There are few words left in spoken language that truly turns heads. But Holocaust still retains such lexical power. So do Hitler, Nazi, Auschwitz, and Dachau. Such iron-wrought phonemes have become effective synonyms of incarnate evil, of horror beyond imagination, especially for the generation for whom World War II already seems distant history; no longer a living memory, but one only brought to life through books, films, and museum artifacts.

In 1993, Steven Spielberg rekindled the memory of Oskar Schindler for an entire world of moviegoers. (Novelist Thomas Keneally had done the same for a world of readers eleven years prior.) I will never forget my experience with the film SCHINDLER’S LIST. Upon emerging from the theater that gray, wet night in Chicago, I found myself unable to speak. Unable to critically assess. Practically unable to drive home. I remained in such a state for several days. The Holocaust—that distant hell—had briefly visited the state of the present time. But not for the last time.

Three years later, I spent an extended summer in the Middle East, finishing coursework for a master’s in New Testament Studies. For several weeks, I was privileged to live within Old City Jerusalem, at a university that bordered Sulemain’s Wall on Mt. Zion and overlooked the Valley of Gehenna. (Corrupt King Josiah committed many acts of abomination in this valley, after which it became the city’s common cesspool and the theological inspiration for an inferno afterlife. Thus, the irony of ironies, from my window, I could partake a view from Paradise, into the very depths of hell.)

I soon learned that Oskar Schindler was buried in Old City Jerusalem, in a small Catholic cemetery several hundred meters from where I was staying. After World War II, Schindler emigrated to Argentina but soon went bankrupt. Eventually, a community of Holocaust survivors located their “rescuer,” who, immured in poverty, had repatriated to Germany. When Schindler died, he was interred in the Holy Land, one of the few places that had embraced him after the war. (In the 1960s, he was invited to plant a tree along the Avenue of the Righteous at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Museum.)

I visited Schindler’s place of rest many times that summer. His marker was easy to find—covered high with rocks, as is Middle Eastern custom, honoring the dead with stones, akin to our laying flowers at a grave. The photograph I took of Schindler’s grave has hung on my office wall ever since, its caption a permanent reminder of the ultimate human struggle, the war between good and evil: Der Unvergessliche Lebenretter. “The Unforgotten Lifesaver.”

In 2003, the Holocaust came alive to me yet again, in a place I never could have expected. Certainly, in a way I never expected—but, I suppose, in the way it will only ever come alive again, as the generation who lived through those days is nearly gone.
Three years ago, I moved to Columbia, South Carolina, enrolled in graduate school at the University of South Carolina to study for a master’s degree in library science, and soon found myself working for USC’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The USC Rare Book Library is a closed-stack bookman’s attic, a dusty Bibliotheque, wherein only a handful of individuals are privileged to explore its dusty, treasure-filled shelves. (I once happened upon a 17th-century Descartes volume that the library did not know it owned, having improperly cataloged it in the 19th century.)

In Spring of 2004, a German institution sent our library an obscure request for information about a man named Hans Litten. They noted that USC owned the papers of Lord Allen of Hurtwood (a fact listed only in cursory fashion on USC’s website), and they wondered whether this archive contained any information about Herr Litten.

The University of South Carolina acquired the Allen Papers from the family in 1960 but had never processed them. Thus, no one knew what the 20-odd boxes of materials contained. Moreover, no one had heard of Hans Litten.

The task fell to me to sort through the Lord Allen Papers in search of Hans Litten. Before long, a breathtaking, nearly-forgotten story emerged. Letters from Lord Allen to Adolph Hitler. Letters to Lord Allen from Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister. British newspaper accounts of the Holocaust, from as early as 1933. Gruesome headlines about the beheading of hundreds of German prisoners. And several boxes of letters that told the story of an underground movement, composed of private citizens and politicians, both British and Continental, of which Lord Allen was the nucleus, who did everything possible to free numerous Germans from Nazi imprisonment and torture.

