Regime Loyalty in Nazi Germany during WWII

Measuring regime support in closed autocracies is notoriously 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. Our descriptive findings nuance the prevailing historical consensus: we find that regime loyalty began to erode immediately following the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, not after the Battle of Stalingrad. By contrast, militaristic rhetoric emphasizing soldiers' heroism persisted at high levels throughout the war.