Adolf Hitler attends a rally in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1934. Hitler’s rise to power, and the period between his appointment as chancellor and the Enabling Act granting him dictatorial powers, is recounted in a new book. (Wikimedia Commons/National Digital Archives of Poland)

Lessons in Adolf Hitler’s Rise to Power

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A brilliant new book concludes that Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 was far from inevitable—and aided by the connivance of German elites who underestimated him at every turn.

Timothy Ryback, 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press) 272 pp., $27.00.

In 1949, Theodor Heuss, the first president of the Federal Republic of Germany, warned his countrymen that “we should not make it so easy for ourselves to forget what the Hitler era brought us.”

Heuss, who had been a member of the pro-democracy German State Party during the Weimar Republic, was a keen student of Hitler’s rise. He had published a book called Hitler’s Rise in 1932 that warned of the dire threat Nazism posed to German democracy. Yet a year later, in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire, Heusee and four other members of his party nevertheless voted for the Enabling Act, which granted Hitler the authority to unilaterally make laws. They hoped against hope that it would bind Hitler into the existing legal system. Instead, the measure served as a death sentence for Weimar, establishing Hitler’s dictatorship.

In 53 Days, his brilliantly absorbing book about Hitler’s early weeks as chancellor, Timothy W. Ryback minutely examines his dismantlement of Weimar. Ryback is the author of several books on the German tyrant, including the widely lauded Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power. He offers a timely reminder that Hitler and his camarilla did not engage in an illicit seizure of power, but, as the Nazis themselves liked to emphasize, openly obtained it by constitutional means. Within 53 days, Hitler implemented what might be called “Project 1933.” In clear and compelling prose, Ryback emphasizes that the Führer drew upon his mephitic tract Mein Kampf as a playbook........

© The National Interest