The Good Germans: Resisting the Nazis 1933-1945

After 1933, as the brutal terror regime took hold, most of the two-thirds of Germans who had never voted for the Nazis—some 20 million people—tried to keep their heads down and protect their families. They moved to the country, or pretended to support the regime to avoid being denounced by neighbours, and tried to work out what was really happening in the Reich, surrounded as they were by Nazi propaganda and fake news. They lived in fear. Might they lose their jobs? Their homes? Their freedom? What would we have done in their place?

Many ordinary Germans found the courage to resist, in the full knowledge that they could be sentenced to indefinite incarceration, torture or outright execution. Catrine Clay argues that it was a much greater number than was ever formally recorded: teachers, lawyers, factory and dock workers, housewives, shopkeepers, church members, trade unionists, army officers, aristocrats, Social Democrats, Socialists and Communists. Her ground-breaking book focuses on six very different characters: each of them experiencing the momentous events of Nazi history as they unfold in their own small lives—Good Germans all.