Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand | 
 enlarge | Author: Benjamin Carter Hett
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 106173
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0195369882
Dewey Decimal Number: 943.086092
EAN: 9780195369885
ASIN: 0195369882
Publication Date: September 18, 2008
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Product Description
During 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. His story 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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| Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...
 The Enemy's Enemy November 19, 2008
There is an old saying that "My enemy's enemy is my friend." A sometime corollary of that saying could be "My enemy's enemy is a hero." The story of Hans Litten is the story of an enemy of 20th Century civilization's worst enemy. Litten was a barrister in Weimar Germany who resisted Hitler and the Nazis with every ounce of his being, and he paid for his resistance with arrest, internment, torture, and eventual death. History has remembered him as a hero and a martyr. By turns he has been a martyr to Christianity, Judaism, Communism, and the legal profession, and he may well be a little of all of those. You know a man has a complex personality when he considers himself both a Jew, a Christian, and an admirer of Nietzsche.
In the turbulent time just before the fall of the Weimar Republic, Litten used his legal skills to vigorously defend Communists accused of criminal activity and to act as a relentless private prosecutor of Nazis who offended against Communists. In the Eden Dance Palace trial he prosecuted a number of Nazis for their involvement in what was basically a gang fight between Nazis and Communists. His case theory was that these Nazis were members of "Storm 33" one of a number of "Storms" recruited by Hitler and the Nazis to engage in gang warfare against the enemies of Nazism. To prove his point he subpoenaed Adolph Hitler to testify at the trial, and when he got Hitler on the witness stand, he grilled the future Fuhrer unmercifully. Hitler never forgot his humiliation at Litten's hands.
Although Litten is remembered as a legal hero, he sometimes did not use the law heroically. His legal tactics were not in the highest traditions of legal ethics, and on some occasions actually worked against his clients' interests. As a lawyer you shouldn't use a criminal trial to make political statements against enemies. This is especially so when the tactics used prejudice your client.
Hett's book is well written, and captures Litten's moral ambiguity even as Hett praises Litten's opposition of Hitler. "Crossing Hitler" tells an interesting tale of intrigue and presents a moral conundrum. Litten bent legal ethics to the breaking point in the fight against Hitler. Was he right to do so? Does confronting a great evil justify doing a lesser evil? To borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, when you fight monsters you must be careful not to become one yourself.
"The challenge of confronting Hans Litten" November 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It would have been easy enough to have written a biography of Litten which simply painted him as prescient, courageous & heroic. Certainly he was all of these things. How to explain why he made the choices he did is a tad more difficult; in the epilogue, Benjamin Hett discusses the various versions of Litten (Communist warrior or Christian martyr --- take your pick) which have evolved over the decades. Hett concludes that there was no single motivation for why Litten fought these battles, and that perhaps Litten himself could not have satisfactorily explained it, other than to say that it needed to be done.
As it is, we the readers are treated to a gripping slice of history, where one determined lawyer came close to descrediting Hitler and possibly derailing his movement. He very well could have done it (he or other determined lawyers in Germany), except that the legal establishment did its gosh-darndest to make it as easy as possible for the Nazis to take power and then consolidate their grip.
The complicity of the judges, lawyers and police in allowing the thuggish, quasi-legal (at best) Nazis make the move into legal respectability is a central theme in Hett's book. Litten was not just fighting against the Nazis --- he was also fighting against an often reactionary system (the request by Superior Court officials to have Hitler return portraits of Kaiser Wilhelm II to the court rooms is most illuminating) which was equally determined to keep a trouble-maker like Litten in check as it was to assist a movement dedicated (so it said) to law and order. That so many people were willing to overlook the unlawful and disorderly nature of the Nazis made it well nigh impossible for Litten to win.
For those who don't know how the Nazi regime progressed in its early years in power, Hett's book provides good illustrations as to how things evolved. The Third Reich can be broken down into several stages, and Litten experienced them all first-hand through his imprisonment. An initial pummelling at the hands of SA goons then made the transition to a more orderly imprisonment where intellectuals like Litten could enjoy scholarly pursuits during their confinement. Traditional prisons then gave way to the concentration camps, the nature of which was growing ever more ominous when Litten had decided that enough was enough and took his life. He spared himself the horrors which were to follow.
