Hitler's First Hundred Days
When Germans Embraced the Third Reich
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4.1 • 27 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
This “elegant and sobering” (The 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Illinois history professor Fritzsche (An Iron Wind) chronicles the hundred days following Adolf Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor in this detailed investigation into "the phenomenon of National Socialism." Opening with a fly-on-the-wall account of the January 1933 meeting in which conservative leaders broke a parliamentary stalemate by elevating Hitler and agreeing to hold new elections, Fritzsche details how Nazis banned opposition newspapers, pitted Aryans against Jews (though he notes that anti-Semitism was already "prevalent"), suspended civil liberties, and "wiped out their adversaries in calculated acts of counterterrorism." He draws on diaries, memoirs, and news reports to unpack the "apparent sudden shift in national mood" as ordinary Germans eager to experience social cohesion after two decades of war and fractious politics both consented to and were coerced into supporting National Socialism: a Hamburg resident discovers a new "sense of community" in the city's grittiest districts, while a Dresden teacher can't prevent her 14-year-old students from singing the Nazi anthem for fear of losing her job. Skillfully interweaving these anecdotal accounts with big-picture analysis, Fritzsche deepens readers' understanding of how Hitler consolidated power. This is a worthy look at a moment too often hurried through in histories of the period.
Customer Reviews
Pay attention to the trends.
Fritzsche expertly lays out how the initial days of Nazi rule established patterns of control and violence that would only be stopped through a world war costing millions of lives. Most tragically, he explains how avoidable it all would have been if ordinary Germans had questioned Nazi use of lies and propaganda to brutalize those in their path. But they looked the other way and the Second World War was fought. How surreal and farcical it is that Trump steals so maladroitly from the Nazi playbook and his “base” remains clueless.