Review of R.H.S. Stolfi's "Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny" - Part 1

John F. Kennedy, aged 28, wrote these words in his diary on holiday in Germany in the summer of 1945, after visiting the Berchtesgaden and the Eagle's Lair.

“After visiting these two places you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him."

They now read very oddly, although there is no question that Hitler was one of the most significant figures who ever lived. Kennedy did not foresee that the hatred that surrounded Hitler in 1945 has not lessened at all in 72 years. 

Historians have felt it necessary to explain that the diary entry does not mean that Kennedy, who fought in the war and idololised Churchill, was attracted to fascism. The historians may be wrong - in an earlier visit to Germany, in 1937, Kennedy said fascism was right for Germany. But whatever Kennedy's views on fascism, what is interesting is the intense hatred of Hitler that most Westerners (but not Eastern Europeans, Indians or Chinese) feel 72 years after his death. 

I feel it too. 

The few people who like Hitler are liable to be arrested if they say so openly.

Some readers who comment on my blog do not hate Hitler. One reader, anonymously, recommended a biography of Hitler which looked interesting. I am now reading and learning from it. It's called "Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny" by Colonel R.H.S. Stolfi, an American military historian, and came out in 2011. 

Stolfi, now dead, was a respectable, obscure military historian, who late in life produced this fascinating book. I definitely urge everyone to read it. I am not completely sure what I make of it.

The book does not have much footprint on the net:  a positive review in a Minnesota newspaper, a rave review by a Neo-Nazi, a review on Kirkus accusing it of being an apology for Hitler and a few comments by various bloggers. 

Nor can I find anything much about Stolfi except that he was a colonel in the U.S. Marines who became a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and the names of his other three books, one about how NATO could defeat the Warsaw Pact countries and two about German tank warfare. 

He was not an admirer of Hitler, but seeking to examine his life dispassionately, to see things from Hitler's point of view, in order to understand him, his beliefs and his movement. This is exactly what historians are usually expected to do.

Or perhaps I should say that he was not a fascist or on the far right but did admire some (quite a few) attributes of Hitler. 

As he says at the beginning of the book:

"With Hitler, the perceived danger is that biography demands, or at least suggests, some empathy with its subject and a resulting understanding — and even admiration. The writers on the subject of Hitler have taken the view that rehabilitation is unthinkable, and in such a situation, they have presented verbal portraits that are either half empty or but lightly sketched-in."

Colonel Stolfi's relationship with the English language is not always happy and the book needed a good editor, but it is well worth reading. It makes Hitler make sense in a way very good historians (think Richard Overy) do not. 

The great AJP Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War does not quite do so. In any case he only covers foreign policy and only up until 1939. Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire is very good indeed but does not tell us about Hitler.


Seeing things from Hitler's point of view makes the book read in many places like a defence of Hitler. In fact, it is a defence of Hitler against what the author deems unfair or inaccurate treatment by his  "great" biographers, such as Lord Bullock, John Toland and Ian Kershaw. 

They are accused of being so blinded by hatred for Hitler, or frightened of inadvertently showing him in a positive light, that they are not able to see him clearly.

Lord Skidelsky's wonderful biography of Sir Oswald Mosley is open to a similar charge of being surprisingly sympathetic to Mosley - very unlike the latest biography - though Lord Skidelsky, who is half Jewish and was made a peer by the SDP, is no Moselyite. Nor was Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, who escaped from Auschwitz, an admirer of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, but he wrote about him very sympathetically.

Even so, it is easy to see why people who do like Hitler will love this biography very much and why many other people will hate it and consider it dangerous. 

How odd that 72 years after the war Hitler's ideas are considered dangerous. It illustrates Richard Vinen's insight that the history of Western Europe since 1945 is a meditation on the holocaust.

Hitler undoubtedly was an extraordinary figure who remade the world, yet he is sneered at by biographers who think him an insignificant, dull and vulgar little man. (Many of his contemporaries, especially before he came to power, thought the same.) 

Kershaw again:

“Hitler’s non-political life is not a pretty one. We are faced with a vulgar uneducated upstart lacking a rounded personality, the outsider with half-baked opinions on everything under the sun, the uncultured self-appointed adjudicator on culture.”

His wide reading was 'unsystematic' (outside universities, whose isn't?) and he did not understand Marxism, though in Ian Kershaw's grudging admission he was

"certainly not unintelligent". 

The book quotes Kershaw calling Hitler 

"an unperson". 

