm) at
the bitter end in 1945.
With a mastery of German language archival sources, Siemens presents chapters documented with extensive
endnotes and supported by 33 enumerated plates, mostly photographs but also drawings and posters, though
sans a bibliography, glossary or appendices. He convincingly makes a provocative case SA members
successfully downplayed their post-1934 role as a legal defense during the postwar military tribunals of
Nuremberg, enabling many of them to avoid punishment and also fueling the largely mythic notion of the
"Good German"--a simple patriot and not an ardent Nazi. While prone to jargon (i.e., the "microsociology of
violence") and not easily accessible to the general reader, this diligent study should remain required reading
for years to come.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Shepherd, William John. "Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts." Military History, May
2018, p. 72+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532656041/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a623f8e3. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532656041
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's
Brownshirts
Brian K. Feltman
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History.
30.3 (Spring 2018): p93+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 World History Group, LLC
http://www.historynet.com/magazines/mhq
Full Text:
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts
By Daniel Siemens.
459 pages.
Tale University Press, 2017.
$32.50.
The brown-shirted stormtroopers of the Sturmabteilungen (SA) were one of the most visible and feared
symbols of Nazism before and immediately after Adolf Hitler's ascension to power. While historians have
rarely considered their significance beyond the early years of Hitler's rule, Daniel Siemen offers the first
comprehensive account of the SA by following its stormtroopers from the streets of Munich to the German
settlements of Eastern Europe.
Siemens traces the stormtroopers' early years in post-World War I Bavaria, showing how violence was key
to the SAs foundational myth even before its members first donned their infamous brown shirts in 1924. The
SA relied on war veterans to shape the younger recruits who joined in search of the sense of power they
gained from fighting and humiliating the Nazis' political enemies. By April 1934 the SAs membership had
swelled to four million, yet its power was threatened when Hitler began compromising with the German
elite. The murderous 1934 purge of the SAs leadership, including Ernst Rohm, the most influential of its
higher-ups, thus provided Hitler with the opportunity to subdue the stormtroopers and make amends with
the old-guard military leaders who feared they would be replaced with a "people's militia" of brownshirts.
Siemens acknowledges that the Rohm purge seriously weakened the SA, but he departs from earlier
histories by documenting how the next generation of stormtroopers, spurred on by virulent anti-Semitism,
helped to "Germanize" the East, trained future soldiers for military service, served in the Wehrmacht with
regular and elite divisions, and collaborated in the implementation of the Holocaust.
The myth of the SA's post-1934 impotence stemmed from the effective defense adopted by its lawyers at the
International Military Tribunal in 1945-1946, which found that the organization was not criminal. Siemens
has corrected this fallacy--and with it our understanding of the SAs significance to the Nazi movement--in
this book, which is, quite simply, the best history of Hitler's stormtroopers to date.
Brian K. Feltman is the author of The Stigma of Surrender: German Prisoners, British Captors, and
Manhood in the Great War and Beyond (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Feltman, Brian K. "Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts." MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of
Military History, Spring 2018, p. 93+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526316182/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a8895668.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526316182
Siemens, Daniel: STORMTROOPERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Siemens, Daniel STORMTROOPERS Yale Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $32.50 11, 7 ISBN: 978-0-300-19681-
8
An exhaustive examination of Hitler's Sturmabteilungen, aka the SA.As Siemens (History, Philosophy, and
Theology/Bielefeld Univ.; The Making of a Nazi Hero: The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel, 2013, tec.)
reports in this revelatory scholarly survey, the SA, founded soon after the Treaty of Versailles in the 1920s,
was once not the only popular substitute for Germany's demolished war machine; it soon became the sole
"people's militia" serving as an adjunct of the nascent Nazi Party. The stormtroopers were generally
undereducated and unemployed young men with a gang mentality, and they shared a love of uniforms and a
distinct hatred of Bolsheviks and Jews. Hitler often wore the stormtroopers' uniform, made by Hugo Boss.
The SA became so powerful as their rancorous numbers increased that the Fuhrer had their erstwhile leader,
Ernst Rohm, murdered along with many others during the notorious "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934.
The SA, no longer a threat to the regime, still had important functions under their new boss, Heinrich
Himmler, and the group took a prominent role in the murder of Jews. Stormtroopers were instrumental in
the deadly Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, and they excelled as guards in prisons and concentration camps.
During the war, a few stormtroopers were selected to resettle on farms in enemy territory, and some were
appointed as diplomats in occupied regions. Many others were drafted into the Wehrmacht, where their
sociopathic tendencies were well-employed. Siemens' book, land-mined with Teutonic compound nouns, is
decidedly not a pop history. It is a scholarly work, assiduously researched and filled with illustrative
examples and case studies covering the development of the SA, its role in a fight against Versailles and
Weimar, its cruelties, its survival, and its legacy today. It will be a significant source of discussion and an
influence on the historiography of the Third Reich. A considerable work that promises to be the preferred
text in English on the brown-shirted stormtroopers for some time to come.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Siemens, Daniel: STORMTROOPERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217575/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6874b5d3.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217575
The Making of A Nazi Hero
Dennis Showalter
World War II.
