What I Am Reading: "Crossing Hitler" by Benjamin Carter Hett

This is the third of Benjamin Carter Hett’s books that I have read, out of unfortunately only four. He published the excellent The Death of Democracy last year, about the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the establishment of the Third Reich; and he also wrote Burning the Reichstag, about the mystery and the ramifications of the Reichstag fire. Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put The Nazis on the Witness Stand (a painfully generic title, in my opinion) was his first book on the late Weimar era, and is a biography of lawyer Hans Litten.

Hett was a lawyer before he was a history professor, and his books focus heavily on the criminal justice system. Litten was a lawyer who spent his entire career fighting a political battle against the forces in power, mostly against the Nazis as they consolidated power. He only practiced law for four years, from 1928 until he was imprisoned on the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933. He died in Dachau five years later.

Litten had a high profile in Germany after the war, and is a secular patron saint of German lawyers to this day. Hett stresses that this view of Litten and other views have been over-simplified, and that Litten was a complicated and contradictory figure. He was half-Jewish and identified as Jewish culturally, but practiced some elements of Lutheranism. He spent his career fighting against the establishment, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was from a respectable upper middle-class family, with a father who was president of a University. He often clashed with his father, and his defiance of the Nazis brought his family to exile and ended their promising careers in various fields.

The biographic elements before he became a lawyer show a world of ambitious, idealistic middle-class youth in the Weimar Republic, a world of promise that was never allowed to fully materialize. He made radical friends, and was involved in Jewish youth politics. Eventually, he obeyed his father’s wishes by going into the practice of law, but defied him by taking on only radical clients. The focus of the book is on the Eden Dance Palace Trial of 1931, when Litten summoned Hitler himself to testify in the trial of several SA men who had attacked a gathering of their enemies. Litten was able to exploit the tension between the more radical street fighters of the SA, who wanted to see a revolution, and the Nazi leadership, which was at the time trying to gain electoral support by proving itself acceptable to the middle class. Litten confronted Hitler on the question of the fundamental attitude toward violence of the Nazi philosophy, but was stopped by a judge before he was able to get a properly compromising answer that would have either disappointed the SA if not violent enough or alienated middle-class support if too violent.

The book moves fast, and the trial is over by page 100. The latter three-fifths of the book are dedicated to Litten’s arrest upon the Nazi assumption of power, his time as a political prisoner through maltreatment and torture in several concentration camps, and his eventual suicide. His mother, Irmgard, pressured relentlessly for his release, but was unable to secure it, possibly due to the personal animosity of Hitler himself. Litten maintained a considerable amount of dignity in spite of the injustices he faced, as his fellow prisoners would later testify to. He studied art and history when he was allowed the materials to do so, and formed many close friendships. Eventually, the systematic abuse of the camps took a toll, and he committed suicide after the execution of one of his fellow inmates.

Hett can be at his best as an academic, discussing the relations of historical events to broader systems. The German legal system was very conservative, but the activism of the interwar generation of lawyers were drawing it to a more Republican system of operation. Hett argues that the courts followed the ballot box, which led to some liberalization during the Weimar years; but subsequently to a failure to stand up to the Nazis. The Nazis were fundamentally opposed to the functioning of the legal system, preferring a system organized around charismatic leadership rather than the rule of law. They were even bad for their own lawyers who defended them during their rise to power; some of these ended up imprisoned or exiled.

Hett is also good with historiography, and notes the three phases of the commemoration of Litten. The first was during the war, when his mother downplayed his radicalism and emphasized his middle class roots and his Christianity, in an attempt to appeal to German conservatives who might be persuaded to oppose Hitler. After the war, the East Germans embraced him as a Communist martyr; papering over the fact that he was not a member of the Communist party, though he worked closely with them. Finally, in the later years of the Cold War and then the years after it, the German legal community (facing in the ‘70s many of the same threats of radicalism and authoritarianism that manifested in the Weimar Republic) embraced him as a beacon of the legal system’s fundamental justness and honesty. This downplays the fact that he was not a supporter of the democratic system that he worked within.

Litten was an important, inspiring figure, and I was glad to be able to read about him. It was an interesting juxtaposition to do so over the same weekend that the Mueller report was concluded, and the legal institutions of our country decided that the Trump campaign did not collude with the Russians. Litten’s work and fate tell us that our legal systems may not be as just as we hope they are, and that they cannot always be relied upon to protect us or to perpetuate our democratic institutions. In the Eden Dance Palace trial, Litten was able to convict the individual SA members who committed acts of violence, but the party leadership slipped the net.