BERLIN, Germany—In completing a circular, 17-day tour of Germany recently, it was impossible not to observe the meticulous beauty of the country.

The green, rolling hills, covered with perfectly manicured fields and farm buildings defined the country for me as my wife, my friends and I circled the country by car and train. Not once did I see the junked body of an automobile, a discarded tire, or a worn-down barn distract from the symmetrical beauty of the German countryside.

The cities were similarly well-kept, if not as aesthetic, and there was a sense of orderliness, discipline and, well, a notion of “a place for everything, and everything in its place” throughout Germany.

It’s hard to believe that 80 years ago this was a nation that was significantly leveled by Allied bombing, with 40 percent of its housing destroyed and over 400 million cubic meters of rubble left behind.

It is similarly incomprehensive that 90 or so years earlier, this was a nation whose soul had been abducted by the pure evil of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi minions. What is even more difficult to digest is how quickly Hitler and his party were able to completely overthrow the German democracy and replace it with a fascist dictatorship that controlled every lever of power in the country.

I’d been to Germany once before, took the important historical tours, and noted with due horror the absolute inhumanity of the Nazis to those they deemed “the enemies of the state.” My most recent visit, however, was delivered with a greater sense of poignancy, given what is going on right here in the United States.

While in Munich, where Hitler first came to power, we took a guided tour focused on the emergence of the Nazis and the “Third Reich.” Our guide walked us through how Hitler and his henchmen rather suddenly evolved from a fringe outlier to one of the most powerful political forces in history in a matter of a few years.

Historians have long documented the post-World War I mess that paved the way for Hitler and the Nazis to come to power in Germany. The allied countries that defeated Germany in World War I were determined to make the losers pay heavily. They stripped them of land, forced them to pay usurious reparations to the winners, and placed extreme limits on the size of the German military.

Probably more importantly, Germany was experiencing devastating inflation which made its currency virtually worthless. The history books tell stories of Germans having to push wheelbarrows full of marks in order to have enough money to purchase a loaf of bread.

Hitler, an out-of-work Austrian artist, made his first attempt at taking advantage of Germany’s post-war chaos with a failed coup attempt in Munich in 1923. He was sentenced to prison, serving a year of a five-year term, and writing his seminal political manifesto, Mein Kamp, while incarcerated.

When he returned to Germany — still “an alien” in legal status — he started building the National Socialist Workers Party (soon known as “the Nazis”), appealing to the ordinary German’s sense of disapprobation with the country’s economics, political status, and socio-economic layering.

Hitler’s party earned just 2 percent of the vote in its first attempt at infiltrating the German parliamentary system. Four years later in 1932, with 37 percent of the vote, the NSWP had enough of a plurality to wedge its way into power. When German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as German chancellor against his better judgment, he didn’t know it, but it was the end of democracy in his country for the next two decades.

(It was also the first time that Hitler was an official German citizen).

Within months of his appointment as chancellor, Hitler worked feverishly to consolidate power, all the while isolating potential scapegoats as “enemies of the state.” These included all of the special interest groups who later wound up in concentration camps — Jews, the Sinti and Roma people (“gypsies”), homosexuals, the mentally or physically disabled, and communists. And then, basically, anybody who had the courage to stand up to Hitler and his regime.

Four months after his appointment as chancellor, the Reichstag, the building where the German Parliament met, mysteriously caught fire. It was later determined to be arson, and Hitler took the opportunity to blame the blaze on “the communists,” declared an emergency based on a “communist uprising,” and convinced Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties and allowed for the arrest of political opponents without due process.

At the same time, Hitler was busily consolidating law enforcement under his command, which quickly led to intimidation, arrest, and eventually extermination of his political enemies in Germany. The biggest step in the process came in 1936 when Hitler gave SS leader Heinrich Himmler central control over all the police in Germany. As we toured Berlin recently, we visited the “Topography of Terror,” a combined indoor-outdoor museum that includes the remains of Gestapo Headquarters, where many political prisoners were tortured and executed by Himmler’s thugs.

Hitler was also consolidating control of Germany’s military, first eliminating any political opposition to his control by purging the SA, a paramilitary organization that could have been a potential rival for his dominance. This was accomplished through the so-called “Night of the Long Knives,” when a number of Hitler’s perceived potential rivals were executed without trial. (This was also a turning point for Hitler’s ability to take over the German judicial system).

Then, following Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Hitler assumed the presidency and required the military to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler personally, replacing the previous oath to the constitution. The military, formerly known as the Reichswehr, was renamed the Wehrmacht (translated “defense forces”), consolidating the German army, navy, and air force all firmly under Hitler’s control.

Hitler found willing accomplices in military leadership, who were anxious to rebuild the nation’s military forces in spite of the limitations of the Treaty of Versailles. Then, Hitler’s policies of rearmament and conscription, which were initially kept secret, led to even greater loyalty to the Fuhrer.

Hitler and his henchmen wasted little time in making clear how they were going to “cleanse” German society, and what price would be paid for opposing Hitler’s policies. In 1933, just a year after Hitler’s ascension to chancellor, the German military began construction on Dachau, one of the first concentration camps of the Third Reich.

Originally conceived as a place to send political prisoners and non-conformists, Dachau was not supposed to be a “death camp,” like Auschwitz in Poland. In fact, some prisoners who were sentenced to Dachau, which is located in Bavaria, not far from Munich, were eventually released.

Quickly over time, however, Dachau became a proving ground for various techniques used in the death camps, as well as for improved “efficiency” for forced labor operations, how to manage prisoners who were no longer considered “useful,” and indeed, how to put people to death and dispose of their bodies. An estimated 41,000 people died in Dachau, from starvation, disease, having been worked to death, or more conventionally, having been shot, hanged, or gassed. Nobody really knows the full toll, because, at the end of the war, the Germans were cremating dead prisoners and burying their remains off-site.

I’d been to both Dachau and Auschwitz before this last trip, and the sense of hatred and inhumanity that permeates both places never leaves you. But what stuck with me this time in going through the crematories and gas chambers of Dachau is how rapidly Hitler was able to transition from a third-rate political malcontent to a dictator capable of imprisoning, torturing, and eventually eliminating all of his political opposition within years, even months of his ascension to power.

That certainly caught my ear as I listened to guides in both Munich and Berlin tell the story of Hitler’s rise. It also caught the ear of a lot of my fellow American tourists, more than one or two of whom muttered, “too close to home” when they heard the description of how Hitler came to power.

As we walked toward the crematoriums at Dachau, our guide paused and had us all take a good, long look at a statue located nearby. The statue, which is the “Unknown Prisoner,” stands in honor of all those who were killed, starved, beaten, and otherwise maltreated at various German concentration camps. The inscription, written in German beneath the statue, is an appropriate admonition for our times:

“The dead to be honored, the living to be forewarned.”