In this episode of Fascism on Film, we take on Hans Westmar (1933), part of the so-called “Martyr Trilogy” alongside S.A. Mann Brand and Hitler Youth Quex. The film attempts to mythologize Horst Wessel, the S.A. leader killed in 1930 whose death the Nazi Party turned into a foundational legend. We discuss the film’s unusual production history—how it was originally shot using Wessel’s name, banned by Goebbels, re-edited, retitled, and ultimately released to little public interest. As we note in the episode, even Goebbels dismissed it as “the bloodiest amateurism,” and the filmmaking itself bears this out: it’s poorly directed, weakly written, and narratively incoherent.

We break down the way Hans Westmar dramatizes the early “time of struggle,” portraying Berlin as a battleground between Communists and the S.A., with the Weimar Republic fractured into competing political factions. The movie shows street fights, riots, and marches while positioning the Nazis as Germany’s only hope for unity. The Communist characters are rendered as grotesque stereotypes—one resembling Stalin, another Trotsky, and one heavily coded as a Jewish caricature—while Berlin is depicted as a “cosmopolitan” city corrupted by diversity, English beer, and foreign music. In the film’s worldview, only struggle and purification can restore Germany’s true “character.”

Our discussion also focuses on the film’s ideological agenda: its celebration of self-sacrifice, its elevation of martyrdom, and its insistence that anti-fascist slogans mark a villain rather than a warning. The movie turns Hans Westmar’s death into a mystical ascension, complete with afterlife imagery of Nazi martyrs gathering in a kind of Valhalla. At the funeral, one Communist character even raises his fist in solidarity before slowly transforming it into a Hitler salute—a moment so visually blatant that it distills the film’s goal of converting doubt into obedience.

We close by placing the film in its historical moment. Hans Westmar arrived just months after S.A. Mann Brand and was quickly overshadowed by Hitler Youth Quex, the trilogy’s more polished entry. After the Night of Long Knives, films glorifying the S.A. became politically inconvenient, and stories about the “time of struggle” vanished from Reich cinema. Though nearly unwatchable as a film, Hans Westmar remains a revealing artifact of early Nazi mythmaking—one that shows how fascism used cinema to remake history, sanctify violence, and transform propaganda into legend.