World War II reached into the homes and lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way, with civilians accounting for the vast majority of those killed during the conflict. On Europe's home fronts, the war displaced millions, followed by enemy occupations and purges like the Holocaust. From first-person accounts, Peter Fritzsche provides a sweeping overview of how civilians struggled to understand the terror and chaos and asked themselves hard questions, like whether collaboration or resistance was the wisest response to occupation? How far should solidarity and empathy extend? And where in all this was God? Piecing together the broken words of the war's witnesses and victims—probing what they saw and what they failed to see—Fritzsche offers a haunting picture of the 20th century's defining event.