This "elegant and sobering" (New York Times) history reveals how Germany's fractured republic gave way to the Third Reich, from the breakthrough of the Nazi party to the rise of Hitler
Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler's First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich. Fritzsche examines the events of the period--the elections and mass arrests, the bonfires and gunfire, the patriotic rallies and anti-Jewish boycotts--to understand both the terrifying power the National Socialists exerted over ordinary Germans and the powerful appeal of the new era they promised.
Hitler's First Hundred Days is the chilling story of the beginning of the end, when one hundred days inaugurated a new thousand-year Reich.
Reviews:
"Extensive primary sources, including novels, films, journalism, and diplomatic memos... animate the means through which Hitler's system fused party with nation and forged ordinary Germans into Nazis." -- Airmail
"Not all 100 days are the same. This riveting and troubling portrait of political and social depredation by a master historian of the Third Reich underscores liberal democratic frailty in the face of fierce determined attack. As such, it implicitly offers readers a clarion call to take incipient and assertive authoritarianism seriously lest they create an ugly new normal."-- Ira Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
"In the first 100 days of Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor in 1933, Germany transformed from a troubled democracy to a country that put into practice extreme repression and limitations on personal freedom...Everyone concerned about the rise of nationalism, the impact of extreme partisanship, and preserving democracy should read this insightful book."-- Library Journal, starred review
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