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 his short career in Bolivia and the circumstances under which Hitler recalled him to serve as chief of staff of the paramilitary Sturmabteilung, or SA. Röhm's contributions in bringing Hitler to power and cementing Nazi control are well delineated, while Hancock provides the reader with a good critique of interpretations of this process. A nuanced analysis of the problems that developed within the SA and its conflicts with other agencies and key personalities during 1933/34 set the stage for the purge of June 30, 1934. Nevertheless, the exact process by which Hitler became convinced of this necessity still remains shrouded in mystery, although she certainly provides logical insights into the psychological process.

Röhm emerges as “human, all too human.” Hancock develops insights into his personality that are often inaccessible among other NS leaders. Most intriguing is the image of a thoroughly macho mother's boy and courteous lover of high culture who could employ any form and amount of violence in pursuit of his cause. Specifically acute is her observation about his lifetime of undisciplined and rebellious behavior: “He would rebel rather than overthrow the authority that he temporarily disobeyed or disregarded. He still needed that authority to be there” (p. 87). As a self-proclaimed traitor, he obviously saw the Weimar regime as simply an inadequate authority to be overthrown, but not so Hitler. Unlike any other paladin, he could criticize Hitler to his face, even get into shouting matches, yet his loyalty to his Führer was unshakable until the last moment. His most fatal failure was naiveté about the reciprocity of that loyalty.

Her treatment of his homosexuality is straightforward and specific, but fortunately neither judgmental nor sensationalistic. More importantly, she captures the political and emotional price he paid for the public attacks that it invited. Essentially, by the time Hitler came to power, Röhm was so weakened within the movement that he was totally dependent on Hitler's personal support, following him unquestioningly, and was unable to attend to the SA's future role.

Hancock thoroughly dismisses the myths that Röhm represented some “pure” strain of National Socialism that might have corrected the later excesses and horrors unleashed by Hitler with the encouragement of his extremist paladins. In some respects more relaxed and flexible than some Nazi leaders, he would probably have been more at home in a regime such as Italy's. Röhm was more nationalist and less biological in his anti-Semitism than Hitler or the likes of Himmler, but would not respond to any pleas to curb the anti-Semitic excesses of the SA during 1933/34. She also separates him and his higher SA leadership from the so-called second revolutionary elements that bubbled up from the ranks of the SA. Rather than being a social revolutionary, he was a supporter of hierarchy and social status. Only his loyalty to Hitler trumped his monarchist predilections. He remained a supporter of rapprochement with Britain and France and a committed Protestant Christian. “The irony for Röhm and the SA was that their very success in achieving and consolidating the seizure of power made them superfluous” (p. 169). Röhm undoubtedly aspired to being Reichswehr Minister over a fully Nazified military, but seems to have settled for the seemingly more realistic role for the SA as something like a Swiss militia. When even that proved a threat to the military and was quashed by Hitler, he begrudgingly accepted the more limited and less suitable role (given the soldierly nature of the SA and its leaders) as agency for pre-military training and instrument for the spiritual Nazification of the male population. In the end, he was isolated and lacked the political intelligence agency that might have warned him of his danger. Physically ill and emotionally exhausted, he would have resigned and returned to Bolivia, but Hitler could neither allow the implications nor trust the sincerity of the gesture.