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Ernst Röhm: Hitler's SA Chief of Staff. By Eleanor Hancock. New York Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ISBN 978-0-230-60402-5. Note on sources. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii, 273. $84.95.
There is a very traditional picture of Ernst Rohm: a scarred, pudgy, dissipated figure standing at Adolf Hitler's side at the Nazi Party rallies in Nürnberg before a mass formation of his brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (SA). It belies Röhm's abilities and the shrewd political maneuvering that built the SA from a handful of thugs into a force of some four and half million- most still lower-class thugs- whose tactics of intimidation and violence were in many ways responsible for the National Socialist electoral victory in 1932 and Hitler's chancellorship in 1933. Their hatefilled rhetoric fueled the Holocaust. Given Röhm's pivotal role in all this, it is surprising that he has never been the subject of an English language biography.
Eleanor Hancock's brief monograph seeks to change that. Despite the paucity of sources- most official Nazi documents related...