Complicity in the Third Reich is a trilogy comprising the books 1) Ordinary Germans, 2) Eichmann: Explaining Perpetrator Behaviour, and 3) 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.

Author Andrew Elsby makes the case of the drive for personal ends as the crucial factor in the way German people as a whole reacted to the Nazi regime, not least its totalitarian control. Dr Elsby discounts any suggestion that Nazi ideology was the result of underlying long-term cultural characteristics peculiar to the German people. Complicity in the Third Reich therefore does not assume as decisive the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda in vilifying both Jews and Bolshevism, but focuses rather on the drive for best possible personal outcomes. Elsby further argues that such human drive is derived from evolutionary natural selection, and that it takes the form either of dominance, possible only for the few, or conformity, the optimal survival strategy for the many.

These three books together also examine the different ways in which optimal aims and outcomes were achieved. Some individuals aspired to privilege, enhanced status and power over others, and so were opportunistic, competitive, and exhibited zeal and slavish orthodoxy. Others conformed more minimally by doing no more than meeting role requirements at work, while in the private sphere the misfortune of others – in this case Jews – was not taken advantage of. It is acknowledged that it is impossible to establish how many ordinary Germans were willing aspirants and opportunists relative to those whose conformity was more cautious and defensive, while in both cases optimisation of personal outcomes was the driving principle.