28.4 (November-December 2013): p75+.
COPYRIGHT 2013 World History Group, LLC
http://www.historynet.com/
Full Text:
THE MAKING OF A NAZI HERO
The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel
By Daniel Siemens. 20 pp.
I. B. Tauris, 2013. $20.
Horst Wessel was a rank-and-file storm trooper, an SA Brown Shirt, whose murder in 1930 made him a
propaganda icon as the Nazi Party rose to power, and then a subject of heroic memorialization in the Third
Reich. The party anthem became "The Flag on High" (better known as "The Horst Wessel Song"), whose
lyrics Wessel had written, and it was performed at rallies and belted out by SA troopers parading through the
streets. After 1945, both the East and West German governments buried this Nazi symbol as their necessary
first step to claiming moral high ground for a "new" Germany.
But Wessel's story is well worth exhuming, for it offers a multifaceted case study of political violence in the
Weimar Republic and political vengeance in the Third Reich, the workings of Germany's legal system
before and after 1933, and of the mythmaking that was central to National Socialist identity and rule.
Historian Daniel Siemens rises to the challenge of integrating and contextualizing these narratives.
Masterfully combining exhaustive archival research with scholarly literature, he reconstructs how a criminal
case metastasized into a cultural and political phenomenon.
Wessel and his milieu were products of the Great War and its chaotic aftermath. A Protestant pastor's son,
Wessel repudiated his bourgeois identity in favor of the violence at the heart of National Socialism. He
found his place in 1920s Berlin. Siemens brilliantly describes this turbulent scene, where politics informed
the mundane, where the Nazi "community of action" provided structure and meaning, and where a dispute
over unpaid rent could get a man killed.
That was what happened to Horst Wessel. His shooting was not, as the Nazis claimed, a Communist plot.
Nor was it personal--pimps quarreling over a streetwalker, as was also claimed. Nor was the killers' trial
shaped by politics, Nazi or otherwise. The verdict was harsh and the sentences long. But Siemens
establishes the complex and contradictory nature of the evidence in this "assassination"--in fact, the kind of
crime that big-city courts often consider a useful excuse for getting thugs off the streets, one way or another.
And so away they went.
To the Nazis, however, Horst Wessel was an instant centerpiece in the movement's pantheon of martyrs. His
death helped authenticate and legitimize National Socialism's mission. Elevated to cult figure, Wessel was
endlessly heralded in classrooms and in pulpits as an example of the new Germany. He inspired books,
songs, poems, and statuary--all distinctly bad. Wessel's iconic status atrophied as the war brought new
heroes and new victims. But the Reich and its dedicated minions had long memories.
Of the 16 people convicted for Wessel's murder, two were murdered in 1933. Two were executed after a
1935 show trial. Four died in concentration camps. After the war, Wessel's "avengers" got off lightly:
closing the books and starting over involved overlooking small fry deemed to have "gone with the flow"
during the Nazi regime. But it was not until 1998 that the German government legalized the reversal of
National Socialist criminal verdicts deemed unjust. Siemens calls this symbolic gesture important. In an
imperfect world, it's better than nothing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Showalter, Dennis. "The Making of A Nazi Hero." World War II, Nov.-Dec. 2013, p. 75+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A345172316/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5d2586d6.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A345172316
The making of a nazi hero: the murder
and myth of horst wessel
Daniel Siemens
New Statesman.
142.5150 (Mar. 22, 2013): p58.
COPYRIGHT 2013 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
"Raise the Flag", better known as the "Horst Wessel Song", was a Nazi anthem. It commemorated the death
of a young SA cadre, shot in Berlin by a member of the Communist Party. Daniel Siemens examines how
the Nazis turned Wessel's murder into myth.
I B Tauris, 320pp, [pounds sterling]20
Jonathan Derbyshire
Siemens, Daniel
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Siemens, Daniel. "The making of a nazi hero: the murder and myth of horst wessel." New Statesman, 22
Mar. 2013, p. 58. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A326351373/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=369bbada. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A326351373
‘For Fighting We Were Born’
Christopher R. Browning APRIL 5, 2018 ISSUE
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts
by Daniel Siemens
Yale University Press, 459 pp., $32.50
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Stormtroopers without their brown uniforms, which were banned by German authorities several times between their introduction in 1926 and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933. Daniel Siemens writes that an ‘SA troop…with members dressed in white shirts or other surrogate “uniforms” still remained highly recognizable.’
