Why write another biography of a Nazi perpetrator? Why not instead write a biography of a victim of Nazi mass murder? The victims were almost always innocent and helpless, they could alter little about their fate and they possessed no means of influencing decision-making processes. The mindset and conduct of someone who kills requires considerably more explanation than the mindset and conduct of someone who is killed. As the historian Timothy Snyder has noted, ‘It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.’ In view of the estimated total of between 200,000 and 250,000 Germans and Austrians – predominantly, though not exclusively, men – directly involved in the mass murder of European Jewry, the selection of a single subject is neither an easy nor an obvious choice. Over the last two decades, there has been a boom in biographies of leading Nazis. Only to a limited extent, however, has this trend extended specifically to front-line Holocaust perpetrators. Direct killers have not been studied as individual subjects in similar depth to the major figures. Alongside the studies of the leading architects of the Holocaust, Himmler, Heydrich and ‘Gestapo’ Müller, we have only a small handful of individual biographical accounts of mid-level SS (Schutzstaffel, i.e. Protection Echelon) and police functionaries heavily involved in the genocide of European Jewry, for example, on Odilo Globocnik, Walther Rauff or Theodor Dannecker. It remains unclear, however, to what extent the findings made about a perpetrator like Werner Best can be applied to front-line executors of the Holocaust, a group to which Best did not belong. In Ulrich Herbert's landmark biography of Best, furthermore, Werner Best the person runs the risk of disappearing behind his status as a member of a generational category.

Alongside the boom in biographies of leading Nazis, research into Nazi crimes has increasingly focussed in recent years on the mid- and lower-level perpetrators. Frequently, the results of this research have taken the form of collective biographical studies or collections of short biographical sketches. Despite their undeniable value, neither collective accounts nor collections of short sketches can replace in-depth individual biographies.