The moment is freighted with history and politics: that is the lesson one draws from studying the myriad and most often fleeting microsocial encounters that took place in Europe during the Second World War. In addition to the little facts it reveals that, by virtue of their recurrence, constitute social phenomena, comparative history trains a spotlight on national groupings, redefines the lines dividing friend from enemy and also clarifies certain relations of transnational friendship. What factors animated the Duponts, Smiths and Schmidts of wartime Europe such that they adopted behaviors that were at once so homogeneous and/or specific at the national level and so contrasting from one country to the next? Ground-level analysis demonstrates that France’s “strange defeat” in 1940 may have concealed an insurrection nipped in the bud; that the British “People’s War” was more than a myth; that the French Resistance was a nationwide movement, a portion of which – that represented by the helpers – was in direct contact with Allied personnel; and that, in Germany, the “community of the people-race” was indeed a social reality and the driving force of collective violence.