Crossing Hitler by Hett Benjamin Carter;

Author:Hett, Benjamin Carter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2008-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

“I Must Burden You with My Suicide”

In the middle of June 1933, Litten returned to Moabit as a witness in the perjury trial of Franz Engelhardt, one of the Röntgen Street witnesses. The Attack reported, “As Litten was brought forward, those who knew him before could not resist smiling.” He had lost his “imposing, muscovite lion’s mane,” appearing before the judges with an “8 millimeter haircut and—absolutely contrary to his former habits—well-shaved.” The Attack also quoted Litten’s complaint that he was suffering from memory loss as a result of a head injury. An exile paper, the Prague Social Democrat, noted that in drawing attention to his head injury and memory loss, Litten “had been the first to get a court to take judicial notice of atrocity stories.” “Everyone understood him,” said the Social Democrat—everyone except the Attack, anyway. “ ‘It was absolutely the old Litten,’ said ‘coordinated’ journalists at the time, not without admiration.”61

Litten was in court again because Freisler and Justice Minister Kerrl were seeking to reopen criminal cases that they believed exemplified the corruption of the “System Era”—the Nazi code word for Weimar. Among these were many cases involving Jewish suspects. But there were also cases of “Communist capital crimes,” such as the murder of Horst Wessel, the Bülow Square shootings, and, most fatefully for Litten, Felseneck. When Irmgard Litten met with Freisler, he used the allegations about Litten’s conduct in Felseneck as justification for his continued detention. Early in 1934 the prosecutor and Gestapo officer Otto Conrady told Irmgard that “one must always reckon with the possibility” that a formal criminal proceeding would be launched against Litten for “aiding and abetting.”62

The “protective custody” prisoners at Spandau were divided into two classes: the regular and the “prominent.” Litten, along with Ludwig Barbasch, Ludwig Bendix, and Egon Erwin Kisch, was among the prominent. The main event of the day for these prisoners was the “free hour,” when they could exercise in the courtyard. As most of the prominent prisoners were held in solitary confinement, this was their only opportunity to socialize. One free hour in particular, on the last day of June, was burned into Bendix’s memory. Litten came late, and Bendix noticed right away a striking change in his “otherwise lively, intellectually animated face.” Litten looked, he thought, as if he were filled with despair. “I cannot and will not ever forget this expression,” said Bendix, especially after he learned the cause of it. Barbasch explained to Bendix that Litten had come to the free hour directly from a police interrogation. The officers were Kurt Marowsky, still bearing a grudge against Litten from Richard Street, and two SA men. They wanted Litten to confess that he had known from the beginning of the Felseneck case that Karl Ackert was guilty of Ernst Schwartz’s killing. If Litten did not confess, the men told him, the “brown police” would go to work on him in the same way they had done at Sonnenburg. They left Litten to mull this over for six weeks.

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