Originally published on January 27, 2022 (Episode 244)
Introduction
On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Simultaneous with Franklin Roosevelt’s “First One Hundred Days” in the United States, Hitler’s first one hundred days were even more dramatic and consequential—the most sudden change, Peter Fritzsche argues, in all of German history.
Within weeks, a very partisan and divided society—split between Social Democrats, Communists, National Socialists, Catholics, and Protestants—seemed to transform itself into a “people’s community,” forged by terror from above and “conversion” from below. Elections, arrests, bonfires, executions, rallies, and boycotts marked the first steps in a national revolution that made Germany unrecognizable within just over three months.
In Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (Basic Books, 2021), Peter Fritzsche examines the kaleidoscopic, terrifying details of this transformation, when to sympathizers it looked as if German history had healed itself, and to outsiders it looked like the collapse of democracy into dictatorship.
About the Guest
Peter Fritzsche is the W.E. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. A leading scholar of modern German history, he is the author of numerous works, including Germans Into Nazis and Life and Life and Death in the Third Reich. Hitler’s First Hundred Days is his latest book.
For Further Investigation
Peter Fritzsche, Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (Basic Books, 2021)
Peter Fritzsche, Germans Into Nazis (Harvard University Press, 1998)
Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris and Hitler: 1936–1945 Nemesis (W. W. Norton, 1998 & 2000)
John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (Vintage, 1998)
💬 Listen & Discuss
What explains how a divided nation so quickly became a dictatorship? Was it terror, conviction, or some combination of the two? Share your reflections in the comments—and forward this conversation to a friend interested in how democracies fall.
