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(More customer reviews)"Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand" is a biography of Hans Litten, a crusading German lawyer whose life ended prematurely at Dachau concentration camp in 1938, seven years after he pressed Adolf Hitler into a fit of rage on the witness stand at the Eden Dance Palace Trial. A recent revival in interest and regard for Litten in Germany has led to some sanitizing of his character and politics, which author Benjamin Carter Hett attempts to dispel. He presents a picture of a complex and radical man, a champion of the downtrodden, intolerant and inflexible, anti-Weimar Republic, anti-Nazi, anti-democratic, sympathetic to Communists but not one of them, who believed in the law, which he used to advance social and political consciousness in the volatile last years of the Weimar Republic.
Hett doesn't dedicate much space to Litten's personal life, if, indeed, he had a personal life. He was an obsessive man for whom everything revolved around the goals he pursued in the courtroom. There is detailed coverage of Litten's role and Hitler's difficulty in the 1931 Eden Dance Palace Trial in which four Nazi stormtroopers were accused of the attempted murder of three people at a Berlin party, a trial that may have sealed Litten's fate years hence. A year later, Litten was expelled from court for politicizing another trial of Nazi stormtroopers, this time for a violent clash with the communist Combat League Against Fascism. The book then follows Litten's movement through a series of prisons and concentration camps as a political prisoner after he was arrested in 1933.
Hans Litten is an interesting, if not likeable, man who had an important career at a pivotal time and place in history. But I found "Crossing Hitler" most illuminating when discussing the legal climate in Germany in the years just before and after the Nazi party came to power. The author goes beyond the idea that the Weimar judicial system was simply soft on the political right to present a broader picture of a varied legal system that was in the throes of upheaval in the early 1930s, yet managing still to function. The tireless efforts of Hans Litten's friends Max and Margot Furst and his mother Irmgard to free him from prison reveal a bureaucracy in the grasp of Nazi power but not yet entirely subdued by it. "Crossing Hitler" is an insightful and sometimes eloquent look at how a legal system behaved in the midst of political turmoil, through he experiences of a revolutionary lawyer.
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Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness StandDuring a 1931 trial of four Nazi stormtroopers, known as the Eden Dance Palace trial, Hans Litten grilled Hitler in a brilliant and merciless three-hour cross-examination, forcing him into multiple contradictions and evasions and finally reducing him to helpless and humiliating rage (the transcription of Hitler's full testimony is included.)At the time, Hitler was still trying to prove his embrace of legal methods, and distancing himself from his stormtroopers.The courageous Litten revealed his true intentions, and in the process, posed a real threat to Nazi ambition. When the Nazis seized power two years after the trial, friends and family urged Litten to flee the country.He stayed and was sent to the concentration camps, where he worked on translations of medieval German poetry, shared the money and food he was sent by his wealthy family, and taught working-class inmates about art and literature. When Jewish prisoners at Dachau were locked in their barracks for weeks at a time, Litten kept them sane by reciting great works from memory. After five years of torture and hard labor-and a daring escape that failed-Litten gave up hope of survival. Hisstory was ultimately tragic but, as Benjamin Hett writes in this gripping narrative, it is also redemptive."It is a story of human nobility in the face of barbarism." The first full-length biography of Litten, the book also explores the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic and the terror of Nazi rule in Germany after 1933. [in sidebar] Winner of the 2007 Fraenkel Prize for outstanding work of contemporary history, in manuscript. To be published throughout the world.
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