This chapter analyses a selection of personal testimonies written by non-Jewish German refugees and non-Germans with experiences of Germany under Nazi rule to the 1939 Harvard essay competition ‘My Life in Germany before and after 1933’ in order to explore how behaviour in private in Germany under National Socialist rule helped to constitute a ‘bystander society’. It argues that the pressures to demonstrate conformity in public did not simply create dissonance between individuals’ public and private selves, but also transformed private attitudes and habits. As a result, a ‘bystander society’ emerged after 1933 in Germany that was characterised by people tending not to intervene on behalf of the direct targets of persecution: as such, it was a precondition of the Holocaust.

This chapter critiques the way in which historians of National Socialism have dealt with the topic of private life, highlights recent new developments in the historiography that can be built on, and shows how concepts of privacy and the private drawn from sociology and political theory can usefully be applied and tested in relation to developments under the Nazi dictatorship.