Russel H.S. Stolfi Quotes & Sayings

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 elite."
--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, pp. 30-31 — 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 gifted."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 32 — 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 literature.

--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, pp. 103-104 — Russel H.S. Stolfi

To comprehend the Hitler of 1919 is to comprehend the Hitler of the entire period from 1919 through 1945."
--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 35 — 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 Europe."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 40 — 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 bloodless."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 44 — Russel H.S. Stolfi

Hitler took the action of pitiless massacre as a last resort in the face of a perceived irreconcilable enemy."
--Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 39 — 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 comprehension."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 27 — Russel H.S. Stolfi

The great biographers take excessive liberties in denigrating his person, and, in doing so, they make it difficult to comprehend him."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 17 — Russel H.S. Stolfi

Virtually every literary piece written about Adolf Hitler in more than half a century since 1945 has been based on antipathy.
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 11 — Russel H.S. Stolfi

(...)it seems more probable that his anti-Semitism was less emotional and more objective than has been assumed to the present."
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 37 — Russel H.S. Stolfi