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Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand
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|  | This is a biography of Hans Litten (1903-1938), a talented German lawyer and a fierce opponent of Nazism during its rise to power. His greatest success came in 1931 when he forced Adolf Hitler to give testimony at the Eden Dance Palace trial of four of the party's storm troopers, who were charged with attempted murder. At that time Hitler was playing a dangerous double-game, trying to convince Germans that his party intended to gain power only by legal means, while at the same time placating party members who wanted violent action. Much of the trial revolved around whether the party covertly approved of "rollo commandos," a term from the front lines of World War I that had come to refer to small groups of men whose task was to kill party opponents.
Few historians have mentioned Hans Litten. Ingo Müller's Hitler's Justice makes no mention of him, nor does Louis Snyder's Hitler's German Enemies, or Peter Hoffmann's 847-page The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945. And despite the fury Litten provoked in Hitler, he isn't in the index of John Toland's two-volume biography, Adolf Hitler. In English, the only biography of him before this was by his mother, Irmgard Litten (A Mother Fights Hitler in UK, Beyond Tears in the US).
Why has one of Hitler's boldest early opponents been so woefully neglected? First, Litten was arrested just after the Reichstag fire, less than a month after Hitler took power, so virtually all his opposition to Hitler came during the rise to power, when opposition to Hitler was safer and more common. Confined to prison until his death by suicide in early 1938, he never had a chance to voice opposition to the regime. That's precisely what Hitler intended.
Second, even if a historian were to notice Litten, the very complexity of the man's character defies easy analysis. Benjamin Hett does his best to explain Litten, but even he leaves the reader confused. Litten's mother saw him as a devout descendant of the Protestant pastors on her side of the family, and yet at times he seems almost Catholic in his interest in Mary, and at other times he stressed a Jewish ancestry that came from a father he loathed. He believed intensely in many things without making an effort to reconcile their differences.
Most important of all, his opposition to Nazism suffers from a double taint. He was also a fierce critic of the Weimar Republic, which for all its flaws was the only thing standing between the German people and a dictatorship of the far right (Nazism) or far left (Communism). He sarcastically called it an "enormous comedy," and a friend noted that, "At that time, at the end of the Weimar Republic, we were against democracy."
What was he for politically? Although his exact intentions aren't clear, he seems to have wanted Germany to become communist. His battle with Nazism was closely linked to his courtroom defense of communist agitators whose behavior was often as violent as Nazi brownshirts. Friends may have claimed that his legal activities flowed from a deep desire to help the underdog, but in early 1930s Germany, there were many far more deserving underdogs than the communist thugs he defended.
Hett perhaps comes closest to making sense of Litten when he suggest that both Litten and Nazism share a "quintessentially German" attraction to ideas over reality:
"In his magisterial biography of Adolf Hitler, the historian Joachim Fest speculates that the most quintessentially German quality of the National Socialist movement was its perverted idealism; its uncompromisingly radical embrace of the power of an idea over reality, and its consequent hostility to reality. Though he dwelt at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Litten shared these qualities."
This isn't an easy book to read and, in the end you may feel, like me, that you've still not come to understand what drove Litten to live the life he lived. But perhaps that's for the best. There are some things we're not meant to understand.
--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II
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