Who were these forgotten prisoners? Unbelievably, they were the first victims of the Holocaust. Before there was a Final Solution. Hans Litten. Carl von Ossietzky. Erich Muhsam. Ernst Heilmann. Hermann Liebman. The several dozen men Hitler ordered arrested in the early morning hours of February 29, 1933, within hours of the Reichstag Fire. (Some were arrested in the immediate days and weeks that followed.) These men posed the greatest political threat to Hitler’s nascent dictatorship. But the man the Fuhrer despised most was Hans Litten, a pacifist attorney who, in a Berlin courtroom in May 1929, had interrogated and humiliated Hitler before the entire German nation. Hans Litten became a trophy of contempt for the Nazi inner circle, enduring unimaginable torture for five years. His story is, of course, told within the pages of LITTEN’S PASSION.

Nearly all the original Reichstag prisoners were brutally tortured. And those who weren’t outright murdered, after a session of beating, would return to their cells and discover nooses hanging from the ceiling: for some, a welcome end to their undeserved suffering. Hans Litten, however, was afforded no such macabre invitation.

But this was not so. By the time the U.S. troops liberated Dachau on May 1, 1945, Hans Litten’s suffering had long ended. No one knows how Hans Litten was murdered in February 1938, only that he was. And with the passing of time, and the burial of the Lord Allen Papers in the rare book recesses of the University of South Carolina, the name Hans Litten has nearly faded from memory.

Also forgotten is the part Lord Allen played in the Litten Affair. A devout pacifist who was himself imprisoned for conscientious objection during World War I, Reginald Clifford Allen became a prominent political-left figure, newspaperman, and founder of the No-Conscription Fellowship. He was eventually offered a peerage, but he was a lord without an estate, living, at best, a middle-class existence, despite his title.

Lord Allen’s efforts to free Hans Litten, and hundreds of other German prisoners, cannot be fully recounted in the space of this l. Suffice it to say, such a history deserves the title Lord Allen: The British Schindler.

When I discovered the series of February 1938 letters that informed Lord Allen of Hans Litten’s murder, I was thunderstruck. Litten’s death impacted Lord Allen with an equal blow. One year later, Lord Allen fell ill and died. I cannot help but think that Allen’s physical collapse may have been the result of feeling responsible for failing to save Hans Litten. For failing to save so many. And toward the very end, the devout pacifist must have realized that only force could free Germany, and the world, from such a powerful evil.

Neither Hans Litten nor Lord Allen lived to see V-day. So many died not knowing whether Hitler’s armies would be destroyed, whether liberty would be restored. And now, the remaining survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust must similarly wonder how the future will remember those dark days of Nazi reign. What monuments will be established to prevent such unspeakable wickedness?

The writers hope Litten’s Passion will become such a monument. Hitler’s rise to power could have been prevented. All such horrors can be prevented. I pray the names of Lord Allen, Hans Litten, and Irmgard Litten will become luminescent, forever countering and overpowering the diabolical connotations of Concentration Camp.

How many times in the past year-and-a-half I have sat at my desk and wiped tears off decades-old pages. Pages that Ribbentrop signed and Hitler may have previewed. Pages upon which Corder Catchpool and Dorothy Buxton and so many other unknown underground heroes wrote in the exigent pursuit of justice. Pages that Lord Allen read, wherein Irmgard thanked him from the depths of her heart for all his help, despite the tragic fate of her son.

You who touch these pages, whether they be fresh from the printer, or foxed and brittle with age, you are beholden to this monument of Hans Litten, the forgotten first victim of the Holocaust. In these pages, the Holocaust rises out of the past and becomes present. For the memory of Hans Litten, and the millions who suffered, endeavor to make certain such darkness never casts its shadow over the future.

Even if LITTEN’S PASSION never becomes a film, Hans and Irmgard, and all the good men and women who fought for justice, have inspired my life beyond measure. But it would be so wonderful for the whole world to see this story through our impacted eyes.

Arik M. Bjorn
Columbia, SC