Nobody thinks of Donald Trump as a good man. He might be a hard man capable of doing hard things.
Was Napoleon a “dictatorial blood-thirsty monster desiring French hegemony over Europe or was he the standard bearer for the more enlightened values to come out of the French Revolution (including deghettoizing the Jews)”?
The publisher of this controversial biography of Hitler, Prometheus, also published my first book.
R. H. S. Stolfi’s premise, that Adolf Hitler did not think of himself as an evil man doing evil deeds, is diametrically opposed to other biographers’ theories of Hitler, the man. Stolfi professes that Hitler was underestimated by his enemies as well as historians and his biographers. Stolfi quotes Ian Kershaw, a recent biographer of Hitler, as saying that “someone with so few intellectual gifts and social attributes ….was no more than an empty vessel outside of his political life….” In Stolfi’s opinion, Hitler was a talented architect, a good artist (not a mediocre one as is often described), and a music aficionado as well as a heroic front-line soldier of World War I. The common bias of Hitler’s previous biographers, according to Stolfi, is that a fear of interpretation leading to comprehension of the man, might also be considered an apology for his actions. All of Hitler’s previous biographers began their studies from a viewpoint of contempt for the man, rather than an openness to learn about him. Stolfi sees Adolf Hitler as a self-proclaimed messiah; a savior of the German people from the degradation resulting from the Treaty of Versailles and the Marxist Jews who were intent on destroying Germany.
I personally found it difficult to read Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, because I, like the other biographers, have a hard time overlooking the evil deeds of Hitler and concentrating instead upon his supposed genius. Stolfi characterizes Hitler as a rare world historical figure, compared with the likes of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Julius Caesar. He clearly presents an alternate view from all the other major biographers of Adolf Hitler, but not a view that I can share.
In the guise of a scholarly screed, former Marine Corps Reserve Stolfi (German Panzers on the Offensive Russian Front, 2003, etc.) makes an incredible—and entirely failed—attempt to rehabilitate the most reviled figure of modern history.
The author strongly objects to the universal “denigration” of Adolf Hitler. Across nearly 500 pages, he decries the “antipathy” against his hero, mistaking amoral charisma for integrity. Hitler, writes the author, was a man of towering achievement, a messiah for the German people, an intense, idealistic mastermind. To Stolfi, the young Wagnerian hero of World War I who boasted a firm handshake and direct eye contact was a sensitive Bohemian artist and opera lover. Against all evidence, the author also proclaims him a wonderful painter and superb architect. Hitler pronounced himself the savior of Europe from the threat of Marxism, and the murder of millions of Jews was simply political necessity. Readers should understand that Stolfi’s book is not a biography but a preposterous hagiography employing selective fact supported by quotes from a few Nazis and a lot from the Führer’s own Mein Kampf. It is also a jealous, sarcastic discourse against the “conventional wisdom” of the “great-biographers” (unlike Stolfi, these include reliable authors such as Toland, Fest, Kershaw, etc.). The book ends before the end of the Third Reich. Ultimately, despite the author’s effort to spin the malign corruption—especially offensive while it is still in living memory—there remains nothing beyond the evil and tyranny that his subtitle promises.
A repellent text, as deranged as its subject.
Because Adolf Hitler has come to epitomize evil, it takes an “act of stupendous historical imagination” to perceive him as a man, as A.N. Wilson asserts in his provocative biography. From today’s perspective, Hitler’s words and deeds, as far back as “Mein Kampf” (1925-26), seem to lead inevitably to the concentration camps and the murder of millions. We see him, to use Mr. Wilson’s phrase, as a kind of “Demon King” of history.
Instead, Mr. Wilson would like to suggest, Hitler’s racism and fanaticism were of a piece with the culture of his time. Hitler was “an embodiment, albeit an exaggerated embodiment, of the beliefs of the average modern person.” Mr. Wilson in fact goes further than that, suggesting that the rise to power of someone like Hitler was a predictable consequence of a secularizing world. “Hitler was the Enlightenment’s cloven hoof,” Mr. Wilson writes; he exemplified “more than anything else the futility of the ‘modern’ or ‘scientific’ outlook on life.”
