In this powerful and revelatory new work, historian Mary Fulbrook takes on one of the most fraught issues in modern times: the role of ordinary Germans in enabling the rise of Nazism and with it the exclusion, persecution, and then extermination of millions of people across Europe. The question often asked of the Nazi era 'what and when did ordinary Germans know about the crimes being committed in their name?' is, Fulbrook argues, the wrong one. The real question is how they interpreted and acted, or failed to act upon what they knew; and how, in the process, became complicit.