Thoughts are Free: The Story of Hans Litten

A neighbor recommended an Off-Broadway play: Douglas Lackey’s  Hans Litten: The Jew Who Cross-Examined Hitler. We saw it last Saturday. In one memorable scene, concentration camp prisoners are ordered to sing the Horst Wessel Nazi anthem”Die Fahne hoch,” ( “Raise the Flag”), in celebration of Hitler’s birthday. Instead, Litten leads them in the defiant German folk song “Die Gedanken sind frei” (“Thoughts Are Free”). 

The retaliation is swift and savage. This powerful moment distills his defining quality: profound courage that asserts individual freedom in the face of absolute tyranny.

Bodies can be imprisoned. Individuals can be tortured. But thought itself lies beyond reach.

That conviction ran through Litten’s life, through the song he chose, and through the play that tells his story.

Who was Hans Litten?

Hans Litten was born in 1903, in Halle an der Saale, into a family with strong German nationalist leanings. His father, Friedrich (Fritz) Litten, who converted from Judaism to Lutheranism to advance his career, taught law and later served as rector of the law faculty at the University of Königsberg, where the family settled. His mother, Irmgard, came from a conservative Protestant background and provided both intellectual and moral rigor at home. Raised initially as a Christian, Hans embraced Judaism as a teenager and displayed extraordinary intellectual range, studying languages such as Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese, as well as literature, music, and philosophy, before turning to law.

The First World War was formative. His father was an officer in the German Army and was wounded at Ypres. Irmgard raised their three sons and instilled in them a strong sense of justice and respect for human dignity. As a boy, Hans once took food from the family kitchen to give to a beggar, pointedly addressing the man as “Sir”. His mother defended him.

By the age of thirteen, his awareness of the waste and brutality of the war turned Hans toward socialism and pacifism. At school, he clashed with teachers who despised Weimar democracy and idealized the imperial past. It was only his father’s position and intervention that saved him from expulsion. During a classroom debate over whether to hang a portrait of Paul von Hindenburg, Hans dryly remarked that he had always been in favor of hanging Hindenburg.

The Courtroom

By his mid-twenties, Hans Litten was practicing law in Berlin, representing workers and victims of political violence, and quickly gaining a reputation for taking cases other lawyers avoided. He wrote on art and literature, provided legal aid to workers’ organizations, and became known as a “proletarian lawyer,” defending those targeted by Nazi street terror while insisting on his political independence – an anarchist to the left of the Communist Party rather than a party loyalist. Major cases included work around the 1929 “Bloody May” police violence in Berlin, the 1932 Felseneck trial arising from a deadly political clash, and early labor cases in which he secured amnesties for workers.

The Eden Dance Palace Trial

The most audacious episode of his career – and the one that sealed his fate – grew out of the Eden Dance Palace attack in Charlottenburg on November 22, 1930. That night, SA stormtroopers burst into a left‑wing workers’ dance hall armed with clubs and firearms, beating and shooting those inside; several people were killed and many more wounded. Litten, representing the victims (and in some accounts acting as a co‑prosecutor), recognized that this was not just local thuggery but an opportunity to challenge the Nazi Party’s claim to “legality” and expose its organized use of violence. He argued that the party’s own inflammatory rhetoric made its leader indirectly culpable. He summoned Adolf Hitler as a witness.

On May 8, 1931, in Berlin’s Moabit Criminal Court, a packed courtroom watched Hitler take the stand in a civilian suit – uniforms were not permitted – as “Mr. A. Hitler” of 45 Brienner Straße, Munich. For about three hours, Litten cross‑examined him with calm, meticulous persistence. He quoted from Nazi newspapers and speeches, including slogans about “crushing opponents to pulp” and moving from a “revolution of words” to a “revolution of deeds,” and forced Hitler to reconcile these calls to violence with his public insistence that the Nazi movement was strictly legal. Litten pressed him on whether SA units such as “Sturm 33” functioned as mobile commando groups with leadership approval for deadly attacks, and whether any party member had ever been expelled for instigating such violence.

