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

by Peter Fritzsche

Overview

This unsettling and illuminating history reveals how Germany's fractured republic gave way to the Third Reich, from the formation 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541697447
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Peter Fritzsche is the W. D. & Sarah E. Trowbridge professor of history at the University of Illinois and the author of ten previous books, including An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler and the award-winning Life and Death in the Third Reich. He lives in Urbana, Illinois.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Quarter Past Eleven, One Hundred Days, a Thousand Years 1

Chapter 1 "Crisis, if You Please" 25

Chapter 2 Mystery Tour 48

Chapter 3 Assault 91

Chapter 4 The "Communist Beast" 134

Chapter 5 The German Spring 176

Chapter 6 "Your Jewish Grandmother" 229

Chapter 7 The Administration of Life 263

Chapter 8 "This Enormous Planet" 301

Chapter 9 The One Hundred Days 336

A Postscript and Acknowledgments 357

Notes 361

Index 411

Editorial Reviews

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.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

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.

New Criterion

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.

author of Berlin and Where Ghosts Walked: Muni David Clay Large

Thoroughly researched and elegantly written…A stark reminder of the blandishments of power.”

professor emeritus of history at UCLA and author o Saul Friedlander

Fritzsche’s 101 days certainly capture the scale of the upheaval and a swiftly coalescing sense of where the new Germany was headed.”

New York Times Book Review

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.

author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Or Ira Katznelson

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 York Times

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.

Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA and author o Saul Friedlander

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.”

Air Mail

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.

author of The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Benjamin Hett

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

From the Publisher

Perceptive.

Wall Street Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews