53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy

A chilling chronicle of how Adolf Hitler overturned a constitutional democracy in less than eight weeks.

It took just 53 days - one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and forty minutes - from the moment Hitler became Chancellor on January 31, 1933 for him to transform the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. And the minutes mattered.

In our era of astonishing far-right political gains, historian Timothy Ryback chillingly evokes the playbook by which Germany's first constitutional democracy was disabled then dismantled.

About the Author :
TIMOTHY RYBACK has written on history and politics for more than three decades. He is the author of Hitler's Private Library, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and The Last Survivor, a New York Times Notable Book. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and the Financial Times. He is cofounder and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. Previously he was a lecturer in the Concentration of History and Literature at Harvard University.

Review :
An utterly gripping and suspenseful account of how an elected leader can make use of a democracy to destroy a democracy This book offers a powerfully written, blow-by-blow account of how German democracy was dismantled from within. It is a chilling reminder of democracy's fragility -and how easily we can lose it at the hands of our elected leaders Incisive...a trenchant depiction of democracy as most vulnerable when its stewards are insufficiently committed A sobering study of how democracies can become dictatorships overnight Timothy Ryback's riveting account, at once careful and brisk, dramatically reminds today's friends of democracy how fragile self-rule can become - and why defending it should be the first priority of all who believe in freedom, equality and justice The definitive anatomy of democratic collapse and a timely warning. Having watched Viktor Orbán methodically use the machinery of law to hollow out the rule of law in Hungary, I found Ryback's account viscerally familiar. 53 Days proves that our democracies are most endangered when constitutions, courts, and institutions are turned against the very freedoms they were designed to protect Timothy Ryback tells a grippingly important tale. His meticulous detailing of the dramatic days before Hitler assumed power make for salutary reading in our times How does a flawed republic become something entirely different? We know how the Nazi regime ended, but we think too little about how it began. This admirable account shows us how fragile and avoidable were those beginnings and helps us to reflect upon our own predicament Riveting ... Reading Timothy Ryback's excellent and forensic account of the complicated events in German politics in the six-month run-up to that fateful moment, I found myself willing the end result not to happen