The men and women of Dutch-Paris were resisters, meaning that they were among the tiny minority of civilians in Occupied Europe who actively opposed the Nazis. What about everyone else?
Speaking very broadly, there were two choices. If you didn’t resist, you could collaborate or you could accommodate.

Collaborators were the minority on the other end of the spectrum who actively supported the Nazis. There’s actually a range in here and some of the examples get very murky indeed. There were people who were not German but fully agreed with and supported Nazism – straight out collabos. Then there were people who thought that they could best serve their occupied country by cooperating with the Nazis. That attitude led a number of civil servants into collaboration because it was a very steep slippery slope. Are you really protecting your countrymen by doing the Nazis’ dirty work, or just making life easier for the Nazis and turning yourself into a collabo?

Here’s another example: the young men who volunteered to fight in German uniform on the Eastern Front to save the world from godless Communism and save themselves from starvation. Maybe they didn’t care enough about politics to be enthusiastic Nazis, but they still fought in German uniform.

But the real murkiness belongs in the realm of accommodation – meaning the vast majority of civilians in occupied Europe who kept their heads down and did what they needed to take care of themselves and their families. It was never as straight forward as that sounds.

What about the man who was required to take his turn guarding the freight train yards from resisters who might want to sabotage the trains or the rails? If he didn’t do it, he’d be arrested and his family would lose his wages. If he did do it, he’d be helping the occupier keep control. What about a man who keeps his job at a factory that shifted over to doing war work for the Germans? If he’s unemployed, he’d be liable for forced labor in Germany itself. Or the factory owner who has to choose between keeping his workers employed and at home by accepting German war work or refusing to make military hardware and exposing all his workers to forced labor in the Third Reich?

There was no easy place to ride out the occupation. Certainly, some places were a lot more dangerous than others. You had a much better chance of avoiding difficulties in a rural village in the French heartland than in Warsaw or Amsterdam. But the war and it’s treacherous moral choices would find you even in that forgotten village.