This is my last Substack post connected with my second novel, We Are Like Fire.
In his 2008 book Crossing Hitler, Benjamin Carter Hett tells us the story of German attorney Hans Litten.
Adolf Hitler, wearing a dark blue suit, appears on the witness stand on Friday, May 8, 1931. The 42-year-old leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party has been summoned to testify by Hans Litten, 27, who’s been practicing law for just two and a half years.
Litten has been hired by three men who were wounded at the Eden Dance Palace. They are in court alongside the German state prosecutors, who are trying Nazi Party members for murders at the Palace.
The previous September the Nazis won 18 percent of the seats in the Reichstag – the German parliament.
While Hitler is attempting to convince Germans of the legitimacy of the Nazi Party, more than 100,000 Nazi S.A. “storm troopers” have formed “roll commandos”—paramilitary units – to seek out and attack or even murder political opponents. The Storm 33 roll commando carried out the attack at the Eden Dance Palace.
Litten is using this trial to prove that violence is an essential practice of the Nazi Party.
Excerpts from their exchange:
Litten: “Do you know Storm 33? Do you know its leaders?”
Hitler: “No. The Party utterly rejects violent methods.”
Litten: “How do you explain roll commandos?”
Hitler: “The concept ‘roll commando’ has taken on an absolutely ridiculous meaning here. It has nothing to do with the elimination of people.” (Striking his chest with his fist): “The legality of the Party would only be placed in question if I approved roll commandos.”
Litten: “But didn’t Joseph Goebbels come up with the slogan, ‘The enemy must be beaten to a pulp’?”
Hitler: “That is not to be taken literally!”
Litten: “When you made Goebbels the Party’s propaganda chief, were you aware that Goebbels had written a call to ‘chase the parliament to the devil and found the state on the basis of German fists!’?”
Hitler: “The thesis in Goebbels’s book is entirely without value for the Party.”
Litten: “Is it correct that Goebbels had already been made Party boss of Berlin in 1926?”
Hitler: “I cannot confirm the date.”
Litten: “Mustn’t Goebbels’s example rouse the idea in the Party that the program of legality hasn’t gotten very far?”
Hitler (stuttering): “The whole Party stands on the basis of legality, and Goebbels stands likewise on this basis.”
Litten: “Has Herr Goebbels been forbidden to disseminate his text?”
Hitler: “I don’t know.”
Litten: “And are you aware that numerous S.A. men and Party members, especially in northern Germany, hold to Goebbels’s program of illegality?”
Hitler: “If that were the case, these people would have left me.”
Litten: “Did you promise Reich Chancellor Bruning to dissolve the S.A. in the event of your joining the administration?”
Hitler (highly agitated): “I insist that Bruning has not offered me any participation in his government, nor have we asked for any participation on the basis of any sort of concession. Dissolving the S.A. would mean for me the end of the Party. The S.A. men are the first men of the Party.”
Litten: “Herr witness, is it correct that on the occasion of the so-called S.A. revolt last September, you were accompanied on your tour of Berlin restaurants by armed S.S. men?”
Hitler (infuriated): “That is complete lunacy! In all the taverns, I was greeted with stormy enthusiasm.”
Narrator (Gisela): Hitler cannot be pleased as he hears the gallery of spectators erupt in laughter.
Litten: “Is it correct that Goebbels’s revolutionary text ‘The Commitment to Illegality’ has now been taken over by the Party publisher and has reached a printing of 120,000 copies?”
Narrator: Hitler’s attorney objects to the question.
Litten: “This pamphlet is sanctioned by the Party, is sold at all of Goebbels’s meetings, and is available in all Party bookstores, contrary to Hitler’s declarations about legality.”
Hitler (heated, losing his composure, his face turning a deep shade of red, yelling hysterically): “A text becomes official if it bears the printed seal of the Party. In any case, it is the Propaganda Chief who must be heard on these things, above all.”
Litten has pushed Hitler to the wall. As Hitler faces this contradiction in public, his Party stands in jeopardy.
Hitler needs legality to win elections, yet he needs to keep the S.A. or else his movement will splinter and fail. Hitler has claimed the pamphlet is not official. Litten has shown that it is.
Hitler has perjured himself. In his withering cross-examination of Adolf Hitler, Hans Litten has succeeded in laying bear the violence at the heart of the Nazi movement.
As a 20-year-old law student, Litten had written of the deep responsibility of attorneys, of the involvement of the whole person in the vocation of the law, of the duty to act despite consequences, and of the willingness to sacrifice.
Adolf Hitler becomes the Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Within a month, Hans Litten is under arrest. His teeth are knocked out, his jaw is cracked, he is beaten until he can no longer walk, and he is left half-crippled.
In January 1934, Litten is sent to a concentration camp, where he continues to demonstrate a defiant strength that is superhuman. But after five years of imprisonment, hard labor, prolonged interrogations, beatings, torture, and other brutal treatment at the hands of Nazi guards, Hans Litten succumbs in February 1938. He takes his own life.
What a powerful section, Mike.