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 31st, 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.

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