Hitler the “oily barber”

Under this pressure, Hitler faltered. He sweated, grew flustered, and repeatedly lost his composure; The Berliner Morgenpost  mocked his performance, likening him to an “oily barber,” and even Joseph Goebbels reportedly admitted to anxiety over the interrogation. Though the judge curtailed some of Litten’s questioning and no full transcript survives, contemporary accounts agree that the cross‑examination revealed the gulf between Nazi propaganda and Hitler’s courtroom denials. More importantly, it publicly humiliated a man who craved invulnerability. Hitler never forgot it. Those around Litten understood that he had, in effect, signed his own death warrant.

In the years that followed, friends and his mother urged him to emigrate as the Nazi threat grew. Litten refused. “The millions of workers cannot leave,” he replied. “So I must stay here too.”

The Camps

When Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933, Hans Litten was living under a kind of suspended death sentence. He had humiliated Hitler in open court two years earlier, and the new leader had neither forgotten nor forgiven.

The Reichstag fire on February 27 provided the pretext the regime needed: Litten was arrested the following night and placed in “protective custody.” He was held without trial and would never be free again.

At first, the euphemism “protective custody” reassured his mother and friends, but they soon learned otherwise. As a well-known opponent of the Nazis, Litten faced not just scorn from guards at Sonnenburg concentration camp – where he arrived in April 1933 – but savage physical abuse so extreme that fellow prisoners were barred from seeing him. Within weeks, severe leg injuries, a fractured jaw, knocked-out teeth, a damaged middle ear, and a permanent eye injury had wrecked his body.

At his mother’s insistence, he was transferred back to Spandau prison, where interrogators tortured him to extract information about the Felseneck trial, aiming to incriminate acquitted left-wing workers. Newspapers soon blared the headline “Hans Litten confesses: Accessory to murder,” claiming he had admitted defending a man he knew to be guilty of killing an SA Brownshirt. 

Litten wrote a letter to the Gestapo retracting the forced statement as untrue, knowing full well what reprisal awaited. He attempted suicide and was found half-dead; his doctor later said he survived only because his captors wanted more questioning.

This marked the start of a five-year descent through prisons and camps: Brandenburg, Esterwegen’s moor labor, Lichtenburg, Buchenwald, and finally Dachau. Beatings shattered his jaw and teeth and damaged his eyes; forced labor left him on crutches. Interrogators relentlessly sought false confessions to betray his former clients, prompting further suicide attempts born of despair and fear of breaking.

Yet Litten resisted in the only sphere left to him. He taught fellow inmates on law, philosophy, literature, and art, reciting poetry – Rilke, among others – from memory to preserve fragments of intellectual life.

Irmgard Litten

Outside the camps, Irmgard Litten waged a relentless, often desperate campaign to save her son. She petitioned Nazi leaders at every level – Göring, Hess, Hitler himself, Justice Minister Gürtner, and Defense Minister Blomberg. Judge Roland Freisler told her that Hitler flew into a rage at the mere mention of Hans’ name. Undeterred, she appealed to Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, churchmen like Bishop Müller, cultural figures such as conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, British lawyers, Quakers, and other foreign advocates. 

Her efforts yielded only fleeting, often revoked concessions: a visit permitted, then canceled; a marginally better cell assignment, swiftly withdrawn. At Hans’ anguished request during one round of torture, she even smuggled poison to him but his attempted suicide failed.

 Hitler’s personal vendetta proved implacable..

After Hans hanged himself in a Dachau latrine on February 5, 1938, at the age of thirty-four, Irmgard and her husband Fritz fled to the United Kingdom.

Fritz died of influenza in Belfast in 1940, and Irmgard became a witness to Nazi barbarism, traveling across the UK to talk to anyone who would listen. 

