The Death of Democracy
Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic
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Narrated by:
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Steven Crossley
About this listen
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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"[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)
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For all the literature about Adolf Hitler, there have been just four seminal biographies; this is the fifth, a landmark work that sheds important new light on Hitler himself. Drawing on previously unseen papers and a wealth of recent scholarly research, Volker Ullrich reveals the man behind the public persona, from Hitler's childhood, to his failures as a young man in Vienna, to his experiences during the First World War, to his rise as a far-right party leader.
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Worthwhile if you haven't read a Hitler biography
- By Joshua on 11-03-16
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When the World Seemed New
- George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War
- By: Jeffrey A. Engel
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 20 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The end of the Cold War was the greatest shock to international affairs since World War II. In that perilous moment, Saddam Hussein chose to invade Kuwait, China cracked down on its own pro-democracy protesters, and regimes throughout Eastern Europe teetered between democratic change and new authoritarians. Not since FDR in 1945 had a US president faced such opportunities and challenges. As the presidential historian Jeffrey Engel reveals in this hard-to-pause history, behind closed doors, George H. W. Bush rose to the occasion brilliantly.
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The Right Man at the Right Time in the Right Job
- By A. M. on 09-12-18
By: Jeffrey A. Engel
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Becoming Hitler
- The Making of a Nazi
- By: Thomas Weber
- Narrated by: Alex Hyde-White
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In Becoming Hitler, award-winning historian Thomas Weber examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler shed his awkward, feckless persona and transformed himself into a savvy opportunistic political operator who saw himself as Germany's messiah. The story of Hitler's transformation is one of a fateful match between man and city. After opportunistically fluctuating between the ideas of the left and the right, Hitler emerged as an astonishingly flexible leader of Munich's right-wing movement.
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talented malevolence c a dash of amazing luck
- By emilio squillante on 11-05-18
By: Thomas Weber
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De Gaulle
- By: Julian Jackson
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 41 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In a definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept Nazi domination of France, Julian Jackson captures this titanic figure as never before. Drawing on unpublished letters, memoirs, and resources of the recently opened de Gaulle archive, he reveals how this volatile visionary put a broken France back at the center of world affairs.
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Extremely British approach to de Gaulle
- By Keith on 05-31-19
By: Julian Jackson
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Overthrow
- America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
- By: Stephen Kinzer
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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"Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the Spanish-American War and the Cold War and into our own time, the United States has not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals.
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Looking at the dark side
- By Stanley on 08-02-06
By: Stephen Kinzer
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The World Remade
- America in World War I
- By: G. J. Meyer
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 24 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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After years of bitter debate, the United States declared war on Imperial Germany on April 6, 1917, plunging the country into the savage European conflict that would redraw the map of the continent - and the globe. The World Remade is an engrossing chronicle of America's pivotal, still controversial intervention into World War I, encompassing the tumultuous politics and towering historical figures that defined the era and forged the future.
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"100% America" - a disturbing place to be
- By DPM on 04-01-17
By: G. J. Meyer
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All the Kremlin's Men
- Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin
- By: Mikhail Zygar
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 16 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
All the Kremlin's Men is a gripping narrative of an accidental king and a court out of control. Based on an unprecedented series of interviews with Vladimir Putin's inner circle, this book presents a radically different view of power and politics in Russia. The image of Putin as a strongman is dissolved. In its place is a weary figurehead buffeted - if not controlled - by the men who at once advise and deceive him. The regional governors and bureaucratic leaders are immovable objects, far more powerful in their fiefdoms than the president himself.
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Enough with the Russian accents!
- By Emma Jane Top on 12-17-17
By: Mikhail Zygar
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Paris 1919
- Six Months That Changed the World
- By: Margaret MacMillan
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 25 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, renowned historian Margaret MacMillan's best-selling Paris 1919 is the story of six remarkable months that changed the world. At the close of WWI, between January and July of 1919, delegates from around the world converged on Paris under the auspices of peace. New countries were created, old empires were dissolved, and for six months, Paris was the center of the world.
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Good book, well narrated
- By W. F. Rucker on 02-07-09
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Hitler
- By: Joachim C. Fest, Richard Winstton - translator, Clara Winstton - translator
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 41 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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This masterful biography by one of Germany’s best known journalists was the leading nonfiction best seller in Germany. Fest shows Hitler as the receptacle of the dreads and resentments of a shaken social order, gifted with an uncanny instinct for all that was hollow behind the appearance of power, at home and abroad. Though a warped human being, he was neither clown nor puppet, as many liked to think; Hitler appears here as an enormously astute politician, impressing and hypnotizing Germans and foreigners alike with the scope of his projects and the theatricality of their presentation. Fest uncovers in Hitler a constantly destructive personality....
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Should be part of high school education
- By Rex Riethmeier on 12-25-18
By: Joachim C. Fest, and others
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The Last Empire
- The Final Days of the Soviet Union
- By: Serhii Plokhy
- Narrated by: Alex Wyndham
- Length: 15 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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On Christmas, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: Earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic values over communism, took center stage in American public discourse immediately after Bush's speech and has persisted for decades. As Serhii Plokhy reveals, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the US.
