This book covers 1932 and the first part of 1933 as Hitler rose to power in Germany. It has many parallels to The United States today so is worth reading as a cautionary tale of how democracy can be lost so quickly. The Nazis never had a majority of the country and even when Hitler suppressed voting for left party candidates, were still not able to gain a majority of votes. They did manage to gain the largest minority and this became Hitler’s path to dictatorship.

Hitler essentially said all along that he wanted to destroy democracy to save the country. He destroyed democracy alright and then proceeded to destroy a whole generation of Germans in his wars that followed, not to mention millions of Jews…and French…and Russians…and…you get the point. Ideas have consequences and sometimes those consequences can be very severe.

Some pertinent quotes:

“The National Socialist movement will achieve power in Germany by methods permitted by the present Constitution—in a purely legal way,” he told The New York Times. “It will then give the German people the form of organization and government that suits our purposes.”

“In towns and villages he stoked nationalist anger, claiming the government was not protecting Germany’s borders. They let in foreigners from the east who brought chaos and crime and havoc into the country, he said, to undermine the political system and society, to despoil and violate the purity of the German race.”

“Confronted by incontrovertible evidence—photographs of Hitler and Papen on the steps of the Schröder villa—Hitler did what he always did in the face of uncomfortable fact: he denied it publicly and vociferously.”