The Swastika and the Red Hat 

Imagine you hear a speech in which a ruler, reflecting on his first months in office, boasts that he has secured the borders, imposed tariffs, purged the civil service of corruption, eliminated Marxism, and protected Christianity. You might reasonably assume it was delivered in Washington sometime in the past year. In fact, Adolf Hitler delivered it on March 23, 1933, before the newly constituted Reichstag in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House. The speech occupies a prominent place in historian Timothy Ryback’s 53 Days, a succinct new account of Hitler’s astonishing rise to power during the first few months of 1933.  

The book grew out of a series of articles Ryback published in The Atlantic over the last year or so. The first, on how Hitler “used the constitution to shatter the constitution,” apparently “scared the hell” out of California Governor Gavin Newsom. But the essays that followed were even more uncanny: “The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler,” “Hitler Used a Bogus Crisis of ‘Public Order’ to Make Himself Dictator,” “Hitler’s Terrible Tariffs,” “What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker,” “Hitler’s Greenland Obsession,” and “Hitler’s Edifice Complex.” 

We have been told that comparisons between the Trumpists and the Nazis are too facile, that they inevitably trivialize the genocidal mass murder. Comparison-deniers have pointed out that while Hitler had a clearly defined ideology, codified in Mein Kampf, Trump has never come up with anything close to it, apart from the abiding wish to maximize his and his family’s wealth. Comparison-deniers might also argue, as the United States Supreme Court recently did, that Trump’s signature talking point—likening immigrants to animals—is just rhetoric, not the expression of a policy goal.  

Historical parallels are indeed nothing but that: two lines that, as we learned in school, never meet. Still, reading Ryback’s 53 Days, 588 days into the president’s second term, is a profoundly dizzying experience. It has a way of making those parallel lines seem like one and the same. Ryback, the director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, has visited this terrain before. In his 2024 book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, he tracks Hitler from the July 1932 elections, when the Nazi Party emerged as Germany’s largest political force, through its losses that November and the backroom deals with conservative elites that finally installed the former army corporal from Austria with the funny mustache as chancellor in January 1933.  

53 Days picks up there. Ryback offers a chilling, week-by-week account of the destruction of the remaining restraints on Hitler’s power, beginning with his first cabinet meeting on January 30, 1933, and ending on March 23 with passage of the infamous Enabling Act, which gave Hitler the right to make and enforce laws without parliamentary approval: the de facto “suicide,” writes Ryback, “of a constitutional republic.”  

A core ingredient of Hitler’s ideology was a eugenicist commitment to racial purity of the Volk. Those who reject comparisons between Trump and Hitler, while acknowledging the American president’s visceral racism, have pointed to a homegrown “history of xenophobic hostility,” implying that Trump didn’t need Hitler to become who he was. Ironically, Hitler himself, as Ryback explains, was quite aware of the tradition of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States: “By fundamentally refusing immigration to elements deemed physically unhealthy while excluding certain races altogether,” he crooned in Mein Kampf, “the American Union has already, from the very outset, aligned itself with the idea of an ethnically unified state.” If Hitler learned a few things from the U.S., he’s been giving back ever since. It’s hard not to hear in Trump’s vitriolic comment at a 2023 rally in New Hampshire that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a direct echo of Hitler’s repeated public declarations that he had come to “purge the Reich” of foreign elements.  

But the parallels do not end with Hitler and his associates. Just as consequential are the people who enabled him. The novelist Klaus Mann, returning to Germany in 1945 as a member of a U.S. Army intelligence unit, wondered where all the Nazis had gone. Suddenly Hitler hadn’t been anyone’s fault. But the fact remains that in March 1933, over 17 million Germans had wanted him to be their leader. By the time the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act a few weeks later, Germany had already enabled Hitler.  

Most assume there are only two ways of accounting for this stunning outcome. Either a sizable chunk of the German population knew exactly what they were doing and willingly cast their lot with a dictator, or they failed to understand what they were enabling. The truth was probably messier. Many Germans may have recognized Hitler’s extremism but regarded him as a necessary bulwark against communism. “The Marxist parties and their followers,” Hitler thundered in an address broadcast on his second day as chancellor, had left the country in “a heap of ruins.” Despite the urgings of his coalition partner, the businessman Alfred Hugenberg of the German National People’s Party, Hitler cleverly refused to ban the communists immediately. He needed them to remain an ongoing threat as he headed into the March elections.  

Hitler’s vast propaganda machine made it difficult to tell the lies from the truth. His efforts included a makeover of the German language, in which established terms received new meanings and newly invented words pushed aside old ones. Ryback refers to Victor Klemperer, a professor of romance languages at the University of Dresden, who meticulously documented the semantic shifts in his diaries and in his brilliant 1947 book that grew out of them, LTI, short for Lingua Tertii Imperii, or “The Language of the Third Reich.” Consider Schutzhaft—protective custody—which suggested that the government, rather than arresting and brutalizing its opponents, was in fact holding them for safekeeping. A modern equivalent would be the Department of Homeland Security’s insistence that detention was an immigrant’s “choice,” not the result of a forceful abduction.

