Throughout the novel, Todd examines how large-scale persecution depends upon people and institutions that tolerate, rationalize, or accommodate it. The novel develops this idea through ordinary German citizens, Bertie’s complicated survivor’s guilt, and the actions of the Allied powers after the war. At the same time, however, Todd does not treat every failure to resist as morally equivalent. The novel repeatedly distinguishes between people with the power to oppose injustice who choose not to act, and marginalized victims forced into self-preservation. Through these contracts, complicity emerges as a question of what choices and power were available.

The interludes documenting Hitler’s rise demonstrate how passivity allows oppression to develop incrementally. Rather than presenting Nazi persecution as a single, sudden even, Todd creates a rapid sequence of brief bulletins: legal protections are revoked, queer social spaces are closed, the press is censored, political opponents are imprisoned, Dachau opens, and the Enabling Act transfers legislative authority to Hitler. These developments have a relentless rhythm, while the compressed chronology shows how quickly individual restrictions accumulate into systemic persecution. In particular, the announcement that Hitler’s consolidation of power occurred through “legal, constitutional, and democratic means” (172) underscores this idea. As a result, legality itself provides no guarantee of justice. Institutions and citizens can permit oppression to grow by accepting each new restriction as an isolated political development rather than recognizing the larger pattern.

The forced exhibition at Oberer Kuhberg shows hoe denial can continue even after the consequences become impossible to ignore. Confronted with photographs and physical evidence of Nazi atrocities, some townspeople dismiss what they see as “lies,” while others argue the victims should have “obeyed the law” (116). Their responses illustrate two mechanisms of complicity: refusing to acknowledge suffering and rationalizing persecution once it has occurred. The scene also echoes the earlier interludes. Laws repeatedly defined marginalized people as criminals, allowing ordinary citizens to confuse legality with morality. By continuing to justify victims’ treatment on the basis of law even after the regime has fallen, these characters show how prejudice can outlive the political system that institutionalized it.

At the same time, Bertie’s character provides a more complicated examination of individual responsibility. During the destruction of the Institut, he burns his own file but fails to destroy Karl’s, leaving records that later fall into Nazi hands. He becomes convinced that his self-preservation makes him complicit in what happened afterward. However, that judgment becomes complicated, as Bertie’s story reveals that he himself was being hunted during a violent raid and had only moments to escape. His guilt therefore raises a difficult distinction between complicity and survival. The same question returns when Bertie hides during the Nazi years and later accepts assistance from Nazi passengers while fleeing Germany. He repeatedly worries that surviving without confronting evil makes him responsible for it, but his limited choices contrast sharply with those of citizens and governments that possess meaningful power. His character emphasizes how victims may internalize responsibility for atrocities actually created and sustained by larger systems.

The gravest hypocrisy is that of the Allied forces. The book is framed by the historical reality that the Allies upheld the Nazi-amended Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality. This meant that queer Holocaust survivors were often transferred directly from concentration camps to civilian prisons to serve sentences for their supposed crimes. This policy is the catalyst for Karl’s flight from Dachau; having been “liberated,” he must immediately run for his life from his liberators. The Allies’ cynical collaboration is further exposed when Roy reveals that the United States government is actively recruiting former Nazi officers for intelligence work against communism. This willingness to work with war criminals for political gain dismantles the myth of a purely moral crusade against fascism, showing that the Allies’ opposition to the Nazi regime was conditional and self-serving.

Ultimately, complicity appears in the novel as a spectrum rather than single moral failure. It can take the form of silence, denial, obedience to unjust laws, preservation of discriminatory institutions, or active cooperation with former perpetrators. Through Bertie, however, the novel also warns against assigning equal responsibility to those who merely lacked the power to stop an atrocity. The novel places the greatest responsibility on those who can recognize injustice and possess the ability to resist it but instead choose convenience, safety, prejudice, or political advantage. In doing so, the theme becomes a warning about the ordinary decisions through which oppressive systems are allowed to survive.