Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Crossing Hitler The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand by Benjamin Carter Hett Crossing Hitler: Who Was Hans Litten? In the Eden Dance Palace trial of 1931, in which four Nazi storm troopers stood accused of criminal assault and attempted murder, a for the prosecution requested the presence of as a witness. Who was this fearless lawyer? Hans Litten. In Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand, Benjamin Carter Hett an Associate Professor of History at Hunter college and a former trial lawyer, tells the story of this historic confrontation, as well as the man who for a brief moment posed a serious threat to the Nazis rise to power. In the excerpt below we learn a little about who Hans Litten was. Who was Hans Litten? Years later his closest friend, Max F ü rst, remembered him as “more than a brother…’a part of myself,'” but also as a fanatical warrior who fought with the desperation of “one who fights the last battle.” Countess Marion Donhoff, editor in chief of the Die Zeit (Time) , believed that Litten was “one of those righteous men for whose sake the Lord did not allow the city-the country, the nation-to be entirely ruined.” Kurt Hiller, a friend from Berlin political circles and later a cellmate in a concentration camp, called him “a true Christian by nature, and also by conviction.” Another fellow prisoner was more sardonic: “A definite genius, but not easy to live with.” Photographs show a serious, bespectacled young man, already growing portly and inclined to a double chin, with thinning hair combed back from a widow’s peak and worn unusually long for the time (“Only soldiers and slaves get their hair shorn,” he liked to say). He was tall: his closest friends’ small daughter remembered him as “the big man with glasses,” and a youth movement friend described him as a “tall, pale young man.” Beyond his height, the photos do not suggest a man who would be striking or memorable. Yet people meeting Litten for the first time invariably gained a strong impression. Rudolf Olden, a distinguished lawyer and journalist, remembered the first time he saw Litten. It was in 1928 at a meeting of the League for Human Rights ( Lifa f ür Menschenrechte ), a very modern kind of political lobby group that had grown out of a left- leaning association called New Fatherland founded during the First World War by Albert Einstein and the future mayor of West Berlin, Ernst Reuter. Litten asked a question during the discussion. “The speaker had a striking head, a smooth face, rimless glasses over round bright eyes. He work his shirt open at the throat, and short pants, below which the knees were bare.” Olden took the young man for a schoolboy. After the debate, one of Olden’s friends, smiling, told him that the “boy” was in fact the Assessor , or newly qualified lawyer, Hans Litten. The next time Olden saw Litten was in a courtroom. Olden was struck by the contrast between the “childlike face” with the eyes that “gazed pure and clear through the glasses,” and the calm expertise of the lawyer who refused to let anyone intimidate him… …In her later years his still-grieving mother would remind anyone who listened that “Hitler’s first victims were ,” and there were many reasons why, almost from the beginning, the Nazis condemned Litten to imprisonment in a concentration camp, hard labor, prolonged interrogations, beatings, and . To the Nazis Litten was half-Jewish, as he was the product of what Germans in the early twentieth century called a mixed marriage. In politics he stood far to the left. And he was a lawyer, a profession for which the Nazis had scant regard. But above all it was Hitler’s personal fear and hatred that landed Litten in the concentration camps, and this fear and hatred stemmed from the handwritten summons of April 1931. For when Hitler appeared in court in May 8, Litten subjected him to a withering cross-examination, laying bare the violence at the heart of the Nazi movement. The Eden Dance Palace trial exposed Hitler to multiple dangers: criminal prosecution, the disintegration of his party, public exposure of the contradictions on which the Nazis’ appeal was based. It was only through luck that Hitler survived with his political career intact.. …Litten’s resistance to the Nazis went on after the “seizure of power” of January 30, 1933. Although he was one of the first to be arrested after Hitler was made chancellor, Litten fought back even from the concentration camps. Posted In: Our Privacy Policy sets out how handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities. We will only use your personal information to register you for OUPblog articles. X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II. Please join us for a live Zoom discussion of the new book X TROOP: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II by Leah Garrett . In this riveting history, Garrett chronicles the incredible—and largely untold—story of the German-Jewish commandos who fought in Britain’s most secretive WWII special-forces unit. The author will be in conversation with Hunter College history professor and author Benjamin Hett. The men of X Troop were the real Inglorious Basterds : a secret commando unit of young Jewish refugees who were trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat to deliver decisive blows against the Nazis. Acclaimed scholar Leah Garrett draws on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members of the X Troop unit. She follows this unique band of brothers from Germany to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of the Terezin concentration camp—the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war. For the first time , X Troop tells the astonishing story of these secret shock