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From Finance to Fascism: the Real Effects of Germany's 1931 Banking

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From Finance to Fascism: the Real Effects of Germany's 1931 Banking From Finance to Fascism: The Real Effects of Germany’s 1931 Banking Crisis Sebastian Doerr Stefan Gissler José-Luis Peydró Hans-Joachim Voth Abstract Do financial crises radicalize voters? We analyze a canonical case – Germany in the early 1930s. Following a large bank failure in 1931 caused by fraud, foreign shocks and political inaction, the economic downturn went from bad to worse. We collect new data on bank-firm connections. These suggest a direct link from the banking crisis to both economic distress and extreme radical voting. The failure of the Jewish-led Danatbank strongly reduced the wage bill of connected firms, leading to substantially lower city-level incomes. Moreover, Danat exposure strongly increased Nazi Party support between 1930 and 1933, but not between 1928 and 1930. Effects work through both economic and non-economic channels. Greater economic distress caused by Danat led to more Nazi party votes. In addition, the failure of a Jewish bank was skillfully exploited by propaganda, increasing support above and beyond economic effects. This was particularly true in cities with a history of anti-Semitism. In towns with no such history, Nazi votes were only driven by the economic channel. Greater local exposure to the banking crisis also led to fewer marriages between Jews and gentiles just after the Summer of 1931, and to more attacks on synagogues after 1933, as well as more deportations of Jews. Keywords: financial crises, banking, real effects, Great Depression, democracy. JEL codes: E44, G01, G21, N20, P16. This version is from September 2018. Sebastian Doerr is at University of Zurich ([email protected]); Stefan Gissler is at the Federal Reserve Board ([email protected]); José-Luis Peydró is at ICREA- Universitat Pompeu Fabra, CREI, Barcelona GSE, Imperial College London, CEPR ([email protected]); Hans-Joachim Voth is at University of Zurich and CEPR ([email protected]). We would like to thank participants at Goethe University House of Finance-SAFE-Institute for Banking and Financial History “The Real Effects of Financial Crises: Past, Present, Future”, the 2018 European Summer Symposium in Financial Markets, the 1st Endless Summer Conference on Financial Intermediation and Corporate Finance, and The Halle Institute for Economic Research “Challenges to Financial Stability” conferences, seminar participants at CREI, Federal Reserve Board, MIT, and University of Zurich, Daron Acemoglu, Fabio Braggion, Fernando Broner, Paola Bustos, Stijn Claessens, Carola Frydman, Luc Laeven, Ralf Meisenzahl, Atif Mian, Isabel Schnabel, David Schoenherr, Moritz Schularick, and Peter Temin. We also thank Stéphanie Collet and the Research Center Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe (SAFE) for providing us with interwar data on German companies. Peydró acknowledges financial support from both the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness Feder EU (project ECO2015-68182-P) and the European Research Council Grant (project 648398). The views in this paper are solely the authors’ and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. I. Introduction Do financial crises fan the flames of fanaticism? From the election of Donald Trump to the recent elections in Italy, France, Austria, Germany, Sweden and Greece, the period since 2008 has witnessed dramatic gains for anti-establishment parties and politicians. On the 10th anniversary of the Lehman collapse in the summer of 2018, both the Financial Times and the New York Times featured op-eds arguing that "Populism is the true legacy of the financial crisis". At the same time, the driving forces behind the recent populist surge remain unclear: In addition to the aftermath of the financial crisis, rising concerns over immigration, growing income inequality, fiscal austerity, and the adverse effects of foreign trade have all been argued to play a role (Dippel et al 2016; Autor et al 2017; Becker and Fetzer 2017). While recent evidence (Mian et al. 2014; Algan et al 2017) and historical studies (De Bromhead et al 2013; Funke et al 2016) using aggregate cross-country data suggest that financial crises are linked to radical voting, there is a striking shortage of evidence based on micro data documenting a direct effect of financial shocks on political radicalization, and the economic and non-economic channels through which they operate. We examine the canonical case of a radical government coming to power amidst economic and financial disaster: The rise of the Nazi Party, which established a genocidal dictatorship responsible for starting World War II, causing millions of casualties. As aggregate GDP in Germany fell by 40% and unemployment surged towards 6 million, the Nazi party went from 2.6% of the popular vote in 1928 to 43.9% in March 1933. Economic analyses of the rise of the Nazis have mainly focused on the link between unemployment and radical voting. They find relatively little evidence that the German slump caused