Review

Benjamin CARTER HETT: Crossing Hitler. The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand, in: German History, vol 28 (2010), No 4, pp. 590-592.

Hans Litten, a German-Jewish lawyer, ‘crossed’ Hitler in different ways, not only cross-examining him in one of the most famous trials of the Weimar Republic, but making him angry in the process — and paying the price once the Nazi leader was in power. Litten is relatively unknown in Germany today, even less so in the English-speaking world, and Benjamin Carter Hett’s biography represents the first major English-language publication on Litten’s life since the 1940s, when Litten’s mother Irmgard published her account of her son’s struggle.