Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich

Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche

Amid the ravages of economic depression, everyday Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both Left and Right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany transformed from a deeply divided republic into a one-party Nazi dictatorship. In Hitler's First Hundred Days, 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.

After Hitler's appointment as chancellor, the Nazis moved with brutality and audaciousness to solidify a new political order. Fritzsche offers a close examination of these few decisive months -- the elections and mass arrests, the gunfire and bonfires, the patriotic rallies and anti-Jewish boycotts -- to understand both the terrifying power that the National Socialists exerted over ordinary Germans as well as the appeal of the new era they promised. Rifling through newspapers, letters, and diaries, listening to the sounds of the radio and to song and slogans, and going into German homes, Fritzsche focuses on the moment when dissenting voices went silent and a majority seemed to prefer a Nazi future to the Weimar past.

Hitler's First Hundred Days is the chilling story of the beginning of the end, when one hundred days seemed to inaugurate a new thousand-year Reich.

Basic Books, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2020