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World War I, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Nazi Party

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World War I, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Nazi Party War and Nationalism: Evidence from World War I and the Rise of the Nazi Party∗ Alexander De Juan† Felix Haass‡ Carlo Koos§ Sascha Riaz¶ Thomas Tichelbaecker‖ September 24, 2021 Abstract Can wars breed nationalism? We investigate this question in the context of the rise of the Nazi party after World War 1. We argue that civilian exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that reinforce hostility towards war opponents, increase identi- fication with the nation, and thereby strengthen support for nationalist parties. Wetest this argument using a novel dataset of all 8.6 million German soldiers who were wounded or died in WW1. Our empirical strategy leverages battlefield dynamics that cause plausi- bly exogenous variation in the county-level death rate—the share of dead soldiers among all war casualties (dead and wounded). We find that throughout the interwar period, electoral support for nationalist parties, including the NSDAP, was about 2 percentage points higher in counties with a high death rate. Additional results from individual-level data on NSDAP party entries and pre-WW1 war memorials suggest collective memory culture as a potential mechanism. ∗We thank Maja Adena, Carles Boix, Sebastian Bondzio, Nils-Christian Bormann, Volha Charnysh, Hanno Hilbig, Macartan Humphreys, Christoph Koenig, John Londregan, Erez Manela, Jonas Meßner, Christoph Rass, Seth Soderborg, Alex Watson, Daniel Ziblatt, and workshop participants at Harvard and WZB Berlin for helpful comments. We thank Jürgen Falter for generously sharing data. We are grateful to Dora Gergis, Fredric Lüssen- heide, Anton von Poblozki, and Julian Voß for excellent research assistance. Felix Haass acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 863486). † Professor of Comparative Politics, Osnabrueck University, [email protected] ‡ Post-doctoral researcher, University of Oslo, [email protected] § Senior Researcher, CMI (Chr. Michelsen Institute), [email protected] ¶PhD Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University, [email protected] ‖PhD Candidate, Department of Politics, Princeton University, [email protected] 1 1 Introduction In 1933, Ernst Röhm, an early ally of Adolf Hitler, claimed that “the roots of national social- ism lie in the trenches of the World War” (Schmidt and Grabowsky 1934). His propagandistic rhetoric reflects a more general interpretation of WW1 as the “the great seminal catastrophe” that created the breeding ground for developments that culminated in WW2 and the Holo- caust. Existing scholarship highlights the enormous economic and social costs incurred by the war, the idealisation of the experience on the front, the humiliation of many after the de- feat in 1918, the negative sentiments many Germans expressed towards the Versailles peace treaty, and the Nazis’ ultimate ideological capture of these sentiments during their rise to power (Hett 2019; Krumeich 2010; Peukert 2001; Weitz 2007; Ziemann 2018). In contrast to these macro-level explanations that link WW1 to the rise of the Nazi party, we shift the focus to an often overlooked, but critical aspect of the Great War’s impact:the enormous human costs of WWI were distributed highly unevenly across the German Reich.1 An example illustrates this variation: of the 7,478 citizens in the small Bavarian town “Deggen- dorf”, historical records indicate that between 15 and 28 soldiers were killed between 1914 and 1918. Only about 150km to the West, the roughly similarly sized Bavarian town of “Neuburg on the Danube” (9,061 inhabitants) registered more than eight times as many fatalities (130 to 160 soldiers). Did this geography of the Great War “at home” have any impact on the rise of nationalism and the Nazis’ success? We investigate the association between the local distribution of war fatalities and elec- toral support for the Nazi party to add to our general understanding of the effects of inter- state war on nationalism. Influential historical and macro-level works underscore the roleof the military and international wars in strengthening national unity (Weber 1976; Finer 1975; Hutchinson and Hutchinson 2005). However, only recently, a few studies have started to in- vestigate the effect of war and nationalism on the micro-level. Cagé et al. (2020), Acemoglu et al. (2020) and Koenig (2020) analyze the effects of WW1 on support for nationalist parties in inter-war France, Italy and Germany. These studies provide important insights on the roleof 1See Bondzio (2020) for an exception that carefully investigates local-level variation in the city of Os- nabrueck. 