The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
Fritzsche describes an era that has been covered by other books—not least his own—many times over…But there's something particularly clarifying about the hundred-days framing, especially as it's presented in this elegant and sobering book, which shows how an unimaginable political transformation can happen astonishingly quickly.
New Criterion
Masterly... While Hitler's First Hundred Days is laden with lessons for contemporary political observers (let
alone students of any era of modern political history), Fritzsche is not a prisoner of the moment. He has instead made a substantial contribution to the historical scholarship on Nazi Germany.
author of Berlin and Where Ghosts Walked: Muni David Clay Large
If you have ever wanted to gain a better understanding of when, how, and why a critical mass of Germans turned themselves over to a pathological populist ideologue like Adolf Hitler, enthusiastically embracing his brand of exclusionary tribalism against a backdrop of economic dislocation, societal polarization, and state-sponsored terror, this is the book for you. Solidly researched and gracefully written, acclaimed historian Peter Fritzsche's Hitler's First Hundred Days is also timely, very timely indeed.
professor emeritus of history at UCLA and author o Saul Friedlander
Thoroughly researched and elegantly written…A stark reminder of the blandishments of power.”
New York Times Book Review
Fritzsche’s 101 days certainly capture the scale of the upheaval and a swiftly coalescing sense of where the new Germany was headed.”
author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Or Ira Katznelson
Not all 100 days are the same. This riveting and troubling portrait of political and social depredation by a master historian of the Third Reich underscores liberal democratic frailty in the face of fierce determined attack. As such, it implicitly offers readers a clarion call to take incipient and assertive authoritarianism seriously lest they create an ugly new normal.
New York Times
There’s something particularly clarifying about the hundred-days framing, especially as it’s presented in this elegant and sobering book, which shows how an unimaginable political transformation can happen astonishingly quickly.”
Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA and author o Saul Friedlander
Hitler's First Hundred Days, a thoroughly researched and elegantly written book, is a must for understanding how a majority of Germans adapted to the new regime, even cheered it, merely a few months after Hitler's accession to the chancellorship. A stark reminder of the blandishments of power.
Air Mail
Fritzsche opens his book with a gripping fly-on-the-wall account of the meeting in which the Make Germany Great Again conservatives, who had the ear of Paul von Hindenburg, the ailing president, decided to make Adolf Hitler chancellor.”
author of The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Benjamin Hett
Hitler's First Hundred Days is gripping from the first lines. With elegance and deep knowledge, Peter Fritzsche tells the story of how Hitler and the Nazis consolidated their hold on power in the spring of 1933. Fritzsche knows this ground like few others, and his eye for the telling detail makes this book surprising at every turn, even as he shows how the story is chillingly relevant to our times.
From the Publisher
Extensive primary sources, including novels, films, journalism, and diplomatic memos... animate the means through which Hitler's system fused party with nation and forged ordinary Germans into Nazis."
—Airmail
Wall Street Journal
Perceptive.
Kirkus Reviews
2019-12-08
Hitler had little trouble destroying German democracy, and this fine history describes how he did it.
Fritzsche (History/Univ. of Illinois; An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, 2016, etc.) emphasizes that Germany was a divided, turbulent nation when Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. The Nazis were Germany's largest party, but a series of elections in 1932 showed no groundswell in its favor, and most establishment leaders considered Hitler a loose cannon. President Paul von Hindenburg refused to appoint him chancellor, and Hitler refused to serve under anyone else. It was only when influential conservatives assured Hindenburg that they could control Hitler from subordinate positions in the cabinet that he changed his mind. Even readers who know what followed will not put down Fritzsche's gruesomely fascinating account, as he chronicles how Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to schedule another election and then launched a fierce campaign, using government powers and his own paramilitaries to suppress opposition. The result was not a landslide, but the Nazis and their minor partners controlled just above 50% of the Reichstag. Proclaiming that the nation faced massive communist terrorism, Hitler urged officials to pass an enabling act, giving him dictatorial powers. To achieve the necessary two-thirds vote, he arrested the communist delegates, but in the end, it passed overwhelmingly. By May 9, the 100th day, Nazis had seized the governments of the federal states, dismantled trade unions, passed the first anti-Semitic laws, and destroyed all opposing political parties. Dachau and other new concentration camps quickly filled. In the final chapters, Fritzsche describes Germany over that summer and fall as mass arrests and violence dwindled. In return for enthusiastic devotion, Hitler assured citizens that they were the salt of the earth, that he would crush a despicable elite responsible for their miseries, and that sneering foreigners would realize that Germany was a great nation again. Most Germans found this appealing, and it remains a crowd-pleaser for power-hungry politicians around the world.
A painful but expert historical account.
