"We have come to perceive Hitler’s appointment as chancellor as part of an inexorable rise to power, an impression resting on generations of postwar scholarship, much of which has necessarily marginalized or disregarded alternatives to the standard narrative of the Nazi seizure of power (Machtergreifung) with its political and social persecutions, its assertion of totalitarian rule (Gleichschaltung) and subsequent aggressions that led to the Second World War and the nightmare of the Holocaust. … Both Hitler’s ascendancy to chancellor and his smashing of the constitutional guardrails once he got there, I have come to realize, are stories of political contingency rather than historical inevitability."