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Full of Holes; Horrid Narrator
- By Donald on 03-02-23
By: Serhii Plokhy
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Potsdam
- The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe
- By: Michael Neiberg
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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After Germany's defeat in World War II, Europe lay in tatters. Millions of refugees were dispersed across the continent. Food and fuel were scarce. Britain was bankrupt while Germany had been reduced to rubble. In July 1945, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin gathered in a quiet suburb of Berlin to negotiate a lasting peace - a peace that would finally put an end to the conflagration that had started in 1914, a peace under which Europe could be rebuilt.
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Richly told and entertaining.
- By John Kaiser on 06-20-15
By: Michael Neiberg
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In the summer of 1932, the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. One in three Germans was unemployed. Violence was rampant. Hitler’s National Socialists surged at the polls. Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero and avowed monarchist, was a reluctant president bound by oath to uphold the constitution. The November elections offered Hitler the prospect of a Reichstag majority and the path to political power. But instead, the Nazis lost two million votes.
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Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler's First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich.
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Bad Melodramatic Reading
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Germany, 1923
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On the night of January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler leaned out of a spotlit window of the Reich chancellery in Berlin, bursting with joy. The moment seemed unbelievable, even to Hitler. After an improbable political journey that came close to faltering on many occasions, his march to power had finally succeeded. While the path of Hitler's rise has been told in books covering larger portions of his life, no previous work has focused solely on his eight-year climb to rule: 1925-1933.
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American journalist and author William L. Shirer was a war correspondent for six years in Nazi Germany, having a front-row seat to Hitler’s rise in influence and power. His most definitive work on the subject, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is a riveting account of life in the tyrannical state, a country transformed by war and dictatorship. The author was originally commissioned to write The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler for a young adult audience. This account loses none of the immediacy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich....
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Democracies can die with a coup d'état - or they can die slowly. This happens most deceptively when in piecemeal fashion, with the election of an authoritarian leader, the abuse of governmental power and the complete repression of opposition. All three steps are being taken around the world - not least with the election of Donald Trump - and we must all understand how we can stop them.
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Connecting the Dots
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Empire of Rags and Bones
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Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable. Resource extending schemes obscured the crucial political role played by virtually all German citizens to whom salvaging, scrapping, and recycling were promoted as inherently virtuous and orderly behaviors.
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Well Researched, a New Perspective on the Holocaust
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Vertigo
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Out of the ashes of the First World War, Germany launched an unprecedented political project: its first democratic government. The Weimar Republic, named for the city where it was established, endured for only fifteen years before it was toppled by the insurgent Nazi Party in 1933. In Vertigo, prizewinning historian Harald Jähner tells the Republic’s full story, capturing a nation caught in a whirlwind of uncertainty and struggling toward a better future.
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How. Did It Happen?
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Hitler
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Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness. From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail, strewn with contradictory tales and overgrown with self-created myths. One truth prevails: the sheer scale of the evils that he unleashed on the world has made him a demonic figure without equal in the 20th century.
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An Excellent Read
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What listeners say about The Death of Democracy
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- Darlene A. Geloso
- 07-08-19
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!
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- White Fox
- 05-04-21
Great!
May we learn from history. “What's past is prologue.” - Shakespeare. Well done. Enjoyed the story and narration.
Thank you.
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- philip
- 01-13-24
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Chris
- 12-14-21
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.
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- GCS4791
- 07-18-20
The last 3-4 minutes of audio chapter 13.
If nothing else, read or listen to at least that much of his Hett’s book then try to assert with a clear conscious that you’re unconcerned about where America could end up by late January 2021.
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- Writer in Maryland
- 08-13-19
important lessons!
easily digested lots of historical details...still shocks. drive and listen. then vote blue in 2020!
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- Veronica Thibodeaux
- 10-18-22
Educational
I am speechless with the parallels facing Germany at that time and America during recent years . I wonder how future generations will remember us and I hope we will have as honest as assessment as has been delivered here.
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- Brian
- 10-02-23
Vital, important history
Lots of information on the dominoes that fell leading to Hitler attaining absolute power over the people of Germany and plunging the world into war.
This book is especially good for those who are looking for historical clues as to where our current dysfunctional system and the polarization between urban and suburban/rural societies, both exacerbated by opportunistic purveyors of propaganda and disinformation, will ultimately take us.
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- Chris Browne
- 08-24-24
History is a flat circle
To really understand the 20th century you need to start in the lead up to WW1 and truly understand the failure of Democracy in the intervening years. The resemblance to current events is somewhat uncanny as the GOP VP nominee has pointed out before joining the ticket. I think their are lessons in here for a lot of enabling conservatives and obstructionist idealists,
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- Dwayne
- 01-24-21
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.
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14 people found this helpful