More from the book review ...

... Almost no one, whether in Germany or outside, had expected it: In January, political experts from across the spectrum had assumed that Hitler was a cipher who had been captured by the conservative establishment, led by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, former Chancellor Franz von Papen, and others of their ilk.

What followed Hitler's appointment as chancellor was a kind of "flood the zone" strategy"an early election call, a blizzard of executive orders curtailing press freedom and giving Hitler's paramilitaries police powers, a crescendo of violence, then the shock of the Reichstag fire followed by thousands of arrests. The election of March 5 produced somewhat underwhelming results for the Nazis -- contrary to their own expectations, they fell short of a majority -- but at the end of the month they got their Enabling Act anyway.

Ryback tells this story well in a concise 194 pages. His book has two main arguments, both of them implicit rather than stated expressly. In fact, on the evidence of the text, I am not even sure he is conscious of the second argument.

Ryback is certainly conscious of the first argument though: The process by which Hitler consolidated dictatorial power provides a strong parallel and perhaps precedent to that of Donald Trump's second term, especially through most of the year 2025. The chapter titles alone make this clear enough: "War on the Press," "Purging the Civil Service," "Co-opting the Corporates," "Guardrails." We learn of Hitler's use of emergency decrees under the famous Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to curb the press, give his paramilitary followers police powers, and remove Jews and likely political opponents from the civil service.

When Ryback describes Reichstag president Paul Lbe and statistician Ernst Julius Gumbel talking about the reasons for the political failure of Germany's Social Democrats, any reader in 2026 will feel they could have been talking about today's feckless American Democrats. ...