Regime Loyalty during Wartime: Evidence from Nazi Germany
Year: 2025

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 La