The torchlight parade of some ten to fifteen thousand brown-shirted stormtroopers through the streets of Berlin on the night of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933 is certainly one of the best-known images of the Nazi era. It is no surprise, then, that it was invoked last August by a few hundred American white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the moment they openly admitted their identification with National Socialism by chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us” and carrying the swastika flag alongside the Confederate flag. But who exactly were the stormtroopers, members of Hitler’s SA (Sturmabteilungen, or Storm Sections), whom the Americans were trying to emulate? Daniel Siemens’s new book, Stormtroopers, provides us with an up-to-date answer to that question. It varies in some ways depending upon which period of the Nazi era one is looking at, but there were also features of the SA, Siemens notes, that remained fixed throughout.
The constants of the SA were violence and racism. It was a paramilitary group composed above all, as Siemens notes, of “communities of violence.” Violence was rational and purposeful. It constructed identity, created sociability and a sense of belonging, and provided self-empowerment for the stormtroopers. It mobilized and unified them. It separated them from mainstream society and marked them as crusaders on behalf of a higher cause. It nourished “feelings of liberation”—above all a freedom to destroy. The higher cause was the national unity and social solidarity of the Volksgemeinschaft, or racial community of Germans, created by the exclusion of others and preserved through vigilant policing of that exclusion by the self-appointed guardians of racial purity, such as the SA itself.
As a fighting community, the SA was a subculture of militant masculinity that provided a surrogate family and an “emotional shelter” for its members. It created what Siemens calls a “lifestyle” based on “emotional excitement” rather than reason and an “alternative public sphere” for “extreme partisan views” not subject to “factual accuracy.” It rejected democracy, especially the divisiveness of political parties representing differing class and economic interests, in the name of a unity of race and conviction embodied in the bond between the people and the charismatic leader. Its sense of struggle against the old order as well as against Jews and Marxists made its members feel “relevant” within a “hostile” environment. Unresolved were potentially troubling questions about just how anticapitalist the SA’s populism was and just how much social change at least some of its members would demand should the movement succeed in coming to power. In the…
Reviewed by: Roger Moorhouse
Author: Daniel Siemens
Publisher: IB Tauris
Price (RRP): £20
The devil has all the best tunes, so they say, and Horst Wessel’s rousing ‘Lied’, penned in 1929, was no exception. An unofficial anthem of the Third Reich and a staple of Nazi ceremonial, it was required from 1934 that every German citizen should raise their right arm in a ‘Hitler greeting’ upon hearing it. But for his song – and the circumstances of his death – Wessel would doubtless have languished in obscurity. The middle-class son of a Protestant pastor, Wessel fell into the violent subculture of Weimar-era Berlin, emerging as a prominent member of the Nazi ‘Brownshirts’ – the SA – who battled their political opponents on the capital’s streets. Ultimately, Wessel died in the manner in which he lived; shot by a communist gang in January 1930.
However, as Siemens’ excellent book relates, what followed was something like a Nazi apotheosis. Shot in the face, Wessel languished in hospital for five weeks before succumbing to septicaemia. But in that time, he was expertly elevated by Goebbels to the status of a martyr to the Nazi cause, in spite of the fact that his death appears to have been caused by nothing more political than a sordid squabble over a prostitute.
In the years that followed, Wessel was immortalised across Germany, with a film, numerous books and countless monuments dedicated to his memory, as well as a Berlin suburb, a Waffen-SS division and a Luftwaffe squadron all being named after him. He became the ‘poster-boy’ of the Nazi Kampfzeit – the ‘Time of Struggle’.
Siemens expertly dissects Wessel’s brief life and his later myth, producing a highly scholarly yet thoroughly readable text, which tells its complex story with considerable élan. He shines a stark light not only on Wessel’s squalid murder and his ‘beatification’, but also on the revenge meted out by the Nazis to his killers, and on the rather tortured efforts of postwar Germany to unravel the resulting legal mess. His approach is rigorous and comprehensive, with liberal use of the original documents, some of which are apparently examined for the first time.
If there are complaints to be aired, they are minor. Very occasionally the book lapses into social science jargon, which might momentarily befuddle the non-specialist reader. Also, Siemens’s tone tends to be archly critical, with a few prejudicial asides that serve to dent the impression of objectivity. Certainly, there is little to admire in Wessel, but one feels that a more consistently neutral tone might have been more appropriate.
These are petty quibbles, however. Siemens has delivered an outstanding work of history, which illuminates and educates, yet wears its considerable erudition lightly. He has taken a tale long entwined in and obscured by its own mythology and stripped it back to its essentials, allowing us to evaluate it afresh. With this book, Siemens has raised the flag for serious, well-written, accessible history and given his subject the thoroughgoing scholarly treatment that Wessel’s ‘martyr’ status, however repugnant, undoubtedly deserves.
Roger Moorhouse is the author of Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939—45 (Vintage, 2011)