2 war veterans, economic hardship and right-wing counter-mobilization against political gains of socialist parties. Adding to this emerging field of research, we emphasize and investigate the role of a more direct effect of the war: collective experiences of death andloss. We contend that exposure to war fatalities can foment nationalist preferences among civil- ians. We define nationalism as an attitude that entails the idealization of the nation(Tajfel 1969), a feeling of national superiority (Hechter 2000) and a tendency towards derogating comparisons with groups not considered to be part of the nation (Schatz, Staub and Lavine 1999). Combining insights from social psychology, history, and political science, we argue that community-level exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that fos- ter in-group-cohesion and out-group derogation (Bowles 2008). We expect this mechanism to materialize in higher levels of electoral support for nationalist parties that emphasize cultural homogeneity or racial superiority. To explore the local effects of the war losses on political preferences and voting behavior, we build a novel data set based individual-level war records. We leverage geocoded data on the entirety of all 8.6 million German soldiers who were wounded or died in WW1. To estimate the local impact of the war on nationalist preferences, we combine these casualty data with county-level voting results for the two main far-right nationalist parties in the Weimar Republic: the German Nationalist People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP) and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP). Our treatment variable exploits information on soldiers’ loss status (dead vs. wounded) for causal identification. We contend that this status was the result of idiosyncratic battlefield action and, therefore, unrelated to determinants of political outcomes in soldiers’ home coun- ties. Across specifications, we document a robust and substantial positive effect of indirect exposure to wartime violence on the nationalist parties’ vote share. To trace mechanisms, we explore (1) the differential effects of war exposure on the two main nationalist parties—the NSDAP and the DNVP, (2) the impact of the death rate on NSDAP party entries among drafted vs. non-drafted cohorts, and (3) heterogeneous treatment effects on counties with ahighvs. 3 low density of pre-WW1 war monuments. These additional analyses are in line with our ar- gument that the main effects reflect an increase in nationalist preferences among civilians (rather than veterans) supported by processes of collective commemoration. Taken together, our results make three main contributions to the literature. First, our findings add to research on the sources of nationalism. We provide additional micro-level evidence on the impact of war on nationalism, complementing previous theoretical and his- torical (Smith 1981; Hutchinson 2017) as well as recent quantitative analyses (Cagé et al. 2020; Acemoglu et al. 2020; Koenig 2020). More specifically, our fine-grained casualty data and aux- iliary analyses allow us to analyze the effects of war deaths on nationalist vote shares. Adding to prior research on the role of war veterans, we demonstrate how local confrontation with war-related death can foment nationalist sentiments among larger segments of the civilian population. Second, extending research on the aggregate effects of WW1 on interwar Germany (Al- calde 2017; Ziemann 2018), we demonstrate that the geographical distribution of war fatalities has had substantial effects on nationalist voting. We document a sizeable electoral benefit of war deaths for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party adding to socioeconomic, religious, and propaganda-related benefits highlighted in previous research (Adena et al. 2015; King et al. 2008; Satyanath, Voigtländer and Voth 2017; Selb and Munzert 2018; Spenkuch and Tillmann 2018; Thurner, Klima and Küchenhoff 2015). Third, we contribute to research on the effects of war on political attitudes and behavior. In particular, we demonstrate that proximity to casualties in the context of international wars can have long-lasting effects on political attitudes that go beyond assessments ofongoing wars and incumbent regimes (Gartner and Segura 2000; Althaus, Bramlett and Gimpel 2012). 2 War and nationalism A well-established body of literature has investigated how pervasive nationalist attitudes can be a source of war among states (Schrock-Jacobson 2012; Gruffydd-Jones 2017). In contrast 4 to its role as a source of war, however, nationalism as a consequence of war has received less attention in the empirical literature (Hutchinson 2017). While not focusing on the effects of war on nationalism specifically, studies on historical state-building
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