The Death of Democracy

Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

By: Benjamin Carter Hett

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

The Death of Democracy is a riveting audiobook account of how the Nazi Party came to power, and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen.

Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In this dramatic audiobook, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time.

To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. From the late 1920s, the Weimar Republic’s very political success sparked insurgencies against it, of which the most dangerous was the populist anti-globalization movement led by Hitler. But as Hett shows, Hitler would never have come to power if Germany’s leading politicians had not tried to coopt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler’s hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship.

Benjamin Carter Hett is one of America’s leading scholars of 20th-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today, when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of strongmen sounds ever louder.

©2018 Benjamin Carter Hett (P)2018 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"[Narrator Steven Crossley's] British accent gives his narration an academic-sounding quality fitting for the text. He is clear and precise in pronunciation and enunciation and is suitably expressive throughout." (AudioFile Magazine)

Truly Terrifying

Everyone who is concerned about what is happening in The United States today and everyone who thinks it can't happen here needs to listen to this!

Great!

May we learn from history. “What's past is prologue.” - Shakespeare. Well done. Enjoyed the story and narration.
Thank you.

Grabbing the Wolf By the Ears

Hett employs outstanding scholarship and gripping narrative to explain how a highly civilized society with a thriving democracy could slip into barbarism. The folly lies with anti-democratic forces believing that they can use the barbarians to achieve their goals. In fact the barbarian outmaneuvers them because he is not constrained by the accepted rules of engagement, written or otherwise.

There is always one member of MAGA world who will be turned off by a work of scholarship because it is a work of scholarship, and that is not what they are looking for. If fact there are no references to Trump or the MAGA movement in this book, not even by inference. However, our MAGA representative has heard the author interviewed and like virtually every other scholar in the field, he recognizes the parallels between the two movements. Anybody who studies the topic will arrive at the same conclusions. However, there is nothing in this book that attempts to draw these parallels. If a reader is offended that this historian has a low opinion of the Nazis, maybe he would be more comfortable reading Mein Kampf. But there is nothing in this scholarly book that reflects any kind of liberal bias. Hett is sharing received scholarship on the subject of the rise of THE Nazis, nothing more.

When history is prescient

Excellent narration on a fascinating topic. I listen to this as an American in 2021. I find that the parallels between the death of the Weimar Republic and American media and political life over the past five years are striking. I hope the world's future takes a different path than it did in 1933, but I fear that most people don't know their history. in any event, this book offers great insights on an important part of the world's history.

Concise and enlightening - lessons for our time

I selected this book based on a 1-star review that popped up when I selected this book from the audible app. The very long 1-star review accused the book of partisanship for suggesting parallels between the rise of the Nazis and current political conditions in the United States. Many readers of history have seen those same parallels and have expressed concern. I purchased the book with the suspicion that it was an accurate reflection of reality...and it is.
The author presents factual information about the attitudes and actions of the German people in addition to their would be leaders. The evidence includes personal memoirs, transcripts and news reports of the time. At no point does the author make direct comparisons between then and now. The 1-star reviewer must have seen the parallels between the rise of Nazism and the current political situation in the U.S. all by himself--and he is not wrong. The 1-star reviewer wrote his review before an angry mob marched on the U.S. capitol building on January 6th, 2021 to intimidate lawmakers engaged in the task of certifying the 2020 presidential election. Hitler and company burned the German Reichstag building. Trump launched an insurrectionist mob against ours. Parallels?
An underlying theme of this, and other books like it (William Shirer's "The Collapse of the Third Republic" comes to mind), is a distaste for democracy itself by those living under it. In each case a group of people devoted to a particular ideology could not stand the compromises demanded of democratic rule. They had all the answers and everyone who disagreed with them was a threat to the nation itself. Elections only allowed lesser people to express themselves--people whose ideas weren't worthy of consideration according to the ideologues. So why bother with elections at all? Why, for that matter, even honor the results of elections?
This book shows how fragile democratic institutions can be. It illustrates how political divisions, based on perceived ideological incompatibility, can lead to a distrust of democracy itself. When a large enough subset of a population believes that democracy cannot solve its problems or, worse still, that democracy itself is a problem, that democracy doesn't have long to live.
If the 1-star reviewer saw parallels between then and now, maybe it isn't a partisan book. Maybe it's a truthful book and those comparisons are accurate. Rather than reject the book and throw it on a burning pile of disagreeable books (where have we seen that before?), perhaps we should heed the warnings that this book illuminates.

Required Reading in the Time of Trump

If our schools could only teach about one chapter in history, it should be this. I am an educated person, a lawyer, and an interested student of history. At the conclusion of this book, I marveled at how I could have possibly gotten to this point in my life without having ever learned of the details of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. This book is beyond interesting. It’s terrifying.

calm and chilling

very well done . think of all common political skullduggery and the banality of evil

A useful, timely overview — could use a comparative perspective

A useful overview of the main forces at work in Germany’s descent into Hitler’s murderous tyranny. It assigns heavy responsibility not just to Hitler’s peculiar biography, or to “German culture,” but to the impact of decisive historical events, like the lost WWI gambit and Weimar’s prolonged, divisive economic struggles, as well as the tendency of all sorts of influential players on the Right (and Left) to underestimate “the little corporal.” Missing here is (1) any analysis of the “permissive” role of the intl community in Hitler’s rise — another necessary condition; and (2) a brief comparative survey of other Axis fascisms — notably Japan + Italy. But that might have added at most a chapter to this otherwise comprehensive intro.

Don't miss this beautifully written book

I get jaded at times when I try a multi-starred book and find it less appealing than I would like. This book is a gem on the three ratings. If your interest in Hitler and his rise, his eventual stranglehold on the Republic, its political parties, the church, and the media. Ultimately Hitler had the German people in his fist. and his organization bent to his will. There are many analogs to contemporary politics, and a careful reader will spot them. I bought the Kindle book so that I could identify sections in the recordings that struck my interest.
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Frighteningly familiar

Listening to this title in August of 2020, I cannot be more stunned at just how similar the death of their republic and our own are. We are much further down the road to fascism than even I knew. I will be totally surprised if Trump does NOT try and pull off a power grab - the evidence of the most blatant attempts to suppress the vote are already public (see the United States Postal Service), and they are refusing to make public a redacted report of the IC public so citizens are armed with knowledge about what foreign powers are doing - and it must be done BEFORE the election. The open acceptance of the American Right of fascism is far easier to understand after reading this timely & important work.