Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust  Mary Fulbrook, University College London

Using contemporary sources, Mary Fulbrook's most recent book, Bystander Society (OUP, 2023), explores the ways in which ordinary Germans became increasingly compliant with the Nazi regime, such that a majority were eventually able variously to facilitate, benefit from, or a turn a blind eye to deportations and mass murder.

Tracing selected personal stories through peace and war, Bystander Society helps us to understand the exclusion of Jews and growing passivity in the peacetime years, and how genocide developed in the Baltic states and Poland during wartime. By highlighting widespread local complicity in areas under Nazi occupation, and exploring the risks involved in acts of rescue or resistance, the book questions the very possibility of bystanding in conditions of collective violence. And by focussing on individual stories throughout, the book also raises questions about how we can write history that links wider circumstances with personal experiences.

Mary Fulbrook FBA, is Professor of German History at UCL and former Executive Dean of the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. She serves on several international academic advisory boards concerned with the Holocaust, including the USHMM Academic Committee, the Buchenwald Academic Advisory Board, and Yad Vashem Studies Editorial Board. A graduate of both Cambridge and Harvard Universities, Fulbrook has written more than a dozen scholarly monographs and historical overviews, and has edited or co-edited a dozen more, including, with Jürgen Matthäus, The Cambridge History of the Holocaust, Vol II (forthcoming).

Her major monographs relating to the Holocaust include Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (2011), the Fraenkel Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012), and the winner of the Wolfson History Prize, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (2018).

Mary's latest book, Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (2023), explores how ordinary people could become complicit in the murder of their neighbours. She is currently working on an AHRC-DFG funded collaborative project entitled ‘Good Citizens, Terrible Times: Community, Courage, and Compliance in and beyond the Holocaust'.