troops and their devastating blows against the Nazis. "Brilliantly researched, utterly gripping history: the first full account of a remarkable group of Jewish refugees—a top-secret band of brothers— who waged war on Hitler." — Alex Kershaw, best-selling author. Leah Garrett is the Director of Jewish and Hebrew Studies at Hunter College and an award-winning author. Her book Young Lions : How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and won the 2017 Jordan Schnitzer award for best book in Modern Jewish History. She is also the author of Journeys beyond the Pale: Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World and A Knight at the Opera: Heine, Wagner, Herzl, Peretz, and the Legacy of Der Tannhäuser. She has led a number of public programs at Roosevelt House. Benjamin Hett is a professor of history at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War; The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the ; Death in the Tiergarten ; Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery , which was awarded the Hans Rosenberg prize; and Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand , which won the Wiener Library’s Fraenkel Prize and was made into a documentary film and a television drama for the BBC. Hans Litten: The man who annoyed Adolf Hitler. In the Berlin courtroom, Adolf Hitler's face burned a deep, furious red. The future dictator was not accustomed to this kind of scrutiny. But here he was, being interrogated about the violence of his paramilitary thugs by a young man who represented everything he despised - a radical, principled, fiercely intelligent Jewish lawyer called Hans Litten. The Nazi leader was floundering in the witness stand. And when Litten asked why his party published an incitement to overthrow the state, Hitler lost his composure altogether. "That is a statement that can be proved by nothing!" he shouted. Litten's demolition of Hitler's argument that the Nazis were a peaceful, democratic movement earned the lawyer years of brutal persecution. He was among the first of the fuehrer's political opponents to be rounded up after the Nazis assumed power. And even long afterwards, Hitler could not bear to hear his one-time tormentor's name spoken. But although he was among the first to confront Hitler, Litten remains a little-known figure. Now a drama and an accompanying documentary tell the story of a cantankerous, flawed but ultimately heroic man. Litten was, long before he confronted the dictator, a staunch anti-Nazi. Although his father, a law professor, had converted from Judaism to Christianity and played down his background to further his career, the young Litten went in the opposite direction, joining a Jewish youth group and learning Hebrew out of a mixture of adolescent rebellion and sympathy for the dispossessed. As a lawyer, he specialised in defending workers and rank-and-file members of the German Communist Party (KPD). However, he was no Stalinist, clashing with the KPD leadership for following Moscow's orders. "Two people are too many for my party," he would say. Indeed, his hard-line adherence to his principles meant Litten was not always regarded as sympathetic character. "He was a saint. But I have a feeling that, if I sat down to have a beer with him, I wouldn't like him," says Benjamin Carter Hett, author of Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand, a biography of Litten. "He was in many ways a difficult man to deal with. He was doctrinaire in his politics. Even his closest friends said he wasn't good with people." However, it was Litten's belligerence, as well as his forensic intelligence, that made his interrogation of Hitler so effective. In 1931, Litten sought to have criminal charges brought against four members of the Nazi party's (SA) paramilitary group after they attacked a dance hall frequented by communists, killing three people. Litten called Hitler as a witness, hoping to expose the Nazi party's deliberate strategy of overthrowing democracy by bringing terror to the streets. Hitler had previously assured middle-class voters that the SA was an organisation dedicated to "intellectual enlightenment". Over three hours in , this claim was dismantled by Litten's precise, detailed questioning. At first, Hitler insisted to Litten that he was committed to "100% legality". But his composure began to crack when Litten asked him why he had been accompanied by armed men. "That is complete lunacy," the Nazi leader barked. But the decisive blow came when Hitler was asked why the Nazi party had published a pamphlet by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief propagandist, which promised the movement would "make revolution" and "chase parliament to the devil" using "German fists". Asked by Litten how Goebbels's rise up the Nazi hierarchy could be squared with a commitment to legality, Hitler began to stammer and "search convulsively for an answer", according to one contemporary newspaper report of the trial. According to World War II historian Laurence Rees, writer and director of the television series Nazis: A Warning from History, it was not Litten's focus on the Nazis' violent methods that enraged Hitler the most. By 1931, most Germans could not fail to have noticed that the SA were brutal streetfighters, he says. And Hitler himself was accustomed to - and indeed thrived on - the venomous abuse directed at him from opponents. But, he says, Litten's meticulous, carefully reasoned questioning was guaranteed to enrage him. "What drove Hitler berserk is that here is someone taking him coolly and calmly through the evidence," says Rees. "He hates that kind of intellectual argument - he prefers either haranguing or sulking. It's not just Litten's Jewishness. If you were going to come up with a person that