53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy

by Timothy W. Ryback

In a court appearance in September 1930, Adolf Hitler declared we would never again try to overthrow the Weimar Republic by violent means. Rather, he informed the packed courtroom, once he had achieved power legally, he intended to destroy the country's democratic systems by moulding the government as he saw fit. 'So, through constitutional means?' the presiding judge asked. 'Jawohl!' Hitler replied.

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 a short, compelling book, and in our era of astonishing far-right political gains, historian Timothy Ryback chillingly evokes the playbook by which the democratic German constitutional republic was torn down.

256 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication September 3, 2026

About the author

Timothy W. Ryback is an American historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. He previously served as the Deputy-Secretary General of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris, and Director and Vice President of the Salzburg Global Seminar. Prior to this, he was a lecturer in the Concentration of History and Literature at Harvard University.

Ryback has written on European history, politics and culture for numerous publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and The New York Times. He is the author of The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, published in 2000. He also wrote Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life, published in 2008. Ryback is also author of Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, published in 1989.