If a deep and lasting crisis shook our democracies, as German society was shaken from 1929 to 1933, would we be able to resist the fascist temptation? On January 31, 1933, thirty-two million Germans who did not vote Nazi woke up trapped in the dictatorship. Faced with the new power, how do they behave? How do they react to the suppression of freedoms, to the regimentation, to the anti-Semitic persecutions, to the march towards war? What compromises are necessary to survive? Is it possible not to collaborate with the Third Reich? Is it possible to resist him, and how? By comparing more than two hundred testimonies with the work of the greatest historians of this period, François Roux carries out a panoramic study of the history of Nazism and the Germans, from 1918 to 1946. It also allows us to challenge our received ideas: yes, thousands of Germans died resisting Hitler's Reich; no, the majority of them did not want this regime. By placing us before the choices they had to make, this book allows us to access an intimate, almost physical understanding of the relationship between the dictatorship and its subjects, and tells us a story that could one day be ours. .