{"id":6553,"date":"2011-08-31T12:59:52","date_gmt":"2011-08-31T11:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=6553"},"modified":"2011-08-31T13:05:10","modified_gmt":"2011-08-31T12:05:10","slug":"remembering-hans-litten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=6553","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Hans Litten"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I think I know a fair bit about the Second World War and then I discover something I never knew. Recently it was the story of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hans_Litten\">Hans Litten<\/a>, a German lawyer who defended victims of Nazism in the courts in the late 1920s and early 1930s, who has just been the subject of a both a dramatisation and a documentary on BBC television.<\/p>\n<p>Astonishingly Litten managed to compel Adolf Hitler to give some three hours of evidence in a 1931 trial where Litten was able to expose the brutality of the SA &#8211; the forerunners to the SS &#8211; and the responsibility for this of the National Socialist Party.<\/p>\n<p>Hitler was so outraged by this experience that, on the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933, Litten was arrested. He was savagely interrogated and tortured over a period of years before he committed suicide in Dachau in 1938.<\/p>\n<p>Litten is quite well-known in Germany but not elsewhere. His bravery is a reminder that, all around the world today, independent-minded lawyers are standing up to authoritarian regimes to defend their victims and expose tyranny.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think I know a fair bit about the Second World War and then I discover something I never knew. Recently it was the story of Hans Litten, a German lawyer who defended victims of Nazism in the courts in the late 1920s and early 1930s, who has just been the subject of a both [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6553"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6565,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6553\/revisions\/6565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}