<i>Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust</i> . By Mary Fulbrook
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is an important book on a highly relevant topic. Author Mary Fulbrook makes a daring attempt to offer new insights to an already extensively explored field: the question of (ordinary) Germans’ complicity in the Nazi crimes of World War II and the Holocaust. While Fulbrook’s essential research question is not original, it remains crucial. What conditions and factors allowed the radical regime under Hitler to “kidnap” German society to go along with committing heinous crimes? To be clear, Fulbrook does not bother querying the degree of knowledge among ordinary Germans about the crimes committed in the name of their country. The perhaps stubborn postwar myth—upheld by many Germans post-1945—according to which most knew nothing or very little has long been debunked. But to ask what Germans knew, Fulbrook says, is to pose the wrong question. Instead, she urges the reader to investigate what Germans made of what they knew. The book thus concentrates not on the doings of German perpetrators and their collaborators but instead sets a clear focus on the silent majority of Germans, what Fulbrook refers to as a bystander society. Her argument is sobering. Conformity alone was sufficient for the regime to go unchecked (181). Popular perceptions and (in)actions were not shaped by a morally weak society but by the calculation of the relative risks versus the potential benefits of different forms of action (though the discussion of a balance sheet is quite one-sided and the discussion on how Germans benefitted from Hitler’s regime comes too short). Despite possible inner misgivings, most Germans went along with the system, played their allotted roles and in effect, helped the radicalization of the regime (341). These bystanders, according to Fulbrook, became over time and to varying degrees “complicit—whether through looking away, condoning violence or more actively sustaining the system.” (375).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".