Overview

Complicity in the Third Reich is a trilogy whose component books are Ordinary Germans, Eichmann: Explaining Perpetrator Behaviour, and Post-war Justice for Nazi War Criminals. The three books together are an examination of wider German complicity in the objectives and activities of the Nazi regime. They attempt to establish the nature and extent of involvement of ordinary German people in the aims and undertakings of the Third Reich, and to draw a correspondence with human behaviour in all cultures, societies and time periods. The three books argue that the primary and decisive influence on the behaviour of not only Nazi perpetrators, but ordinary Germans also, was pursuit of personal interest, here defined as material, social and psychological outcomes. In the case of Nazi Germany, in the prevailing conditions of that time, those ends were best achieved by a preparedness to conform to the dictates of the regime. Taken as a whole, the trilogy posits that conformity to optimise personal outcomes is the decisive causal influence on all human behaviour, regardless of culture, society and time.