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Eleanor Hancock has provided the first truly scholarly biography of Ernst Röhm in any language. The scholarship and documentation are generally superior, veritably exhausting the primary and secondary sources from Austria, Germany, Bolivia, Britain, and the United States. She exercises appropriate discretion in dealing with the many questionable sources generated by the Nazi era. Where one is forced to speculate on motives and convictions, she generates what seems to be a suitable range of probabilities, eliminates many that have been proposed, and settles on a most likely probability. She seems to have done everything possible to produce what will probably stand as the definitive work.
Of course, the chapters develop chronologically up to a conclusion in which she summarizes her revisions of the many myths and misperceptions about Röhm. We gain interesting insights into his formative years and early military career through the war, from which she develops the formation of his personality. Obviously, Germany's defeat and the subsequent revolution were the decisive events in the emergence of his political ideology. She does an excellent job of unraveling his maneuvers as "machine-gun king" and alliance broker within the paramilitary and political intrigues of post-revolutionary Bavaria, especially considering the murky nature of the available evidence. We have a precise picture of...