All in all, Hett has presented a wonderfully thorough and well-researched book which examines and incredibly complicated man. Another reviewer commented on the similarities between the personalities of Litten and Hitler, and I too was struck by this as I read it. How can it be that someone we regard as heroic could also remind us in some ways of Hitler himself? There are no easy answers here, and Hett does not try to make it easy. This is very much to his credit.
EXCELLENT November 14, 2008
Crossing Hitler is the story of the man who put Adolph Hitler on the witness stand in 1931. It is the story of the German attorney Hans Litten.
Hans Litten was a fervent anti-Nazi attorney who actively opposed the Nazi party during the years in which Hitler and the Nazi party were in fervent competition for power with the German Worker's Party and the communists and other parties. Hans Litten, though self-described as being to the "left" even of the communists was not a member of the communist party, though he defended communists in court as well as prosecuted Nazi's as a "private prosecutor."
Crossing Hitler centers around the Eden Dance Palace trial of 1931 in which members of Storm Troop 33 were charged with attempted murder. At the time, the SA (also known as "Storm Troopers") were clashing in the streets with communists and other parties who were contesting the Nazis and others for power after 1929 and the renewed period of unrest in Germany. The Eden Dance Palace trial is the case in which Hans Litten put Hitler on the witness stand and questioned him. Hitler would never forget this nor Hans Litten, to Hans Litten's detriment.
The book discusses the entire life of Hans Litten and it is essentially a biography with the Eden Dance Palace trial being the seminal or turning event. After this, Hans Litten and his family were persecuted. Hans Litten was then sent to concentration camps.
The book is an excellent biography and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the law. As an attorney, I found the book excellent. I especially liked how it actually contained a "transcript" (pieced together from several sources) of the actual testimony of Hitler. This is found in the appendix to the book.The book also provides a good deal of historical insight into pre-Nazi Germany and an excellent historiography of the "Hans Litten" story.
 Law is for the weak. The strong do not need it November 14, 2008
German Weimar Republic lawyer Hans Joachim Albert Litten is the subject of Benjamin Carter Hett's 2008 biography, CROSSING HITLER. Hans Litten is increasingly well known to and admired by insiders: German jurists. But he is on a far lower international popularity scale from other victims of Adolph Hitler such as Anne Frank or even the Jewish-Catholic philosopher Edith Stein (Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross). Hett's carefully crafted, clearly written study is a laudable step towards making Hans Litten deservedly better known.
When Hans Litten was only 27 years old, he summoned Adolph Hitler to testify May 8, 1931 in a Berlin trial in which Litten represented three wounded victims of an assault by Nazi SA members on a Communist bar, the Eden Dance Palace. Author Hett uses this trial as a point of departure to explain the broader context of Hitler's efforts over the preceding eight months to convince the moderate German middle class that his Nazi party had renounced violence and would come to political power only through peaceful, legal methods. In his oral examination of Hitler, young Hans Litten impaled both Hitler and for his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbel on the horns of a political dilemma: how retain both Hitler's new image as (A) a moderate and (B) the simultaneous loyalty to Hitler the Fuehrer of members of his already huge bully boy private army, the SA. Hitler successfully trimmed, bobbed and weaved and threaded the needle given him by Hans Litten. The court was irked by Litten's alleged witness tampering and declined to require Hitler to answer certain of Litten's questions that might, in an alternative history, have caused the Fuehrer's popularity and electability to vanish before he became Chancellor in January 1933.
Students of Germany's jurisprudence, its legal practices and its 20th Century history will profit from CROSSING HITLER. General readers may wish, upon finishing the text, to know more about Hans Litten. His mother saw him as a martyr for Christianity. Yet he was proud of his half-Jewish heritage and embraced elements of Roman Catholicism. One contemporary called him a Saint Francis, another a Saint Thomas More. Communist East Germany fostered a cult of Litten the defender of Communist workers. This effort, after the October 1990 reunification with the West was confirmed by embrace of today's non-Communist German legal community.
Hans Litten the man was authoritarian and disciplined by nature yet said that his politics were to the left of German communists (many of whom were his legal clients). He had a photographic memory, was vastly and deeply read in medieval history and German, French, Italian and English literature. He held many warring cultural, political and religious viewpoints in uneasy balance in his complex psyche. He was blessed with a mother, Irmgard Litten nee Wuest, who unsuccessfully badgered Nazis and world opinion for five years to have her son released from a series of prisons until he (apparently) hanged himself in Dachau. He made powerful enemies, including his own law professor Jewish convert father. He also made strong, even passionate friends. Hans Litten was loved by Margot Fuerst nee Meisel, wife of his closest friend and fellow radical, furniture maker Max Fuerst. He was never charged with or convicted of a crime.
