Hans Achim Litten (19 June 1903 – 5 February 1938) 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.

A number of memorials to him exist in Germany, but Litten was largely ignored for decades because his politics did not fit comfortably in either the west or the communist postwar propaganda.

Not until 2011 was 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.

From his mother, Litten acquired an interest in humanitarian ideas and art, and gained a strong sense of justice for the threatened, persecuted and disenfranchised.

He was shaped by important political and social events of the era, such as World War I,[1] the anti-war demonstration in Berlin on 1 May 1916, when Litten was not quite 13, the German Revolution of 1918–1919, and the arrest and murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by Freikorps soldiers in January 1919.

There is an anecdote from Litten's school years, when he was asked in the classroom if they should hang a picture of Paul von Hindenburg, victor of the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg.

The Kapp Putsch, the 1924 court case against Adolf Hitler and other events convinced Litten that Germany was approaching a very dangerous period.

[1] 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.

In May 1931, Litten summoned Adolf Hitler to testify in the Tanzpalast Eden Trial, a court case involving two workers stabbed by four SA men.

That was crucial because, to appeal to middle class voters, Hitler was trying to pose as a conventional politician and maintained that the activities of the Nazi Party were "strictly legal".

[1][12] Hitler's hatred for 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.

She also 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 Müller, Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner and even then-State Secretary Roland Freisler, she was unable to secure her son's release.

Unafraid of their presence, Litten recited the lyrics of a song that had meant a lot to him in his youth, "Thoughts are free" (in German, Die Gedanken sind frei).

Litten's last letter to his family, written in November 1937, spoke of the situation, adding that the Jewish prisoners were soon to be denied mail privileges until further notice.

He 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.

Through his law partner, Barbasch, Litten got involved with the Rote Hilfe, a solidarity organization founded by Wilhelm Pieck and Clara Zetkin that supported worker's families in dire need during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic.

In preparation for a defense, Litten founded a committee with Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Mann and Carl von Ossietzky to investigate the event.

Litten filed an indictment against Berlin Police President, Karl Friedrich Zörgiebel, charging him with 33 counts of incitement to commit murder.

As a person of normal intelligence, the defendant knew that lifting the ban on demonstration would not have come even close to the terrible effect from violent enforcement of the ban.Litten's approach was to focus on the legality of the police use of lethal force.

If the police action was illegal under the criminal code, the resulting deaths were murders and anything done by the demonstrators was "self-defense in the full legal sense".

The objective in Litten's many lawsuits for the victims of police violence was not to litigate individual incidents, but rather to warn about the growing repression in Weimar Republic.

[1] He 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.

He wasn't interested in creating Left Wing martyrs, rather he sought acquittal or an appropriate sentence, which caused him multiple conflicts with the Rote Hilfe and the Communist Party of Germany.

In addition to pursuing criminal convictions of the offenders, Litten wanted to show that the Nazis intentionally used terror as a tactic to destroy the democratic structures of the Weimar Republic.

(…) (The presiding judge read a question formulated by Litten): Did Hitler, as he named Goebbels "Reichsleiter" (Leader for the empire) of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, know of the passage from his book, where Goebbels declares that fear of the coup d'état cannot be permitted, that parliament should be blown up and the government hunted to hell and where the call to revolution was made again, letter-spaced?

Litten: Is it correct that Goebbels' revolutionary journal, The Commitment to Illegality [Das Bekenntnis zur Illegalität], has now been taken over by the Party and has reached a circulation of 120,000?

[22] On trial were five Nazis and 19 residents of the Felseneck arbor colony, where many left-wing workers, including Communists and Social Democrats, were living.

Two people were killed, Ernst Schwartz, a member of the Berlin SA and Fritz Klemke, a Communist; several others, including two police officers, were injured.

[23] Litten was excoriated in the Nazi press as the "Red Death Defender"[8] and readers were urged to "Put a stop to his dirty work".

Commenting on the relevance of Litten's life today and the treatment he suffered while imprisoned, Hett said:[Note 2][2] ...it is startling to read the words of Werner Best, one of the top officials in Hitler's secret police, the Gestapo, explaining in 1935 why the Nazi regime would not allow concentration camp prisoners like Hans Litten to have lawyers: "The forms of procedure of the justice system are, under present conditions, absolutely inadequate for the struggle against enemies of the state."