The impression left is that Hitler was a demon rather than a human being. I think this is an idea that has lodged in the popular imagination.

Lenin was comparably extraordinary and from a much higher social class, but he achieved power by a cleverly planned putsch against a shaky regime in a revolutionary situation in wartime, whereas Hitler came to power at the head of a mass movement that he created and had to find his own ideas rather than adopt those of a well-known thinker like Marx. Lenin, in my view, was undoubtedly evil but he is treated with more objectivity than Hitler.

Evil is undoubtedly a fact and people who shy away from using the word are usually happy to use it of Hitler - though some obstinate liberals prefer to call him mad rather than face the idea that evil exists. 

I'd say Hitler was evil, as were his mass murders. 

“If he isn't evil, who is?” 

Lord Bullock exclaimed to Ron Rosenbaum, a line quoted by Stolfi. 

But is evil a word it is very useful for historians to use? 

I cannot think of any historical figures who are regularly called evil except for Nazis and, rarely, Communists. 

Assuming evil is a useful word for historians - and perhaps it is - the danger exists that it prevents a careful search for an explanation of why Hitler, Lenin or Stalin did what they did. Especially this is true of Hitler. This seems to me the weakness with books about the Nazis. 

Of those three men, although I am not a psychologist, it is very clear to me that Stalin was a psychopath. Still, psychopath though he was, he was also a passionately sincere Marxist. Hitler and Lenin were equally sincere in their beliefs. This does not make them any less evil, but can you be both an evil monster and a great man?

The great British historian Hugh Trevor Roper (Lord Dacre) had no doubts that Hitler was a genius, which is not quite the same thing but close.

"No one, I believe, can hope to understand or explain Nazism unless he is prepared to admit the reality of this problem, and unless, furthermore, he is willing to make a distinction which our ideologically minded historians seem incapable of making: that is, to admit that Hitler, without whom Nazism could not have existed—for he preceded it, founded it, nurtured it, expressed it, and to the end controlled it—was both a revolutionary leader of genius and the meanest, most squalid character who has ever, by genius, conquered great political power. In the 1930’s too many observers recognised the first fact and therefore, because they could not make this distinction, refused even to conceive the second. Since 1945 the second is a platitude; but because the distinction still seems beyond the capacity of the average man, and even the average historian, the first fact is stubbornly denied and Hitler’s rise, being therefore the rise of a nobody, must be ascribed to impersonal historic forces which, though now obvious, seem to have attracted no attention at the time."

This reminds me that Michael Grant once said, 

"It is a mocking travesty of justice to call such a murderer Constantine the Great. Or perhaps not: for what does Greatness mean? Constantine was, as we have seen, a superlative military commander, and a first-rate organiser. He was also an utterly ruthless man, whose ruthlessness extended to the execution of his nearest kin, and who believed that he had God behind him in everything he did. That surely, it must be repeated, is the stuff of which the most successful leaders are made."

By the way, the charge of murdering his nearest kin is probably unfair to St. Constantine and his conversion to Christianity was probably sincere. 

Stolfi doubts that the word evil is appropriate, says that nothing in Hitler's early life suggested that he was evil (on the contrary, he was a brave soldier) and makes the point that he did not consider himself evil. 

I don't see the last as persuasive. Lenin, Stalin and Pol Pot thought they were historically progressive, which is the Marxist equivalent of good. Many evil people are knowingly evil but many think that they justified. 

Hitler does not appear to this layman to be an obvious psychopath (though he was someone, as Stolfi says in one of his strange phrases, "at the outer edge of reality"). Still his philosophy bought heavily from social Darwinism and might is right. 

Might is right was the philosophy of many conquerors and is the philosophy of all psychopaths.  

Of course, Hitler was an idealist - Lord Bullock was very foolish to think him a mountebank. But weren't his ideals, like Lenin's, evil? 

The Germans' 'Hunger Plan' to starve to death millions of Ukrainians and Russians may have been less terrible than the horrors Genghis Khan committed and might even be compared with some things the colonial powers did in Africa or India, but in the context of twentieth century Europe evil seems to me the right word. 

The German murder of over three million Soviet prisoners of war in 1941 was something I didn't know about until I read Stolfi. 

I did know about the terrible pogroms organised or encouraged by the Germans in Eastern Europe and the millions of Jews who were murdered. Everyone knows this. 

Stolfi compares Hitler to Alexander the Great, Caesar, who was responsible for ten million deaths in Gaul, many of women and children, and Napoleon. 

