A chilling chronicle of how Adolf Hitler overturned a constitutional democracy in less than eight weeks.

It took just 53 days - one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and forty minutes - from the moment Hitler became Chancellor on January 31, 1933 for him to transform the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. And the minutes mattered.

In our era of astonishing far-right political gains, historian Timothy Ryback chillingly evokes the playbook by which Germany's first constitutional democracy was disabled then dismantled.

"Incisive...a trenchant depiction of democracy as most vulnerable when its stewards are insufficiently committed" - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A sobering study of how democracies can become dictatorships overnight" - Kirkus Reviews

"Riveting ... Reading Timothy Ryback's excellent and forensic account of the complicated events in German politics in the six-month run-up to that fateful moment, I found myself willing the end result not to happen" - Daily Mail, on TAKEOVER