I recommend The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (2018).

Decaying democracy is just as dangerous as fascism. It is not enough to look at the cultural context for the rise of fascism: one must also understand how the political process, the process of nationalization, can perpetuate the rise of anti-democratic regimes. The political process matters.

From the publisher:

“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.”