1. Hans Achim Litten was a German lawyer who represented opponents of the Nazis at important political trials between 1929 and 1932, defending the rights of workers during the Weimar Republic.
58 Facts About Hans Litten
1. 2.
In retaliation, Hans Litten was arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire along with other progressive lawyers and leftists.
3.
Hans Litten spent the rest of his life in one German concentration camp or another, enduring torture and many interrogations.
4.
Not until 2011 was Hans Litten finally portrayed in the mass media, when the BBC broadcast The Man Who Crossed Hitler, a television film set in Berlin in summer 1931.
5.
Hans Litten was born the eldest of three sons in a wealthy family in Halle.
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Hans Litten's parents were Irmgard and Friedrich Litten.
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Hans Litten was a nationalist conservative, and served in the army in World War I, earning the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd Class.
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Hans Litten was privy counsel and adviser to the Prussian government.
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Hans Litten himself was baptized a Christian - his godfather was Franz von Liszt.
10.
From his mother, Hans Litten acquired an interest in humanitarian ideas and art, and gained a strong sense of justice for the threatened, persecuted and disenfranchised.
11.
Hans Litten became interested in a German-Jewish youth group with socialist-revolutionary ideas, joining with a school friend, Max Furst.
12.
Hans Litten passed his examinations in 1927 with excellent grades and was offered a lucrative job in the Reich Ministry of Justice, as well as a good position in a flourishing law firm.
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Hans Litten declined both choosing instead to open a law office in 1928 with Dr Ludwig Barbasch, a friend who was close to the Communist Party.
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Hans Litten was an internationalist and was able to read English, Italian, and Sanskrit, as well as enjoying the music of the Middle East.
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Hans Litten had a photographic memory and was considered to have a brilliant intellect.
16.
In May 1931, Hans Litten summoned Adolf Hitler to testify in the Tanzpalast Eden Trial, a court case involving two workers stabbed by four SA men.
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Hans Litten cross examined Hitler for three hours, exposing many points of contradiction and proving that Hitler had exhorted the SA to embark on a systematic campaign of violence against the Nazis' enemies.
18.
Hans Litten said, "The millions of workers can't leave here, so I must stay too".
19.
Hitler's hatred for Hans Litten was not forgotten and in the early hours of 28 February 1933, the night of the Reichstag fire, he was roused from his bed, arrested and taken into protective custody.
20.
Hans Litten was sent to Sonnenburg concentration camp, Brandenburg-Gorden Prison, where he was tortured, along with anarchist Erich Muhsam.
21.
The treatment Hans Litten suffered was later described to his mother by an eyewitness.
22.
Hans Litten attempted suicide in 1933 in an attempt to avoid endangering his former clients, but he was revived by the Nazis so that they could interrogate him further.
23.
Hans Litten then wrote a letter to the Gestapo, saying that evidence gained in such a manner was not true and that he recanted.
24.
Hans Litten's mother wrote about his ordeal, recounting how injuries sustained by him early on left his health permanently damaged.
25.
Hans Litten related how, despite her access to many important people in Germany at that time, including Reichswehrminister Werner von Blomberg, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, Reichsbischof Ludwig Muller, Minister of Justice Franz Gurtner and even then-State Secretary Roland Freisler, she was unable to secure her son's release.
26.
Hans Litten was well liked and respected by his fellow prisoners for his knowledge, inner strength and courage.
27.
Unafraid of their presence, Hans Litten recited the lyrics of a song that had meant a lot to him in his youth, "Thoughts are free".
28.
In summer 1937, Hans Litten was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp for a month, before finally being sent to Dachau.
29.
Hans Litten arrived on 16 October 1937 and was put in the Jewish barracks.
30.
Hans Litten would recite Rilke for hours and he impressed the other prisoners with his knowledge on many subjects.
31.
On 5 February 1938, after five years of interrogation and torture and a failed escape attempt, Hans Litten was found by several friends from his barracks, hanging in the lavatory, a suicide.
32.
Hans Litten showed it to the blockalteste, who said it was not the first that had been found in Litten's possession.
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At the time, Hans Litten was under interrogation in the "bunker".
34.
Hans Litten had recently told his friends that he had enough of being imprisoned.
35.
Hans Litten wrote a few parting words and that he had decided to take his life.
36.
Hans Litten represented workers who were sentenced in March 1921 to a long term at hard labor in a Zuchthaus for organized resistance against a police raid of a mass uprising in the central German industrial region a year earlier.
37.
Hans Litten was able to get some of the workers recognized as political actors, making them eligible under the amnesty law of August 1920.
38.
In 1929, Hans Litten defended participants in the 1929 May Day rally in Berlin, known as Blutmai.
39.
In preparation for a defense, Hans Litten founded a committee with Alfred Doblin, Heinrich Mann and Carl von Ossietzky to investigate the event.
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Hans Litten himself had been at the demonstration and observed the actions of the police.
41.
Hans Litten filed an indictment against Berlin Police President, Karl Friedrich Zorgiebel, charging him with 33 counts of incitement to commit murder.
42.
Hans Litten knows that a socialist-educated working class will never let this right be taken away.
43.
Hans Litten's approach was to focus on the legality of the police use of lethal force.
44.
Rather than prosecute individual police officers, Hans Litten sought to hold the President responsible and he accused Zorgiebel of ordering the police to use truncheons and live ammunition against the demonstrators.
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Hans Litten argued that Zorgiebel had ordered the police to use lethal force for political, rather than law enforcement reasons.
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The indictment of Zorgiebel was rejected by the public prosecutors and Hans Litten appealed to a higher court.
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Hans Litten then appeared for this worker's defense, arguing that the worker had acted out of justifiable anger about Zorgiebel's 33 murders.
48.
Hans Litten worked to put paramilitary violence on display, in the hopes it would awaken the German people to the threat facing them.
49.
Hans Litten saw the methods of the police as approaching those of civil war and as being illegal and worked to prove that in court and to prosecute the responsible parties, even if they were in the highest political circles.
50.
Hans Litten used four of the injured to represent the plaintiff, seeking to prove three cases of attempted manslaughter, breach of the peace and assault.
51.
Hans Litten set out to show that the SA Sturm 33 was a rollkommando and that its attack of the Eden and the resulting murders were undertaken with the knowledge of the party leadership.
52.
Hans Litten: You said that there will be no violent acts on the part of the National Socialist Party.
53.
Hans Litten's meticulousness began to annoy both the presiding judge and the prosecutors, who began to conspire to get Hans Litten removed from the trial.
54.
Shortly after that, Hans Litten was again removed from a high court, having been accused of influencing a witness.
55.
Hans Litten was excoriated in the Nazi press as the "Red Death Defender" and readers were urged to "Put a stop to his dirty work".
56.
Author Benjamin Carter Hett, a historian and former lawyer, came across Hans Litten while working on another book.
57.
Hayhurst has written a play on Hans Litten's life, entitled Taken At Midnight, which premiered at Chichester Festival Theatre in September 2014 and transferred to Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London in January 2015.
58.
Hans Litten is played by German actor Trystan Putter in Seasons 3 and 4 of the TV show Babylon Berlin.