That same year, she published her account of Hans’s persecution and her fight to save him: first in Paris as Die Hölle sieht dich an: Der Fall Litten (“Hell Is Watching You: The Litten Case”), then in London as A Mother Fights Hitler, and in the United States as Beyond Tears.

She gave an interview for Movietone

In September 1940 Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about Hans and Irmgard in her syndicated column “My Day” urging America to recognize the Nazi threat.

The Song “Die Gedanken sind frei” Endures

There are many versions available on line – with everything from haunting solo renditions, stirring marching songs, children’s voices, and even the glockenspiel.  

The melody, and the stubborn text it carries, had been in circulation long before Nazism and endures as a song of protest and resistance.

Its author and original composer are unknown. The text appears in late eighteenth‑ and early nineteenth‑century sources, and an early version with the title “Lied des Verfolgten im Turm” (“Song of the Persecuted in the Tower”) was printed in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a Romantic era folk‑song collection. Hoffmann von Fallersleben published a widely known form of the song in 1842 in his Schlesische Volkslieder, and from then on it resurfaced whenever speech became dangerous.

It was sung by banned student fraternities under Metternich; it was sung at the time of the 1848 revolutions, when demands for freedom, equality, and fraternity met censorship and repression.

Gustav Mahler took up the “Lied des Verfolgten im Turm” text in his 1898 Des Knaben Wunderhorn settings, but wrote his own, more elaborate music and framed it as a dialogue.

It was sung again under the Nazis.

Litten at Lichtenburg

In 1934, Hans Litten was transferred to the Lichtenburg concentration camp in Prettin on the Elbe. The camp commandant ordered the prisoners to mount a “cultural program” for one of the Nazi holidays. Litten, already gravely damaged by torture, was forced to appear. One witness recalled him standing there in his prison clothes, malnourished, blind in one eye, barely able to walk, with a weak heart, and a ruined body, facing rows of SS men with rifles, clubs, and dogs. In that setting he recited the words of “Die Gedanken sind frei”  –  “Thoughts are free.”

Douglas Lackey picks up this moment in his play and uses the song as the contrast between Litten’s shattered body and his unbroken mind.

Listen here:

Rundfunk-Jugendchor Wernigerode, conducted by Friedrich Krell. Featured photograph: Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst, photographed by Jürgen Wittenstein, Munich, July 24, 1942 (not January 1943, as incorrectly stated in the video). haunting version

Sophie Scholl of the anti-Nazi German White Rose is closely associated with it. In 1942 she played “Die Gedanken sind frei” on her flute outside the Ulm prison where her father was being held for calling Hitler a “scourge of God.” It continued in postwar protest repertoires.

Pete Seeger popularized it in the United States, and included it on his album “Dangerous Songs”.  Seeger prefaced one version with an anecdote: whistling the tune on a railway platform in Poughkeepsie, he was approached by a rail worker who recognized it from his childhood in pre‑Hitler Germany.

After we saw Lackey’s play, we ran into our neighbor and fell into conversation about how the music worked: not just as period color, but as a way of revealing character. Her friend had learned “Die Gedanken sind frei” in grade school; she herself had come across it in college. As they walked away up the street, they began to sing it, their voices fading but still audible. It felt just right. It’s been stuck in my mind ever since.

There’s a stirring version here:

Watch!

This is an excellent film Hans Litten vs Adolf Hitler To Stop a Tyrant. Among many things, it helps explain just how quickly events can turn. In 1928, the Nazi party commanded 2.6% of the popular vote. In less than five years, Hitler was chancellor.

This post draws extensively on a number of sources including:
Hans Litten https://www.hans-litten.de/
The German Bar Association: https://anwaltverein.de/engagement/erinnerung/hans-litten
DeutschlandFunk Kultur https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/ns-opfer-irmgard-und-hans-litten-der-lange-kampf-einer-100.html
Find a Grave memorial https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/261178130/irmgard-litten