In a new book, German artist and writer Philipp Ruch argues that viewing the ascent of Hitler's NSDAP through the prism of the Third Reich has distorted our understanding of fascism's electoral breakthrough.

With his art collective Centre for Political Beauty, Ruch famously built a replica of the Holocaust memorial on a property next to the home of an AfD politician. Now he's written a history book about the Nazis' rise to power, because apparently there's still something to say.

Asked whether we don't already know everything there is to know about the 1932 elections, the Reichstag fire and the Enabling Act of 1933, Ruch explained that about three years ago he became interested in how Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' party (NSDAP) rose to prominence when Germany was still a democracy, hoping it might illuminate the success of rightwing extremist movements today.

From looking at historical sources, he realized that the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930 were in many ways more important than what happened in 1932 and 1933. He expected it to be an open-and-shut case, but the more he looked into it, the more he realized that most of the theories we have to explain the rise of the Nazis don't make sense - the data tells a completely different, far darker story.