The scholarship behind CROSSING HITLER is solid if plodding in its details. It has several good black and white photographs of principals. The book would be notably strengthened by insertion of one or two maps of Weimar and Nazi Germany, indicating the important cities in the life of Hans Litten and his several places of internment in "protective custody" as a political prisoner. On balance, this is a book that cries out for a follow on. If not this year, then within a decade. Author Benjamin C. Hett has cut through the underbrush. He has identified for future researchers the known primary and secondary sources for the life of Hans Litten. The author's work was hard, demanded travel and has made things much easier for the next generation of biographers and historians.
I am glad I read this book. I am not sure that I want to know more about its hero Hans Litten, but I would like to learn more of his take-charge mother and her strong Lutheran background. Ditto for his passionate, self-sacrificing friend Margot Fuerst (she had been his secretary) who lived until 2003, having returned to Germany after years in Palestine and Israel.
CROSSING HITLER offers a long, rightly praised epilogue "Only Where There Are Graves Are There Resurrections" (pp. 247 - 261). In his FABLES, Aesop's analogous "moral" would have been shorter and pithier. Professor Hett argues that the evil of Hitler and what he made Germany into is not qualitatively different from more modest, sporadic lapses of the USA and other civilized countries into torture, unjustfied invasions and scorn for the law. He quotes the brilliant Weimar Republic lawyer Rudolf Olden writing in praise of Hans Litten in 1940: "The law is always the cause of the weak; the strong need no law, and since they already have the power, they are all too easily inclined to get along without it" (p. 260). Didn't Sir Thomas More warn something similar about the young King Henry VIII long before he became a royal monster? -OOO-
An interesting perspective on the Nazis and German Law November 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I found this to be both an interesting as well as valuable case study on how the German legal system functioned before and after the Nazi takeover of political power. The focus is the brilliant but radical Berlin lawyer Hans Litten (1903-1938). Litten developed a pungent reputation for defending leftists of all sorts during the late 1920's and early 1930's, including Communists and other radicals. Bear in mind that it was in Berlin, shortly after the end of the first war, that the Spartacist uprising, involving Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, turned the city into a virtual war zone. A decade later Litten is defending radicals on behalf of the Red Aid, the legal support group of the Communist Party, at the very time that the Nazis are engaged in radical activity from the right, and Weimar democracy is disintegrating. These groups clashed violently and repeatedly in Berlin, and Litten's practice after 1930 was devoted almost entirely to this type of combustible litigation. It was during one of these trials that Litten conducted an effective cross-examination of Hitler. As one can imagine, Hitler was not happy about this and proved to have a long memory. On the night of the Reichstag fire, Litten was arrested and spent the rest of his short life in prisons and concentration camps, where he suffered the most severe of physical punishment, not being helped by his Jewish family background even though his parents had converted years before. His friends and family fought very hard to gain his release, but he died in captivity and apparently not from natural causes.
So, what is the value of this book besides recounting the life of this fascinating individual? The author, a professor at Hunter College, has devoted now two books to explaining for us how the German legal system functioned during the Imperial Period ("Death in the Tiergarten") and with this volume during the transition from Weimar to Nazi rule. He perceptively melds the legal with the political and traces their impact on the procedures of the courts, at least in these politically-charged cases. His background as both a former trial lawyer and a historian yields important dividends here. We also learn a good deal about a neglected topic--how did the Nazis maneuver into power during the late 1920's when street warfare and violence were their tools in trade? We also learn important facts about how Hitler faced substantial opposition within his own party and how he managed to retain his leadership position.
As with his prior volume, Professor Hett's research is impeccable, as reflected in 52 pages of notes (mostly German-language sources) and a helpful "Note on Sources." Included as an appendix is a transcript of Litten's cross of Hitler that had such an impact on both their lives. The author is very skillful in explaining German legal procedures and the historical background of Litten's story. My only complaint is there are occasional efforts to explain Litten's actions as reactions to his strict Konigsberg law professor father, which I found somewhat speculative. The book well illustrates a major truth of history: important developments often come at the hands of not particularly pleasant people. Litten was not a warm and cuddly character--but he was an important historical personage, which we now can appreciate given this fine volume.
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