Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand | 
 enlarge | Author: Benjamin Carter Hett
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 560961
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Hardcover with dustjacket, Oxford University Press, 2008. Brand-new. Shipped immediately.
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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 28 more reviews...
 "Hitler's First Victims Were Germans" . . . Irmgard Litten, Mother of Hans January 4, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
No doubt about it, Hans Litten was difficult. His was a strict and idiosyncratic code of morals that led him to fight those betrayed what he perceived as the moral values of Germany. Cross-examining Hitler in the Eden Dance Palace trial, he laid himself open to the Fuhrer's revenge, which came, swift and certain. After years of imprisonment and torture, Litten would free himself by taking his own life.
The primary focus of Crossing Hitler is the Eden Dance Palace Trial that presaged, for those willing to see, Hitler's coming wave of terror, violence, and death. However, it is also a dark portrait of a time eerily like our own. Justice was tainted by political views, people were afraid to speak their mind, lies were pronounced as truth.
As I read, I wondered, "Would I have to courage to speak against such evil power, knowing that retribution would surely follow?" "Was this man thoroughly selfish or incredibly brave to ignore the consequences his actions would bring down not only on himself but on his family and friends?"
Crossing Hitler is not an easy book to read, not fascinating reading except perhaps to the legal mind. It is a thought-provoking and chilling story of a man of great self-centeredness and greater courage and of a time when courage would be tested to the ultimate. It is a story whose central character is now well-known in Germany and should be well-known in the United States as well.
Highly recommended.
 Little Known History December 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
With all of the literature that exists about WWII, Hitler, and the Holocaust, it is amazing that this is the first time I have every heard of a man named Hans Litten. Benjamin Carter Hett's biography, "Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand" offers remarkable insight into a man who was determined to stand up against Nazi policy, even at the risk of his own life and law career. While this biography does focus on Litten's examination of Hitler during the Eden Dance Palace trial, it offers further insight into the lawyer's life and German law.
Benjamin Carter Hett crafts a very thorough picture of Hans Litten, focusing briefly on his family background and early days, especially devoting time to his falling out with his father. Hett shows the intelligent man that Litten was, someone who was more than willing to fight for the underdog, almost no matter what the cost might be. Litten did not care if his actions reflected poorly on his family,or the image and name that his father had built up and directed away from his jewish heritage. Yet Litten was proud of that heritage, which was one of the many reasons he garnered scorn from the members of the Nazi party. Even though Litten did not win his case against Hitler, his actions were not forgotten. He was arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire and imprisoned in a variety of jails and concentration camps, and even attempted suicide, before meeting his tragic end.
"Crossing Hitler" offers a wider audience the chance to learn about Hans Litten. He is a celebrity in Germany, with many buildings and streets named after him, and well known among those in the German legal system. Yet he is relatively unknown to the wider world. Perhaps Hett's biography can help that. Benjamin Carter Hett does a commendable job, but his narrative is too disjointed at times due to the amount of facts and figures he throws in, that it disrupts from the story at hand. Those facts and figures are important, just as telling the too little known story of Hans Litten is important, to help understand those horrific times in our world's history.
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
2 out of 2 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.
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