How does the rise of Hitler look since the election of Donald Trump? Historians and activists were already busy drawing parallels with fascist demagogues as they watched Marine le Pen gain surprising vote totals in the 2012 race for the French presidency. By mid-November 2016, many scholars of interwar Europe were embracing a more hands-on role, creating online courses on fascism to assess the similarities with the present. Were these overblown or apt?
Peter Fritzsche’s answer to these questions has been to go back and reassess what we think we know about Hitler’s rise. Gone is the straightforward narrative of the old elites lifting Hitler into power. In “Hitler’s First Hundred Days,” Fritzsche’s dramatic retelling, even in the final meeting between the key players at 10:45 a.m. on Jan. 30, 1933, nothing was certain. With an anti-Weimar, antidemocratic majority of Communists and Nazis in the Reichstag, no coalition could be assembled to make Parliament work. And the men around the German president, Paul von Hindenburg, did not want it to work, either. Neither, however, did they want to cede power to Hitler. Certainly, they feared what Hitler would do if early elections were held and the Nazis won a mandate.
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