Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

Speaker: Mary Fulbrook

In this seminar, Mary Fulbrook will discuss her new book Bystander Society (Oxford University Press, 2023) with CES Resident Faculty David Spreen. Fulbrook explores the ways ordinary Germans became increasingly compliant with the Nazi regime, such that a majority were eventually able to facilitate, benefit from, or turn a blind eye to deportations and mass murder. Tracing selected personal stories through peace and war, Bystander Society helps readers understand the growth of passivity in the peacetime years, illuminates how genocide developed in the Baltic states and Poland during wartime, and highlights the conditions under which only a few individuals were able to engage in the risks entailed by refusal, rescue, or resistance.