Hitler would loathe, it would be him." The trial was widely publicised and marked out Litten as a hate figure in the Nazi press, which called for him to be physically attacked. As Hitler edged closer to power, friends urged Litten to flee Germany. But he refused. "The millions of workers can't get out," he said. "So I must stay here as well." Soon the Nazis were in control. When the new regime used the in February 1933 as an excuse to suspend civil liberties, Litten was among the first to be rounded up. Over the next five years he was held in a succession of notorious concentration camps including Sonnenburg, Dachau and Buchenwald. He was singled out for especially brutal treatment at the hands of the guards, who knew full well of the fuehrer's personal antipathy towards him. Nonetheless, throughout his incarceration he was admired by his fellow inmates for his kindness towards them and his insistence on keeping his dignity intact. When the guards ordered prisoners to stage a performance in celebration of a Nazi anniversary, Litten read out a poem called Thoughts Are Free. By February 1938, he could endure no more. He took his own life by hanging himself. He was 34. After the Nazi regime was finally smashed, Litten's reputation as a staunch opponent of Hitler was revived. A plaque in Berlin was dedicated to him in 1951, the headquarters of the German bar association is at Hans Litten House and the ' association of Berlin named itself itself the Hans Litten Bar Association after reunification. Yet his name is not widely known. According to Mark Hayhurst, who wrote and directed the BBC drama and documentary about Litten, he was a victim of cold war politics - his left-wing sympathies meant he was overlooked in the West, and his attacks on the Stalinist hierarchy caused him to be neglected in the Soviet Bloc. With these divisions now buried for a generation, Hayhurst hopes that Litten can be reclaimed as a figurehead for resisting tyranny. "There are still Hans Littens around the world today," he says. "He's still an inspiration." Crossing Hitler. It sounds like the plot for a thriller by someone like Robert Ludlum. In 1931 Germany, Nazi thugs shoot and wound several men at a dance hall. The incident triggers three months of violence. When the suspects are brought to trial, a brilliant young Jewish lawyer decides to focus the spotlight on their leader. Ordering Adolf Hitler himself into the courtroom, he subjects the rising demagogue to a withering examination. The lawyer will eventually pay with his life. It sounds like a fictional plot, but it’s actually the engrossing real-life story of a fascinating man named Hans Litten, as compiled in a biography/history by Benjamin Carter Hett, himself a former lawyer and the author of an earlier study of German criminal justice during the reign of the last Kaiser. Litten was no ordinary hero. He was strongly principled and often didactic, if not strident. He went against the grain almost to a fault; Litten demanded severe commitment from everyone else and even more from himself. His brilliance was intimidating, mesmerizing. This was a man who regarded the law, in the author’s words, as “a lever of revolution.” The son of a Prussian aristocrat with whom he had a painful parting of the ways, Litten was only in his late twenties when the Eden Dance Palace trial of four Nazi storm-troopers unfolded. Calling Hitler to testify was a daring ploy. The passages of the book which deal with Hitler’s two-day appearance are riveting. Here was the one enemy Litten could not afford to have. Devious yet temperamental, Hitler wanted to make it appear that any brutality by storm-troopers occurred without official Nazi approval. Litten used Hitler’s own writings, plus Nazi newspapers, to show otherwise, briefly exposing Hitler to the threat of prosecution for perjury. The Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, was the turning point that enabled Hitler to become a dictator. Litten was arrested that very night. The first half of Crossing Hitler details Litten’s early life, the trial and the immediate aftermath; the second his arrest, imprisonment, and unusual death. Litten’s staunchly loyal mother memorialized her son in a 1940 book. Lawyers in today’s Germany remember and honor Litten with a jurisprudence award. For the rest of the world, Hett’s well-researched history is an excellent introduction, and a creepy reminder of the insidious power of evil. Reviewed by Dick Cady October 13, 2008. Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255. Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand by Benjamin Carter Hett. Benjamin Hett. Professor of History. Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY Hunter College Department of History 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065. Education. Harvard University Ph.D., November 2001; concentration in modern German history. University of Toronto M.A., November 1995; concentration in modern European history. University of Toronto J.D., June 1990. University of Alberta B.A., May 1987; concentration in political science and English literature. Honors and Awards. 2015: Hans Rosenberg Book Prize from the Central European History Society, for the best book on German history by a North American Scholar to appear in 2014, for Burning the Reichstag (co-winner) 2014: Hunter College Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity. 2009: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. 2009: American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship. 2007: Ernst Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library, London, for Crossing Hitler . 2005: Hans Rosenberg Prize from the Conference Group on Central European History, for the best article on German history by a North American scholar to appear in 2003 or 2004. 