53 Days : How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy

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.

Author: Timothy Ryback

Second World War

Published on 3 Sep 2026 by Atlantic Books.