But propaganda can only explain so much. Hitler also depended on the willing collaboration of the republic’s conservative power wielders. The geriatric president of the Reich, General Paul von Hindenburg, despised the “Bohemian corporal” and nevertheless believed he would be able to control Hitler for his purposes. Never was a man less equipped to defend democracy. At the ceremonial reopening of the Reichstag in Potsdam on March 21, von Hindenburg appeared in full military uniform, spiked helmet on his head and medals cascading down his chest, as if the Kaiser had never been defeated.  

Von Hindenburg stood by as Hermann Göring, a minister in Hitler’s cabinet and something like a one-man Department of Government Efficiency, fired civil servants en masse (“When you chop, chips fly”). He did nothing when Göring issued a “shooting order” to the Prussian police (“better to commit an error than to fail to take action”). And after the Reichstag burned in February 1933, when Hitler blamed the Communists before any proper police investigation had established responsibility, von Hindenburg readily signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending basic civil liberties.  

The widespread violence that followed made international headlines. An article published in the London Daily Herald on March 27 and cited by Ryback mentioned three Jewish victims by name. Here Ryback is occasionally careless with details that matter. He writes that the journalist Leo Krell died in his apartment after being thrown from a window; in fact, Krell died in a hospital on March 16 after being tortured in the SA prison on Berlin’s Papestrasse. It was another victim, Siegfried Kindermann, who was thrown from a window. Kindermann, a baker’s apprentice and a member of the Rote Hilfe (“Red Aid”), the Communist Party-affiliated social service organization, was abducted in front of his home in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district as his mother watched and dragged to the SA barracks in the Hedemannstrasse. He steadfastly refused to give up the names of his political friends and died on March 12, a day after he had been tossed, like trash, onto the street—the same day Hitler, in a radio address, hypocritically called for such individual acts of violence to cease. March 12 was also the day the Königsberg merchant Max Neumann—not “Goldman,” as Ryback has it—died in a Berlin hospital after being beaten to a pulp by Hitler’s henchmen. Since the Nazis sought to strip their victims of their dignity and individuality, getting their names and stories right matters. 

Professor Klemperer, the assiduous archivist of totalitarian doublespeak, was initially spared, thanks to his non-Jewish wife. Eventually, in June 1942, the Gestapo caught up with him, too. Rifling through his apartment, the Nazi cops found a library copy of The Myth of the Twentieth Century, by Nazi in-house philosopher and party functionary Alfred Rosenberg, a book that Klemperer, as a Jew, wasn’t supposed to have. One of the cops whacked Klemperer over the head with the book, slapped him, and, for good measure, kicked him when he was on the ground. He also tore up the notes Klemperer had inserted into the book. Had the men bothered to read them, Klemperer would not have survived the encounter. 

Growing up in Germany in the 1970s, I was aware of the scale of the atrocities the Nazis had committed. That wasn’t the norm. We didn’t learn much about the topic in school, but my father, a politically savvy, left-leaning academic, filled in the gaps. (My father was sixteen when the war ended, which didn’t save him from being drafted, a useless deployment that ended as soon as he arrived where he had been sent.) Once, he showed me a grainy photograph of an emaciated man in an old cardigan: Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben. He was in court, facing the notorious Nazi judge Roland Freisler, charged with complicity in the failed attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944. Von Witzleben had no illusions about his fate. Since the jailers had taken his belt, he had to hold on to his pants, which earned him the judge’s derision: “Why do keep fiddling with your trousers, you dirty old man?” The haggard former soldier, standing upright in the face of certain death, traces of recent torture visible on his face, seemed an image of supreme courage to me. Yet my father, a shopkeeper’s son and the first in his family to attend college, suggested another way of understanding the July 20 conspiracy: as a belated attempt to rectify what these officers—educated, aristocratic, nationalist, profoundly conservative—had failed to do sooner. Even Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the army officer who planted the bomb that missed Hitler, at first welcomed the Nazis, hoping that they would rid his downtrodden nation of the shame from the Treaty of Versailles.  

Ryback’s 53 Days teaches us, forcefully, that democracy is never anything we can take for granted. Those of us who celebrated Obama’s victory in 2008 as proof that we had now entered a “post-racial” United States could not have expected the current crackdown on DEI, the relentless taunting of immigrants, the paramilitary troops manhandling them in the streets. The resurgence of Trumpism in the U.S. parallels the astonishing success of the far-right, Islamophobic Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, a party deemed an extremist organization by Germany’s own domestic intelligence agency. The Trump regime has loudly praised the AfD, which seems poised to take over several German state governments later this year. In his 1941 play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht likened Hitler’s takeover to the rise of a Chicago mobster. Brecht’s play ends with a terrifying, hard-to-translate observation that might serve as an unofficial motto also for Ryback’s 53 Days and a reminder to all of us to resist: “The lap is fertile yet from which this crept.” 

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