Hitler was an early champion of many ideas typical of our own degraded modern age—vegetarianism, the opposition to hunting, the endorsement of abortion and euthanasia, and the rejection of the past, including old-time religion. Are the Nuremberg rallies really so different, Mr. Wilson asks, from “our love of spectacularly large football stadia, pop festivals, and open-air religious celebrations”? The Olympic torch, he reminds us, is a Nazi invention.
But the larger point is that Mr. Wilson’s effort to write a “Hitler, Our Contemporary” polemic puts him at odds with a legion of Hitler biographers and historians whose work he has both absorbed and depreciated….
…Works like Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (1996) have argued that Hitler’s ascent resulted from a strain of racism in German culture that shaped him and made him the culmination of a nationalistic and ethnocentric malignancy. Mr. Wilson, by contrast, seems to recognize little unique about the German situation. Hitler, “in his racial discrimination, was simply being normal,” the author suggests. “The United States and the British Empire were both racist through and through.” This is a stupendously undergraduate generalization—even if it contains some measure of truth.
The Bullock-Fest-Kershaw triumvirate seems to favor a Hitler who wanted something less than the whole world. Yet in order for the rest of the world to retain something of its own identity, it would have to concede the superiority of all things German. So it is not surprising that Mr. Wilson, for one, finds it difficult to see how Hitler could have stopped at the Volga.
In the end, the most convincing parts of Mr. Wilson’s unorthodox account may be his provocative insights into an artistic sensibility. Noting how much Hitler depended on his speeches (even “Mein Kampf” was dictated), Mr. Wilson calls him the “most hypnotic artist of post-literacy.” Like today’s radio talk-show “entertainers,” Hitler knew there was something about the spoken word that could galvanize millions. Rather than focus on Hitler’s ideology, the biographer brilliantly singles out his subject’s style of attack: “Henceforth, the German people were seen as an orchestra whom he could conduct, as a great chorus who could sing his compositions.”
Frederic Spotts, in “Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics” (2003), accomplished something similar, placing Hitler’s plans for world conquest in the context of his private ambitions to rename Berlin “Germania” and to re-create a Greco-Roman empire with colossal buildings that would outclass the classical age. This emphasis of Hitler as artist signals, perhaps, yet another shift in the five-decade effort to come to terms with who Hitler was.
Steve Donoghue lists Prof. Stolfi’s biography as one of the worst books of the year. “7. Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny by R. H. S. Stolfi – The author of this nauseating book is quick to point out that his efforts to get at the man behind the long-standing characterization of Hitler as a monster of pure evil are not to be construed in any way as some kind of neo-Nazi support of Hitler … merely a contention that such characterizations do little to help us understand the man. Which is like saying you’re against guns but a big fan of bullets. Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent, as Stolfi knows perfectly well – and as shouldn’t be attempted in those rare cases where the man is a monster. Years ago I said we were only a decade away from a biography of Hitler by a respected writer who made him out to be a somewhat wayward and badly misunderstood European statesman, and while this book isn’t that biography, it lays the groundwork as thoroughly as that groundwork can be laid (right down to the studio-photograph on the cover, perhaps the most nauseating thing about the whole production). Take it from somebody who’s read everything ever written about the man: in Hitler’s case, much to the world’s misfortune, there was nothing beyond evil and tyranny.”