2002: Harold K. Gross Prize from the Harvard University Department of History, for the best dissertation of the year. 2002: Finalist for the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize from the German Historical Institute, for the best dissertation of the year from a North American graduate student. 1999-2000: DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Doctoral Stipendium. 1999: Derek Bok Center Award for Teaching Excellence, Harvard University. 1996-2000: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. 1996: Winner, Canadian Journal of History Graduate Student Essay Contest. Publications. Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich's Enduring Mystery (Oxford University Press, January 2014) Dutch: De Rijksdag staat in brand (Amersfort: BBNC, 2014) German: Der Reichstagsbrand. Wiederaufnahme eines Verfahrens (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2016) Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand (Oxford University Press, 2008) Spanish: El hombre que humillo a Hitler (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2008) Forthcoming in Greek and Chinese. Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser’s Berlin (Harvard University Press, 2004) Articles and Book Chapters: “'This Story Is about Something Fundamental': Nazi Criminals, History, Memory, and the Reichstag Fire”, Central European History 48(2) June 2015: 199-224. “Das Rätsel Reichstagbrand,” 5 page Sunday Feature, Die Welt am Sonntag , May 24, 2015. “Justice is Blind: Crowds, Irrationality and Criminal Law in the Late Kaiserreich,” in Richard F. Wetzell, ed. Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014) "Introduction" in The True German: The Diary of a World War II Military Judge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) “Berlin Sitzt zu Gericht: Die Berliner Öffentlichkeit und die Berliner Rechtspflege im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik,” in Rebekka Habermas und Gerd Schwerhoff, eds., Verbrechen im Blick: Perspektiven der neuzeitlichen Kriminalitätsgeschichte , (Campus Verlag, 2009) “‘And Only Where There Are Graves Are There Resurrections’: Hans Litten Between East and West,” European Studies Forum 38 (2), 2008. “Hans Litten and the Politics of Criminal Law in the Weimar Republic,” in Markus Dirk Dubber and Lindsay Farmer, eds., Modern Histories of Crime and Punishment , (Stanford University Press, 2007) “The ‘Captain of Köpenick’ and the Transformation of German Criminal Justice, 1891-1914,” Central European History 36 (1), 2003. “‘Goak Here’: A.J.P. Taylor and The Origins of the Second World War ,” Canadian Journal of History 31(2), 1996. Film/Television. Interviewed extensively for program on the Reichstag Fire for Chanel 5, UK. July, 2015. Interviewed extensively for After the Nazis , a 6-part documentary produced for the HIstory Channel, broadcast in May 2015. Consultant for The Man Who Crossed Hitler and To Stop a Tyrant , a combined movie and documentary production by Hardy Pictures for the BBC, broadcast on BBC2 August 21 and 27, 2011, respectively. The programs deal with Hans Litten, the subject of my book Crossing Hitler . Teaching Experience. Hunter College, CUNY, Department of History (August 2012 – ) Professor. Hunter College, CUNY, Department of History (January 2008 – 2012) Associate Professor. CUNY Graduate Center Doctoral Faculty (September 2006 – ) Named to the Doctoral Faculty in History to advise Ph.D. students on dissertations and teach doctoral courses in modern European history. Hunter College, CUNY, Department of History (September 2003-January 2008) Assistant Professor. Teaching survey courses on modern European history, and upper division courses on 20 th century Germany, as well as urban and legal history. Harvard Law School (October 2001-August 2003) Advisor to S.J.D. students. Advised the Harvard Law School's doctoral (S.J.D.) students on academic programs, dissertation research, etc. Taught the "L.L.M. Writers' Workshop", a wide-ranging class on legal research and writing, 2002- 03. Harvard University, Committee on Degrees in History and Literature (July 2001-July 2003) Lecturer. Taught the Sophomore Tutorial on Germany, and my own class entitled “Law/Literature/History,” which explored the relationship between law and literature in a historical context. Related Professional Experience. Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP, Toronto (September 1991-June 1994) Lawyer (Litigation Associate). Conducted trials and related pre-trial proceedings in a wide range of civil and criminal matters at Toronto’s largest corporate law firm. Russell & DuMoulin LLP, Vancouver. Articled Student. Assisted associates and partners of the firm with the conduct of trials, legal research, and drafting, in a wide range of civil and criminal matters at Vancouver’s premier litigation firm. College and University Service. Chair pro tem , Hunter College Department of History (2016) Chair, Admissions Committee, Graduate Center HIstory Program (2016) Member, Hunter College Senate (2012 – ) Chair, Modern Europe Search Committee (2011 - 2012) Member, Department Priorities and Budget Committee (2011 – ) Member, Hunter College IRB (2006 – ) Member, PSC-CUNY Research Awards, History Panel (2005 – ) Dept. of History Undergraduate Advising (2004, 2006-2007) Professional Service. Book Reviews for the Washington Post , H-German, Central European History , Shofar , European History Quarterly and German History. Manuscript Reviews for Oxford University Press, European History Quarterly and Law and History Review. Languages. English: native. German: fluent. French: reading. Russian: reading. By Benjamin Hett. Burning The Reichstag BUY NOW! Crossing Hitler BUY NOW! Death in the Tiergarten BUY NOW!