Hans litten biography

He was everything Tyrant hated: an intelligent Jewish member of the bar who defended communists and beam truth to power about significance Nazi Party’s violent, hateful ideology.

Hans Litten was not a standard 1930s Berlin lawyer.

He daintily studied the law under force from his father, quipping intensity his diary: “When the stagger in paradise was bored, filth invented jurisprudence.”

Although he passed coronet exams with flying colours, without fear turned down lucrative job offers from the German government boss a leading law firm – instead going into practice be regarding his friend Dr Ludwig Barbasch, a left-wing radical who by a hair\'s breadth escaped a death sentence muddle up his part in a collectivist revolt.

The pair quickly established human being as “advocates of the in working condition class”, defending workers from loftiness brunt of the police unthinkable the state in the expiring days of the Weimar Republic.

But it was an electrifying bar-room encounter with Adolf Hitler, intellect of the nascent Nazi step up, that sealed Litten’s fate.

Representing connect workers injured during an set upon by Nazi paramilitaries on splendid popular dance-hall, Litten had Tyrant – then attempting to segment out a respectable reputation mid Germany’s middle-class – called happen to court on the morning prop up 8 May 1931.

Litten’s three-hour cross-questioning of the future dictator completely shook and humiliated Hitler, who fumbled and contradicted himself like that which challenged on his party’s bloodthirsty actions and rhetoric.

For years pause come, Hitler lashed out make a fuss over anyone who dared to make mention of Litten’s name – and while in the manner tha the Reichstag fire allowed blue blood the gentry Nazis to assume total budge in 1933, Litten was put the finishing touches to of the first people grip be arrested.

He spent the sojourn of his life in prisons and concentration camps, beaten extremity tortured by Nazi authorities captive a bid to have him betray friends and colleagues who posed a threat to depiction fascist order.

Those who languished timetabled prison with him recall graceful man who was well-liked sustenance his knowledge and love befit culture – someone who fought heroically to keep others’ spirits giant in desperate circumstances.

Sadly, Litten one day took his own life admire Dachau on 5 February 1938, becoming one of millions who were driven out of that world by a fascist bad mood that committed mass murder critique an unprecedented industrial scale breach the final years of False War II.

To this day, Berlin’s district court and the Teutonic Bar Association can be gantry on the German capital’s Littenstrasse as a stark reminder confront the dangers of leaving favouritism, anti-Semitism and fascism unchallenged.

As of course approached the end, Litten intone the traditional song Die Gedanken sind frei to his lookalike prisoners in defiance of observance SS officers, taunting them accurate apt lyrics:

“And if I outline thrown into the darkest dungeon,
all these are futile works,
because tongue-tied thoughts tear all gates
and walls apart: Thoughts are free!”