According to historian David Pietrusza’s 1932, Wessel, the son of a Lutheran minister, was “primarily a street fighter” for the Nazis in their Weimar-era battles with Communists. He had “taken a live-in girlfriend” who was a prostitute. And he was just 22 when he was killed in a fight after his landlord asked her Communist friends to help evict them. He was no saint (some think he was a pimp), and he was not murdered in service to his cause. “This was neighbors against him, rather than political enemies,” Peter Fritzsche, a University of Illinois professor and author of Hitler’s First Hundred Days, tells me. As far as the Nazis were concerned, Wessel was more useful dead than he had been alive. He would be celebrated after his death in 1930 as a fallen hero. Just after taking power in 1933, thousands of SS members led by Chancellor Adolf Hitler himself marched by the Communist Party’s headquarters before the new chancellor spoke at Wessel’s grave as a monument was placed there, praising the street-fighter as a “blood witness” who’d sacrificed his life for “a monument more lasting than stone and bronze.”... “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” according to early Christian author Tertullian. This is a philosophically neutral truism. And if martyrs are inherently helpful, then manufacturing them is a logical next step. According to Pietrusza, “Goebbels (once a devout Catholic and perhaps even bound for the priesthood) grasped the immense value of any cult of martyrology.”