* Prof. Stolfi has written a much needed corrective interpretive
history of Adolf Hitler – a history free of the socially mandated operating
assumption and pre-conceived conclusion of Hitler as fundamentally evil;
that ‘evil’ is the appropriate and only filter with which to interpret all of Hitler’s
actions, values and aspirations. This typical approach inevitable leads to
authorial moralizing complete with an endless string of
condemning adjectives re: Hitler, i.e. psycho, barbaric, evil, crazy, insane,
egomaniacal. This is not only tiresome, but un-enlightening,
un-academic, and useless in reaching meaningful conclusions about Hitler
and his motivations. Hitler winds up as a buffoonish cartoon rather than a complex human
being with sincere motives.
Prof. Stolfi courageously uses a more realistic approach to his subject,
applying a new filter to interpret Hitler and reaching conclusions that immediately
strike the reader as realistic and more accurate than the pre-packaged
condemnations of previous authors. The end result is a broader portrait of a
three-dimensional human, rather than a cartoonish figure.
Prof. Stolfi and Prometheus publishers are owed a great debt of gratitude
for this book: serious social sanctions are typically applied to Hitler biographers
who use any interpretive filter other than ‘Hitler as evil’: sanctions including
boycott, ad hominum attack, accusations of prejudice, pressure to terminate employment,
etc. In taking the risk, they’ve provided the public with the rarist commodity – real
history rather than dogmatic ideology masquerading as history.
* In the normal course of things, it usually doesn’t take that long after the death of a person of significance for passions to cool and objectivity rein when historians begin to sit in judgement. Even in the case of wartime enemies, ordinary Americans have been remarkably quick to jettison the baggage of official propaganda once we’ve achieved victory, and in some cases even embrace the leading figures of our erstwhile enemies. Did Americans ever really_hate_George III? Did we feel_anything_about the Kaiser after WWI? We came to idolize Robert E. Lee after the Civil War and romanticized Emperor Hirohito once we showed him who was boss.
In the case of Hitler however, historians are still- almost 70 years after his death, hobbled by a set of rules, unofficial but as iron-clad as divine writ, about how he should be presented to the masses: to wit- as an ignorant, cowardly, sexually deviant, one-testicled, no-talent artist who gained power by mesmerizing the German people solely on the force of his oratory which, contradictorily enough, was of comical crudity and amounted to nothing more than screaming anti-Jewish slogans. He achieved economic success for Germany by military spending, he took over countries unjustly, he “started” World War II and initiated “The Holocaust.” When the historical facts won’t stand even twisting, then historians must resort to outright fabrication.
Such strictures of thought control are unprecedented in our history. It is, of course, because Hitler chose to confront two international, overlapping groups- Judaism and Communism- who neither forgive nor forget. When those 2 groups emerged from WWII victorious over both Hitler and Western civilization, they were determined that their captive populations should hate their masters’ greatest enemy and his principles as much as they did, and thus instituted a regimen of 24/7/365 propaganda that replaced the Cross with the gas chamber, that replaced original sin with our White skin, that replaced Christianity with the Holocaust and that replaced the devil with Hitler. Dissidents from the official line are personally and professionally destroyed, by the powerful forces that regulate thought in this country.
The author of this incredible book, who is either brave or reckless or, perhaps, judging himself immune from retribution because of his advanced age and retired status, has written the first objective evaluation of Hitler and first professional critique of the historiography of Hitler’s biographers. The biographers he exposes as court historians, who tell demonstrable lies as they dismiss Hitler as insignificant in 900 page tomes. Stolfi correctly regarded such simultaneous diminution and obsession as contradictory and so undertook this objective examination of Hitler. What he reveals is that, regardless of how one “feels” about Hitler, he was a personally exceptional man whose political accomplishments would objectively rank him as a World-Historical figure as great as, if not greater, than men such as Caesar or Napoleon.
Stolfi is no Nazi apologist. He acknowledges Hitler’s actions against the Jews and offers some perspicacious criticism of Hitler’s war conduct. But he honestly weighs him in the historical scales and quite correctly judges him as the very opposite of the insignificant figure his biographers claim him to be. If you want propaganda, look elsewhere. Read this book if you want to know the truth about Hitler.
