On the night of 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building burned. A young Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was caught in the building and later beheaded for it. The Nazis used the fire to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree the next day, suspending freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the protection from indefinite detention. By morning, 4,000 members of the Communist Party of Germany were in custody. Three weeks later, on 23 March, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act by 444 to 94, with all 81 Communist deputies already arrested or in hiding and Social Democrats kept from the chamber by SA stormtroopers in the corridors. The vote let Hitler's cabinet pass laws without parliamentary approval, including laws that violated the constitution. By 14 July 1933, every other political party had been banned or had dissolved itself. By August 1934, when President Hindenburg died, Hitler had merged the chancellorship and the presidency, and German soldiers swore personal loyalty to him by name. The legal architecture of the dictatorship was built in eighteen months.

On 15 September 1935 in Nuremberg, the Reichstag passed two laws that stripped German Jews of citizenship and forbade them to marry or have sexual relations with non-Jews. By that date, Albert Einstein had already left for Princeton; Hannah Arendt was in Paris; the doctor Hertha Nathorff, whose Berlin practice was thriving in 1932, had begun the diary that would later document her family's increasing isolation. The pianist Karl Robert Kreiten, then 19, kept playing concerts; he would be hanged in 1943 for telling a friend in private that the war was lost. The bookseller Helene Voigt-Diederichs continued running her Jena shop and refused to display antisemitic literature; she was harassed but survived. The Catholic priest Bernhard Lichtenberg in Berlin began praying publicly for Jewish victims after Kristallnacht in 1938; he died in 1943 on the way to Dachau. These were not statistics. They had names, addresses, neighbors who saw them every day.

On the nights of 9 and 10 November 1938, after the Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan shot a German diplomat in Paris, organized SA and SS units across Germany burned more than 250 synagogues, smashed the windows of around 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, and arrested 30,000 Jewish men, who were sent to concentration camps. The official death toll was 91, but actual deaths in custody and from suicide pushed the real number into the hundreds. The events took place in city centers, on main streets, in plain view of neighbors. Police and fire brigades were ordered to stand back unless non-Jewish property was endangered. The choice that millions of Germans made that night was not whether to participate. It was whether to step out of the house, whether to call out, whether to write a letter the next day. Most stayed inside. A few did not. The diary of Friedrich Kellner, a Social Democratic court official in Laubach, records his disgust the next morning in handwriting that he kept hidden for the next seven years.

Most Germans did not resist the regime. Some did, and many of those who did were killed for it. The White Rose group, centered on the siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl, distributed leaflets calling for non-cooperation; they were arrested at Munich University on 18 February 1943 and beheaded four days later. The Confessing Church, led by pastors including Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoller, refused to fold the German Protestant churches into the Nazi-aligned Reich Church; Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenburg on 9 April 1945. The conservative officers behind the 20 July 1944 plot to kill Hitler at the Wolfsschanze, including Claus von Stauffenberg, were rounded up and executed within weeks; Hitler ordered around 4,900 people killed in the reprisal wave, many of them tortured and filmed for his viewing. The German Communist Party operated underground from 1933 until liberation; thousands of its members died in camps or under interrogation. Resistance existed. It was rare. It was usually fatal.

The German Instrument of Surrender was signed on 8 May 1945. The Allies began the Nuremberg trials of senior Nazi leadership in November 1945; twelve were sentenced to death. Lower-level prosecutions slowed quickly. By 1949 the Western Allies were focused on rebuilding West Germany as a Cold War partner, and many former Nazi officials returned to senior positions in the courts, civil service, and intelligence agencies. The historian Fritz Bauer, attorney general of Hesse, fought for years in the late 1950s to bring SS officers from Auschwitz to trial; the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials finally opened in 1963. Adolf Eichmann was abducted from Argentina by Israeli intelligence in 1960 and tried in Jerusalem in 1961, the first sustained public reckoning with the architecture of the genocide. The German student movement of 1968 forced its parents' generation to answer questions they had spent twenty years not asking. The 1979 American television miniseries Holocaust, watched by twenty million West Germans, did more to shift public consciousness than any single court case. The Bundestag did not formally pardon all those convicted under Nazi-era statutes against gay men until 2017. Some accountings are still in progress. They probably always will be.