He does not mention Genghis Khan, who was a barbarian, not a Greek or Roman or 20th century German. 

While it's impossible to know, some historians put the number or people killed in the Mongol invasions as somewhere around 40 million, 10% of the world's population. Genghis Khan is a national hero in Mongolia, of course. 

Vlad the Impaler, who fought against Muslim invaders, is a great hero for Romanians and Attila the Hun is a great hero in Hungary, despite having no connection with the Hungarians, who arrived in Europe centuries after his time.

Were these men evil? 

Vlad certainly wasn't, in my opinion, but lived in a very brutal age, as did all the others except Napoleon. 

I admire Vlad. Hitler, on the other hand, grew up in one of the most civilised countries in Europe, at the high point of European civilisation before 1914. This is the rub.

Stolfi also compares Hitler to Muhammad. 

This last comparison is very interesting. Stolfi is completely mistaken to think that we know anything at all about Muhammad's life, but  he is, I am sure, right to see Hitler in religious terms. Hitler was a visionary - Stolfi uses the word messiah. 

This was how Carl Jung saw Hitler and the Nazis. I talked about this and compared Hitler and Muhammed here.

Religion, which seemed out of date in the 1960s and likely to disappear, now seems, in the age of Islamism, to explain most things. Marxism is a religion and, certainly, Hitler is best understood as a religious figure.

From what I can see, the Nazi party was staffed by true believers just as much as their enemies the Marxists, rather than by chancers. For Stolfi, Hitler was not a power-hungry demagogue who said what people wanted to hear in order to win power. He saw himself, and was seen by his admirers, as ordained by Providence to save Germany.

Hitler who, by his account, disliked the vulgar and uncultured anti-Semitism of the masses and religious prejudice, came by 1908 to be an anti-Semite for cerebral reasons. Stolfi shows Hitler opposing Marxism not because of its economic doctrines or the killings and brutality in its  name but because of its internationalism. He had opposed and feared Jews since 1908 for the same reason and saw the existence of Jews in Germany as incompatible with the nationalistic society he wanted to create.

Stolfi thinks Germany was not to blame for the First World War. This is a big, complex question which he does not go into and nor shall I, though I disagree, but Germans thought so in the Great War and until at least recently. 

He also thinks the 1919 peace settlement was grossly unfair to Germany and gives many reasons. I disagree here. Again, Germans certainly thought so and so did people like Keynes, but in hindsight it is pretty obvious that it was not nearly harsh enough. 

With Russia hijacked by Bolsheviks, and therefore unable to help France restrain a resurgent Germany, it should have been clear that the only way of doing so was breaking Germany up into the states that it had been until Bismarck united the country.

Hitler went to prison, I learnt from this book, twice in his life. The second time, of course, was for the Munich beer hall putsch but the first time was for breaking up a meeting by an obscure politician, who was not left-wing or Jewish but who was a Bavarian separatist. Hitler saw the danger to his plans from an independent Bavaria and so do I. 

By the way, an independent Bavaria was not only a good idea then.  I hope it now breaks away from Angela Merkel's Germany, but this is another story. 

Vive la Baviere libre! 

as Charles de Gaulle said.

Still, the Versailles settlement failed badly to implement the Wilsonian principle of national self determination when it came to Germans, many millions of whom found themselves living in successor states. 

Hitler, according to Stolfi, had the soul of an artist and could have been a fine architect. His experience sleeping on benches in Vienna and his four years as a brave soldier formed him, but the most formative experience of his life, as it was for so many of his countrymen, was German surrender in 1918, for which the catalyst was a mutiny by sailors who did not want to die in a hopeless attack on the Royal Navy.

The Kaiser's ministers adroitly allowed the Social Democrats to take power and therefore responsibility for surrender. For a moment a Communist revolution seemed to herald Bolshevism. It was easy to blame the defeat of Germany on the 'stab in the back', socialists and Jewish Bolshevism. Hitler did so and may have meant it.

Here we see the things that drove Hitler: the need to overturn the defeat of 1918 and unite all Germans in one country that dominated Central and Eastern Europe. 

These aims were shared by most or all Germans except the Communists. Hitler however also intended a Germany that would free of Marxists, Jews and 'asocials' and be safe from further defeat in the future because she would have expanded into and absorbed European Russia (emptied of the indigenous inhabitants). 

The second and final part of my review of "Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny" is here.