53 Days

' 53 Days makes no reference to contemporary politics. And yet certain echoes of the 1930s resonate so loudly that it is impossible not to hear them' THE ATLANTIC
A chilling chronicle of how Adolf Hitler overturned a constitutional democracy in less than eight weeks. It took just 53 days - one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and forty minutes - from the moment Hitler became Chancellor on January 31, 1933 for him to transform the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. And the minutes mattered. In our era of astonishing far-right political gains, historian Timothy Ryback chillingly evokes the playbook by which Germany's first constitutional democracy was disabled then dismantled.

TIMOTHY RYBACK has written on history and politics for more than three decades. He is the author of Hitler's Private Library, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and The Last Survivor, a New York Times Notable Book. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and the Financial Times. He is cofounder and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. Previously he was a lecturer in the Concentration of History and Literature at Harvard University.