Recently a new genre of organizational biography of SS leaders has developed in Germany, drawing on the extensive historical research on the SS that has been completed over the past few decades. These biographers have not been concerned with the personalities or private lives of their subjects, but have focused on their subjects' careers to cast new light on SS policy making, decisions, and motivation. This “biographical turn” is a new development in modern German historiography of Nazism, where biography has previously been less intellectually respectable than it is among historians in the Anglo-sphere. Robert Gerwarth is a German historian who now works in Ireland, and his biography of Reinhard Heydrich is halfway between the detailed and impersonal style of the new German biographies and the shorter English-language biographies, such as Toby Thacker's book on Joseph Goebbels, which give more attention to their subject's private life.

Reinhard Heydrich was Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's closest collaborator and loyal subordinate. Between 1933 and his death in June 1942 from injuries sustained in an assassination attempt by agents of the Czech government in exile, Heydrich was head of the Security Service (SD) and the secret state police (Gestapo), chief of the Reich Main Security Office, and Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor (Deputy Reich-Protector) of Bohemia and Moravia. Heydrich chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which planned the final solution to the Jewish Question—the deportation and extermination of all Jews in Europe.

Gerwarth's task as Heydrich's biographer is made more difficult by the scattered and fragmentary state of Heydrich's personal records, though he has had some help from members of the Heydrich family and drawn on extensive archival sources across many countries. He is judicious in his assessment of the postwar testimony of Heydrich's subordinates and coworkers, which can only be used with care.

The new genre of SS organizational biography has developed an overall interpretation that sees its subjects as heavily influenced by their generational experience of being too young to fight in World War I, and of growing up in the turbulence of the Weimar Republic. Gerwarth demonstrates that Heydrich's own path to National Socialism was atypical and argues that some of Heydrich's subsequent radicalism after 1933 arose out of a resulting desire to prove his ideological credentials.

Gerwarth's biography is particularly convincing in its subtle tracing of Heydrich's central role in the evolving nature of Nazi antisemitic policy and the stages that led to the Holocaust. Here he draws effectively on the findings of the wider historical research. His account of Heydrich's policies as Deputy Reich-Protector usefully combines Czech research into the German occupation with the broader literature on the SS role in occupied Europe more generally. The nature and basis of the Himmler-Heydrich working partnership, however, requires more analysis.

How can a biographer make a man such as Heydrich comprehensible? Gerwarth states that a biographer requires a degree of empathy with his subject and develops the concept of “cold empathy” to describe his chosen approach. His aim is to write with distance but without overt judgment or moralizing, seeking to allow Heydrich's beliefs and actions to speak for themselves. This concept of “cold empathy” is potentially very fruitful for biographers of Nazi figures, and I would have liked him to have developed it a little more. In practice, though, it is not clear in what ways Gerwarth's approach is actually empathetic. His “cold empathy” is more cold than empathetic. This is understandable but it also represents a missed opportunity. This is a book recommended to those researching the history of Nazism, the Holocaust, and World War II.