Quotes From "Hitler: Beyond Evil And Tyranny" By Russel H.S. Stolfi

The great biographers take excessive liberties in denigrating his person, and, in doing so, they make it difficult to comprehend Russel H.S. Stolfi

As concerns the question of the psychological engine that drove Hitler, the conventional interpretation of lusting after power is, in final analysis, the refuge of lack of comprehen Russel H.S. Stolfi

The intellectually-inclined biographers stray from the point that the message is directed through the spoken word at the broad masses and not writing to an inbred, self-adoring intellectual e Russel H.S. Stolfi

Although characterized as uncultured and unread, Hitler comes off in his demands to create a monumental signature for a Greater Germany as historically and artistically gi Russel H.S. Stolfi

To comprehend the Hitler of 1919 is to comprehend the Hitler of the entire period from 1919 through Russel H.S. Stolfi

(...)it seems more probable that his anti- Semitism was less emotional and more objective than has been assumed to the pre Russel H.S. Stolfi

Hitler took the action of pitiless massacre as a last resort in the face of a perceived irreconcilable e Russel H.S. Stolfi

Politics for Hitler must be seen as a distant, prophetic vision to be fulfilled and not as an exercise in personal power. There was no political theory for Hitler and no necessity for adherence to any political programs. There was only tactical political flexibility in the service of seizure of power and the establishment of a Greater Germany in Eu Russel H.S. Stolfi

And in contrast to the Communist revolution in Russia and the Communist attempts at revolution in Germany from 1918 through 1923, Hitler's were virtually blood Russel H.S. Stolfi

Hitler derived several things from his experience and achievements in World War I, without which his rise to power in 1933 would have been at the least problematical, and at the most inconceivable. Hitler survived the war as a combat soldier–a rifle carrier–in a frontline infantry regiment. The achievement was an extraordinary one based on some combination of near-miraculous luck and combat skill. The interpretive fussing over whether or not Hitler was a combat soldier because he spent most of the war in the part of the regiment described as regimental headquarters can be laid to rest as follows: Any soldier in an infantry regiment on an active front in the west in World War I must be considered to have been a combat soldier. Hitler’s authorized regimental weapon was the Mauser boltaction, magazine-fed rifle. This gives a basic idea of what Hitler could be called upon to do in his assignment at the front. As a regimental runner, he carried messages to the battalions and line companies of the regiment, and the more important ones had to be delivered under outrageously dangerous circumstances involving movement through artillery fire and, particularly later in the war, poison gas and the omnipresent rifle fire of the skilled British sniper detach. Russel H.S. Stolfi

In the well reported Kubizek period from late 1904 through mid-1908, with its additiona data from the circumstances of failure at school, lung ailment, and tragic episode of his mother’s death, the picture remains the same. Hitler’s character is one of bold license for a youngster, but not directed toward dissolute behavior or activity that gives a hint of evil. Hitler devoured grand opera and classical music, painted, sketched, planned a great new Linz; he wrote sonnets, communed with nature, and exuded politeness and reserve. These are activities and qualities that suggest potential, although overblown, aspirations to artistic genius. What we see, like it or not, is morally laudable behavior and aspiration on the part of a young man in his teens. But is there a dark side somewhere in this picture? If there were a dark side, it probably would have been the light gray of the contempt that he had for many of his school teachers and his resistance to formal education. Hitler’s comments in Mein Kampf support such contempt and are buoyed by his indelible comment, about his tour of the customs office where his father worked, that the clerks and officials squatted about as monkeys in. Russel H.S. Stolfi

In his thoughtful and complex style of analysis, Hitler continued on to note the following: “Since the newspapers in question did not enjoy an outstanding reputation. . I regarded them more as the products of anger and envy than the [representation] of a principled, though perhaps mistaken, point of view.” In the lines above, we see Hitler begin to wrestle with anti- Semitism, flatly reject religious anti- Semitism as unworthy of Austrian cultural tradition, and suspect that the arguments of the anti- Semitic press and gutter pamphlets were exaggerated beyond credibility by too much subjective and too little objective and principled argument. The view of virtually every Hitler biographer that he based his anti- Semitism on arguments derived from the gutter press and pamphlets of Vienna does not hold up in the face of the words above. To the contrary, we see Hitler take the measure of that liter. Russel H.S. Stolfi