53 Days

In a court appearance in September 1930, Adolf Hitler declared we would never again try to overthrow the Weimar Republic by violent means. Rather, he informed the packed courtroom, once he had achieved power legally, he intended to destroy the country's democratic systems by moulding the government as he saw fit. 'So, through constitutional means?' the presiding judge asked. 'Jawohl!' Hitler replied.





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 a short, compelling book, and in our era of astonishing far-right political gains, historian Timothy Ryback chillingly evokes the playbook by which the democratic German constitutional republic was torn down.



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.



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