WAITING ON THE JUDGES WITH A SICK FEELING IN THE MY GUTS.

The guy in the picture?

Hans Achim Litten

I had never heard of him until last week. He came to me care of a BBC documentary charting Hitler's rise to power in the early 30's. The programme was OK. Nothing special. Most of the story rang distant bells from 'A' Level History. Schleicher, Von Papen, Hindenberg. A comedy of errors which set the dominos falling.

But Hans Litten was new to me. He was a Jewish lawyer from Berlin who called things absolutely right and absolutely wrong at the same time. He couldn't have been more right about Hitler and his brown shirted thugs. He saw them as a lethal danger. No arguments on that front. So where was he so absolutely wrong? Well history proved his unswerving belief in the rule of the law to be sadly misplaced.

His moment in the limelight arrived in 1931. By this time he had dedicated his professional life to putting Nazi thugs in the dock and shining a light on their brutality. He used individual cases to prove the orders for every murder and beating came all the way down from the top. At this stage, Hitler was still filling his days with photo opportunities with beaming kids and wholesome families. He was painting himself a Mr Nice Guy who's life's work was to go out and bat for the little guy. Sure he despised all the bankers and corportaions, but at heart he was just a nice patriotic boy from Linz who was determined to give good decent Germans a fair shake.

Litten saw right through the carefully crafted photo opportunities which were so slavishly reported by a doting right wing press. And so the canny lawyer came up with a cunning plan. He used one of his cases as a means to subpoena Hitler into the courtroom.

It was a pretty big deal and Germany's press were there in force to watch as the Nazi leader and young jewish lawyer faced off. Litten kept his target on the stand for three long hours, and slowly but surely he needled his way under the Austrian corporal's skin. For two hours Hitler kept the mask firmly in place. He held the agred party line. But finally Litten started to find a few chinks in the armour.

As the three hour mark drew near, he smashed through the veneer and Hitler went full on Jack Nicholson in 'A Few Good Men'. He totally lost it and went completely loco. Yelling, frothing, screaming. Hook, line and sinker to the quietly smiling young lawyer who had so skillfully walked the great man to the end of the branch.

And for a while things played out in the way Hans Litten had hoped. The German papers described the tantrum in lurid detail and the German people stepped back and took time out for some second thoughts. It seemed like Hitler's moment had come and gone. At the next elections the Nazi vote caved in and the Austrian corporal seemed like yesterday's news...

Except he wasn't of course. The petty ambitions or a few petty men played out and the countdown to genocide duly began. Within two years the Reichstag had burned to the ground and the Nazis drove through 'The Enabling Act' which did away with Parliament altogther. As in they closed it down.

You could even say prorogued.

Forever. For the duration

Litten bet the farm on the rule of law. On courts and judges and due process. 

He bet his life on it.

He was one of the first to be awoken by banging on his door at two o'clock in the morning. They came for him on the very night of the Reichstag fire.

He never got his last day in court. Instead he was imprisoned without trial. For the next five years he endured a hell tour of concentration camps – Spandau Prison, Sonnenburg, Lichtenburg, Buchenwald and finally Dachau where his will to resist finally ran out.

On 5 February 1938, he hanged himself.

I guess you know where I'm going with all this.

Normally I wouldn'd have taken a huge interest in last week's Supreme Court case. The reason I was so tuned into the proceedings has nothing to do with political geekery. Anything but. As I mentioned in my last blog, one of the QC;s who was front and centre of the thing is an old university pal of mine. I wish this blog was all about how Big Jim is a Hans Achim Litten for the twenty first century. That would have been nice! Sadly Big Jim wasn't lined up on the side of the angels. Well, not my angels. Instead Big Jim was batting for the opposition and telling us all how the forces of the rule of law should stay out of politics.

Or else?

After watching the story of Hans Litten, it was hard to put feelings of unease to one side. In 193,1 Germany was still very much a functioning democracy. It's fragile constitution was creaking, but there were no real signs of what was about to come next. 

In 2019, our fragile constitution is creaking. At least Hans Litten was able to summon Hitler to court and put him on the witness stand. Our lawyers had no such luck with Prime Minister Johnson. He refused to even sign a witness statement.

By the time Hans Litten ended his misery at the end of a rope in 1938, the world was waking up to the unfolding German nightmare. By then, the evil genie was all the way out of the bottle and 50 million would die before the genie was finally killed off.

How will last week's court case look in seven year's time? Will it be a half forgotten footnote in the dismal hitory of the Brexit fiasco? Or will it be seen as one of the last chances we had to stem the tide? To slam the stopper into the bottle before the eveil genie had the chance to get out?

Hans Litten's heroic story got my mind wandering to some pretty uncomfortable places. It took me back to one of my long drives to the continent to buy cheap tobacco. I stocked up in Luxembourg and took a night drive down to Bavaria.

To the museum at Dachau. 

To memories of indescribable horror. I'll never forget the display of all the newspaper front pages reporting on the grand opening of the camp where Hans Litten ended his days. It was trumpeted by the strutting Nazis. They were in no mood to keep the place secret. Instead they threw open the gates and preened themselves for the cameras. Within a few days of shutting down parliament, the Nazis rounded up tens of thousands of potential troublemakers and packed them off to the new concentartion camps. Socialists and communists and trade union leaders and acadmics and lawyers and bothersome journalists. Thorns in their side. Stones in their shoe.

And had there been an internet back then, they would have certainly had a berth in Dachau waiting for those writing blogs like this one. Even Nazi goons can use Google. I don't suppose it would have taken them very long to put my front door through in the early hours of a Scottish night.

Our Blackie is a heck of a guard dog, but he ain't that good....

So now the rain falls and the Indian Summer has breathed its last. Winter is coming. Sometime in the next couple of days the Supreme Court will announce their judgement. And all of a sudden it feels like a horribly big deal. All of a sudden the lights seem to be going out. And all the while we tell ourselves it really isn't the same as it was back then. The world has moved on. Things like that can't happen again. Not here. Not now.

Can they?

Is the rule of law still a thing? Or are we all about to learn the same hard truth Hans Litten learned in 1931? 

Sorry Jim, but I really hope you lose this one.