Benjamin Hett

A panoramic narrative of the years leading up to the Second World War — a tale of democratic crisis, racial conflict, and a belated recognition of evil, with profound resonance for our own time.

Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history.

Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind the scenes in Berlin, London, Moscow, and Washington, revealing the unsettled politics within each country in the wake of the German dictator’s growing provocations. He reveals the fitful path by which anti-Nazi forces inside and outside Germany came to understand Hitler’s true menace to European civilization and learned to oppose him, painting a sweeping portrait of governments under siege, as larger-than-life figures struggled to turn events to their advantage. 

As in The Death of Democracy, his acclaimed history of the fall of the Weimar Republic, Hett draws on original sources and newly released documents to show how these long-ago conflicts have unexpected resonances in our own time. To read The Nazi Menace is to see past and present in a new and unnerving light.

A riveting 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 The Death of Democracy, 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. He would never have come to power if Germany's leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt 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 a leading scholar of twentieth-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.

Benjamin Carter Hett is a professor of history at The Graduate Center and Hunter College.
 

CNN host Fareed Zakaria named the The Death of Democracy his book of the week shortly after its publication in April 2018. See the clip.

The book is a biography of the German lawyer Hans Litten (1903-38) who devoted his legal practice to fighting the Nazis, and on one occasion in 1931 subjected Adolf Hitler to a withering three-hour cross examination. Hitler took his revenge after 1933, and Litten died in the Dachau Concentration Camp in 1938. and on the other a study of the collapse of the rule of law in Germany in the years just before and just after the Nazi takeover. The first full-length biography of this very brave man, the book also explores the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, the collapse of the rule of law in Germany in the years just before and just after the Nazi takeover, and the terror of Nazi rule in Germany after 1933.