Many years ago I read Philip Metcalfe's 1933 and now there is this recent book about the same period and the same people: the US ambassador in Germany and his family. The facts of the period are well known but how did outsiders look at them at the time and ... what might be of use for us today in the era of Trump, populism and renewed nationalism? How did a democratically chosen partyleader obtain full power (by making full use of the fear caused by a terrorist attack, orchestrated or not)? Why did no foreign nation intervene (antisemitism played a role there as well and the fear of the immediate consequences)? Why didn't the German people, politicians, president intervene (antisemitism, fear, nationalism)? Remarkably Hitler used a referendum to obtain legitimacy for ending the Versailles Treaty. Another tactic was to try drastic measures (against jews mainly) and then mitigate them, so as to seduce opponents to think that things were improving, that the worst was over, only to introduce an even more drastic measure after a while, mitigate it and so on. A tactic of repeatedly two steps forward, one backward.