Episode 244: Hitler’s First One Hundred Days

On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany. Occurring simultaneously with Franklin Roosevelt's "One Hundred Days", Hitler's first one hundred days were even more dramatic and consequential–the most sudden change, Peter Fritzsche writes, in all of German history. "A very partisan and divided society, fragmented between left and right, between Social Democrats, Communists and National Socialists (Nazis), between Catholics and Protestants, seemingly transformed itself – by terror from above and “conversion” from below – into a seemingly unified society recognized widely as a 'people’s community'." In his book Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, Fritzsche examines this transformation in its tumultuous, kaleidoscopic, and terrifying details. He describes elections and arrests, bonfires and executions, the patriotic rallies and anti-Jewish boycotts, getting at the transformation that Germany experienced between January 30th and May 10th. "Compared with day one, Jan. 30, 1933, Germany was not recognizable on day 100, at least to outsiders. To sympathizers, German history had healed itself in 100 days." Peter Fritzsche is the W.E. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of History at the University of Illinois in Champagne-Urbana. The author of numerous fascinating studies of German history, Hitler's First Hundred Days is his lates.