Crossing Hitler

This first full-length biography of the Jewish-German trial lawyer Hans Litten won the 2007 Fraenkel Prize for outstanding work of contemporary history. During a 1931 trial of four Nazi stormtroopers, known as the Eden Dance Palace trial, Hans Litten grilled Hitler in a merciless three-hour cross-examination, forcing him into multiple contradictions and evasions and finally reducing him to helpless and humiliating rage. 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 kept Dachau prisoners sane by reciting great works from memory amid unspeakable horror. 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'.