This is the type of question that takes a book (or several!) to fully answer. And since this is for apparently schoolwork of some sorts, I am more comfortable giving a list of books than try to tackle this question.

• Richard Evans's Third Reich trilogy is obviously the place to start, especially if one is relatively new to the subject. It's a pretty thorough history of the period, but one that at times draws a little bit too broad for specialists.

• Nicholas Stargardt's The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945 is an excellent social history of the war years and covers how Germans were both seduced by early victories and gradually disabused of their engagement with the regime as the war lengthened.

• Ian Kershaw's The Hitler Myth is one of the foundational texts that tackles the issue of Hitler's popularity. The relationship between the populace and its dictator is one that was in flux.

• Peter Fritzsche's Life and Death in the Third Reich is another examination of the people's relationship with another facet of National Socialist ideology: the Volksgemeinschaft. Using primary sources like diaries and letters, Fritzsche explores how the actual engagement was often at odds with the idealized vision of a classless society based on race.

• Two anthologies are also worth checking out. The first, Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany has a number of essays on the intersection of daily life within an ideologically charged atmosphere. Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives also tacks to a similar line by showing the complexities of Volksgemeinschaft's variable interpretations among the German population.