The "Blood Night of Wöhrden"...


On March 7, 1929, the Hanoverian SA Oberfuhrer Karl Dincklage...



... wants to inspect the Dithmarscher SA at the start of a "propaganda week" on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein.

The brown thugs there have it very difficult, since the village of Wöhrden and the district of Dithmarschen (in Schleswig-Holstein) are predominantly socialist and communist.

After there had already been several clashes between communists and national socialists in the weeks leading up to the event, the SA assembly was banned by the authorities.

The NSDAP ignores the ban or circumvents it and declares the meeting a "closed general meeting". Despite the ban published in the newspapers, SA formations from all over Dithmarschen gathered in and in front of two opposite restaurants in the town center - a total of about 300 Nazis.





While the event was going on - word of which got around very quickly - socialist and - especially many - communist opponents of the Nazis made their way to Wöhrden from all over Dithmarschen, including many members of the "Red Front Fighters' Association" of the KPD.

When the SA people left the meeting place, they met about 100 counter-demonstrators and after verbal arguments, a fight ensued with rubber truncheons, pieces of steel, knives and daggers (NS propaganda image)...:



Two SA men and a "red front fighter" die, seven people involved are treated in hospital with serious injuries and 23 others with minor injuries.

Among the seriously injured is the member of the Reichstag and KPD functionary Christian Heuck in the next picture in the middle)...:



He and other communists are arrested by the police and taken to the Heide court prison, but later released.

As a result, all public parades will be banned throughout the province of Schleswig-Holstein. Shortly thereafter, the ban will also be extended to Hamburg.

The matter also has a judicial aftermath - and even then the judiciary was "blind" in the right eye:
In 1930, thirteen communists and only one SA man were indicted and convicted by the Altona jury in Meldorf.

The main accused was Christian Heuck...



...who was the only one in custody for six months until the trial and was sentenced to one year and nine months in prison. The social-democratic press criticized the “one-sidedness of the court”.

Heuck will have to serve his sentence until the last day and then be released - but not for long:


Immediately after the Nazis took power, he was arrested in 1933 and imprisoned in Neumüster prison for "preparing to commit high treason" (he had distributed leaflets on a general strike against the Nazi takeover of power!).

On February 23, 1933, he was visited in his cell by SA men, cruelly mistreated and beaten to death. The corpse is then hung up in the cell - later it will officially be said that he committed "suicide".

(Later it will come out that the order to kill the SA men came directly from Obernazi Heinrich Himmler!)

After the "Blood Night of Wöhrden" the Nazis exploited what they call the "Blood Night of Wörhrden" with great success in propaganda:

The Nazis staged the burials as demonstrations of confession of political martyrdom with several thousand participants...:





Adolf Hitler traveled to Dithmarschen for the burial of the two killed SA men in St. Annen and Albersdorf...:





The description of the events as "Blood Night of Wöhrden" comes from this brochure of the NSDAP Reichstag faction, which was published in March 1929 with a print run of 30,000 copies and for which Hitler personally wrote the foreword...:



After the events, the NSDAP recorded a wave of entries in Dithmarschen. Four years before the "seizure of power" in Germany, the Nazis became the dominant political force in the region.

The clothes worn by the two SA men who died, the so-called "blood shirts", were publicly displayed like relics at the time - and by the then NSDAP district leader of the Süderdithmarschen district, Martin Matthiessen...



...an old Nazi who was convinced until the end of his life, preserved beyond the war and the collapse.

After his death in 1978, the "blood shirts" were found on him and can now be seen in the Dithmar local history museum...