Regime loyalty in wartime Nazi Germany

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Sascha Riaz, Peter Mair Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at the European University Institute.

Measuring regime support in closed autocracies is challenging due to preference falsification, state censorship, and pervasive propaganda. We introduce a novel behavioral measure of regime loyalty based on subtle expressions of allegiance in soldier obituaries published in Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. Our empirical analysis draws on a large-scale dataset of over one million scanned pages from roughly 160,000 newspaper issues across 260 unique local news outlets. Using Large Language Models for OCR and data labeling, we detect expressions of regime support, such as praise for Hitler, National Socialism, or the Fatherland, in approximately 600,000 obituaries. Our approach yields the first spatially and temporally granular measure of Nazi regime support during World War II. We then use this measure in a substantive application that exploits local variation in the timing and intensity of Jewish deportations to study how direct exposure to the Holocaust affected expressions of regime loyalty. The project contributes to political science research on whether repression against outgroups increases or reduces regime support and to historical work on how the German civilian population perceived and reacted to the Holocaust.

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