Two Germanys? Investigating the Religious and Social Base of the 1930 Nazi Electorate

Abstract

By applying data from the 1930 Reichstag election we test whether the German National Socialist Worker's Party (NSDAP) was a workers, bourgeois, or a catch-all party. We argue that the degree to which the different groups in society voted NSDAP is dependent on the proportion of Protestants and Catholics in their respective Kreis. We build on two important works on the Nazi electorate, Jürgen Falter's Hitlers Wähler (1991) and King et al. (2008). We specifically make one important change to Falter and King et al.'s models whereby we include new social groups in our study of the interaction between religious affiliation and social groups as an explanation of the Nazi vote. Similar arguments have been made by other historians, yet this has not been tested on data for the whole of Germany until Falter's work in 1991. We find significant explanatory power in the interaction between religion and social groups on the propensity to vote for the Nazi party.