Sebastian Doerr et al. — Financial Crises and Political Radicalization: How Failing Banks Paved Hitler’s Path to Power

65 published claims from this book.

• Absent local amplification does not rule out anti-finance sentiment operating through national framing.
• Adding city controls and province fixed effects raises the model’s explained variance to 0.585.
• An unpublicized bank failure did not radicalize voters despite similar economic damage.
• Anti-finance sentiment alone cannot explain the Danat effect on Nazi voting
• Anti-Semitic cultural context magnified the Danat crisis’s radicalizing effect
• Bank-crisis exposure predicted later pogroms and deportations of Jews.
• Bank-failure exposure predicts later anti-Semitic persecution across German cities.
• Both Danat and Dresdner failures cut connected firms’ wage bills.
• Both failing banks hurt local incomes identically, isolating framing as the differentiator
• Both income shocks and elite scapegoating jointly drove Nazi radicalization
• Change in firm-level wage bill measures real economic exposure to bank failure
• Continuous exposure measures confirm Danat exposure boosted Nazi voting
• Danat exposure caused worsening unemployment only after the bank failed
• Danat exposure is measured as above-average exposure or presence of a branch
• Danat exposure is orthogonal to observable city characteristics except population.
• Danat exposure radicalized Nazi voting beyond the income losses it caused
• Danat exposure raised Nazi voting 1.7 to 2.5 percentage points across robustness checks.
• Danat-connected firms cut wage bills far more than matched city and industry peers
• Danat-connected firms’ balance sheets can be benchmarked against non-bank-connected peers.
• Danat-exposed cities did not differ systematically on observable characteristics.
• Danat-exposed cities had no pre-crisis unemployment divergence from other cities
• Danat-exposed cities showed no sharper pre-July-1931 unemployment downturn than other cities.
• Danat-exposed municipalities show a distinct Nazi vote-share shift, 1930 to 1932.
• Danat’s 1920s lending expansion did not select riskier borrowers
• Danat’s Jewish chairman being singled out explains its stronger radicalization effect over Dresdner’s.
• Danat’s post-1929 client selection does not explain the wage results.
• Danatbank exposure raised Nazi vote share across multiple federal elections.
• Danatbank-exposed cities saw a 2.9-percentage-point extra rise in Nazi vote share.
• Exposure to Danat predicted worsening unemployment only after the bank’s failure.
• Exposure to Danatbank failure raised Nazi vote shares by roughly 3 percentage points
• Exposure to Danatbank is coded as above-average exposure or a city branch.
• Falling local incomes from the banking crisis raised Nazi vote share substantially
• Financial distress and cultural anti-Semitism interacted to spread radicalization.
• Financial distress shifted Nazi votes beyond what income loss alone explains.
• General anti-finance resentment does not drive the Nazi vote effect.
• German banks’ nationwide lending allows cross-city identification of crisis effects.
• Historical anti-Semitism and pogrom exposure are measured by pre-1920 party entry and pogroms.
• Historical anti-Semitism is measured by pre-modern pogroms and anti-Semitic party vote share.
• Identical bank-failure income losses radicalized voters only where media singled out the bank
• Income effects rely on long differences plus a parallel-trends unemployment check.
• Income losses from bank collapse radicalize voters more than equivalent general income declines
• Local Jewish financial presence did not amplify the Danat effect on Nazi voting
• Media scapegoating, not economic loss alone, drove post-crisis Nazi radicalization
• Nazi gains in Danat-exposed cities emerged only after the bank’s collapse
• Nazi gains in exposed cities appeared only after the banking crisis, not before.
• Nazi vote share gained an extra 2.5 percentage points in Danat-exposed cities.
• Nazi vote-share paths in Danat towns are flat before July 1931.
• Newspapers named Danatbank’s Jewish-linked manager but not rivals’ equivalents.
• NSDAP vote-share gains are regressed on city-level Danatbank exposure with robust standard errors.
• Only exposure to Danatbank, not Dresdner, raised Nazi voting despite identical economic losses.
• Parallel trends and stable coefficients rule out omitted-variable bias in the design.
• Pre-1921 Danat exposure predicts identical effects to later connections.
• Press coverage of Danat and its Jewish CEO dwarfed coverage of other failing banks.
• Prior anti-Semitism roughly doubled the radicalizing effect of bank distress.
• Prior crisis research neglected electoral radicalization and cultural factors
• Rising global protectionism choked off German exports after 1929.
• The 1931 banking crisis transformed Germany’s recession into the Great Depression.
• The bank crisis radicalized voters beyond what income losses alone can explain
• The crisis could boost Nazis through economic misery or through Jewish scapegoating propaganda.
• The Danat collapse boosted Nazi votes beyond nationwide crisis effects
• The Danat-radicalization result survives many robustness checks.
• The Danatbank collapse introduced the banking crisis to the public.
• The study measures Danatbank exposure through firm connections and branch presence.
• The wage-bill firm subsample matches the full company universe on size
• Wage contraction persists comparing firms within the same city and industry.