the Nazi Party to gain in the polls (Falter 1991; Childers 1983; Stachura 1978). Instead, voting studies find that the turn towards the Nazis was broad-based across social classes (Falter and Zintl 1988; Kolb 1997). The mass army of unemployed overwhelmingly supported the Communists, not the Nazis (Falter 1991; King et al 2008), suggesting only a weak direct link between economic distress and Nazi voting.1 In this paper, we show that the German banking crisis in the summer of 1931 was crucial in boosting the Nazi movement’s electoral fortunes. It not only aggravated the German economy’s downturn, leading to more radical voting because of declining incomes, but also increased the Nazis’ popularity directly: Their central, long-standing claim that “the Jews are 1 King et al. (2008) have argued that groups hurt economically by the depression did not all have the same interests. Rather, in their view, Nazi support was a case of ‘ordinary economic voting’ – those at low risk of unemployment turning to the Nazis and those at high risk turning to the Communists. 1 our [Germany’s] misfortune”2 was seemingly borne out by indisputable fact. The German banking crisis of mid-1931 was triggered by the collapse of Danatbank, one of Germany’s four universal banks. Danatbank had been led by the prominent Jewish banker Jakob Goldschmidt. The bank faced unsustainable losses because one of its borrowers, a large textile firm, defaulted. The shock to Danat resulted in a full-blown financial crisis because of both internal and external factors: The international financial system was under severe strain because of the concurrent failure of Creditanstalt, an Austrian bank. This led to foreign depositor bank runs in Austria and Germany. Political inactivity because of conflict between Germany and France over a proposed customs union with Austria undermined international cooperation. Because its own gold stock was low, and because foreign help was not forthcoming, the German central bank could not bail out Danat. The ensuing run on one bank led to a suspension of most bank deposits, a bank holiday, and Germany’s de facto exit from the gold standard.3 The banking collapse was quickly exploited by Nazi propaganda. We argue that the electoral surge of the Nazi Party occurred in part because one of its central messages – the hatred of Jews – went from extreme to mainstream after 1931 on the back of the banking crisis’ impact. We first present new evidence on the real effects of the German banking crisis, and then document the crisis’ effects on Nazi support and anti-Semitic attitudes. Instead of focusing on unemployment, we collect new data on the wage bill of firms. Shorter working hours and lower wages caused income losses, as did disruptions to the flow of credit and a collapse of demand from under- and unemployed workers. To identify the effect of bank failures on the real economy and voting, we use newly- collected data on firm-bank pair lending relationships from a contemporary directory of listed firms. Because German banks lent nationwide in the 1930s (in contrast to the US), we can use cross-sectional variation in firm- and city-level exposure to identify effects, despite the fact that the German banking crisis erupted after several years of recession. Information on bank connections was recorded prior to the banking crisis. There is no evidence that firms borrowing from the Danatbank were ex ante any more risky than client firms of other (great) banks – nor were they different in size, age, or leverage. Finally, our statistical results on the effect of Danat exposures do not change when we control for a plethora of additional factors and fixed effects, 2 This was the motto of Der Stürmer, a highly anti-Semitic Nazi weekly magazine that published the slogan on its front page in every issue. 3 For the banking crisis, see Born 1967, Kindleberger 1978, Ferguson and Temin 2003, Schnabel 2004. Kindleberger (1978) argues that the Austrian banking crisis was crucial for the German one. Ferguson and Temin (2003) highlight the inaction of German politicians, including the lack of bail-outs, while Schnabel (2004) emphasizes crisis of the Mark and the fact all the universal banks took substantial risks before the crisis. 2 suggesting that connection to the Danat is orthogonal to unobservable and observed firm fundamentals, following Altonji et al. (2005). Figure 1 illustrates our main results. The left-most panel shows the strong decline in lending by the two banks that collapsed in the summer of 1931, Danat and Dresdner. While loan volume declined by 10% at Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank, aggregate lending at Danat and Dresdner fell twice as much. Accordingly, at Danat-connected companies, liabilities also declined twice as fast as at unconnected firms (a reduction of 30% instead of 15%). Finally, the wage bill at Danat-exposed firms collapsed by 40%, while the average firm only experienced a reduction of 15% in wage and salaries.4 Cities with more firms exposed to the Danatbank prior to the crisis experienced larger income declines, and unemployment rose more after the banking crisis.
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