53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy

On September 25, 1930, Adolf Hitler appeared before Germany’s Supreme Court and outlined his plans to destroy the Weimar Republic through democratic means. The judge asked, “So, only through constitutional means?” Hitler replied, “Jawohl!”

Barely two years later, on January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed the fifteenth chancellor of the Weimar Republic. Within 53 days of that date, he had effected one of the most astonishing transformations in modern democracy, using the provisions of the Constitution to turn a democratic republic into an authoritarian state. Drawing from his 800-page political playbook, Mein Kampf, Hitler banned or neutered the print press and radio; purged the civil service and installed party loyalists; suspended civil liberties; compromised the courts; imposed Reich government control over the country’s seventeen federated states; slapped draconian tariffs on trading partners; co-opted, imprisoned, or drove political opponents into exile; assumed control over the central bank; and then compelled the Reichstag, the country’s legislative body, to pass an Enabling Act granting Hitler dictatorial power.

Charting the key events of those dramatic days in taut and compelling prose, Timothy W. Ryback evokes the raw political power and increasing inevitability of Hitler’s state capture, amid heroic efforts by journalists and social democrats to save the republic, underscoring the alarming observation in the introduction to Joseph Goebbels’ collected essays: “The big joke on democracy is that it provides its mortal enemies with the means to its own destruction.”