The [NSDAP] initially had little success, receiving only 2.8% of the vote in 1928. Thereafter, the [German Fascists] changed their tune. They no longer publicly advocated a violent revolution and instead emphasized legal means of gaining government control. This made the party more acceptable to middle‐ and upper‐class voters (Evans, 2004), and Hitler formed links with businessmen (Ferguson and Voth, 2008).

The party also played a prominent rôle in a referendum against the rescheduling of Germany’s reparations obligations (“Young Plan”, Hett (2018)). Shortly thereafter, the [German Fascists] scored their biggest success yet, winning 18.3% of the vote in the September 1930 election.

As aggregate GDP in Germany plunged by 40% and unemployment surged, the [Fascists] went from capturing 18.3% of the popular vote in 1930 to 43.9% in March 1933. The party’s biggest ballot box breakthrough came in July 1932 (the first national parliamentary elections held after the banking crisis). The [NSDAP] became the largest party in parliament, receiving 13.7 million votes (37.4%), more than the Social Democrats and Communists combined. Hitler demanded to be named chancellor — but was rebuffed by President Paul von Hindenburg.

By November 1932, in another round of federal parliamentary elections, electoral support for the party began to slip. However, barely a month later von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor. Within two months, the [Fascists] had staged elections and taken over effective power in the entire country (Turner, 2003). […]

In 1925, Hitler wrote a book about his political vision, entitled Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”). In it, Anti‐Semitism was combined with anti‐finance rhetoric. Germany losing World War I, the reparations settlement as part of the Versailles treaty, and the hyperinflation — all stemmed in Hitler’s mind from a vast Jewish conspiracy. His beliefs about Jewish finance are well‐summarized in his contention that “Jewish finance desires […] not only the economic smashing of Germany but also its complete political enslavement” (p. 905).¹²

[Fascist] propaganda exploited the 1931 banking crisis, which provided seemingly incontrovertible proof for their misguided theories of Jewish domination and destruction. The party blamed Jews for Germany’s slump.

Immediately after the banking crisis erupted, Josef Goebbels instructed party propagandists to exploit the financial crisis and emphasize that it demonstrated the structural flaws of [the] Weimar [Republic] and society. The substantial over‐representation of Jews in high finance (and top management in general) likely facilitated this message (Mosse, 1987; D’Acunto et al., 2019).

By mid‐1932, when the party was about to become the single largest party in German parliament, its central mouthpiece, the Völkischer Beobachter, argued that the banking crisis had lad to its breakthrough in terms of middle class support:

the banking crisis led, among the bourgeoisie, to “an ever‐increasing convergence towards national socialist language and national socialist thought. The turning point came approximately during the summer crisis of 1931 […] the conflict between Germany’s vital needs and those of the global economic and financial policy can no longer be obscured” (VB 31.5.1932).

In retrospect, the [Fascist] press was thus convinced that the financial crisis in the summer of 1931 had been a turning point for the “movement”.

A key target of [Fascist] propaganda was Danatbank’s prominent Jewish manager Jakob Goldschmidt, targeted as a scapegoat for Germany’s banking crisis. [Fascist] newspapers featured highly anti‐Semitic Der Stürmer cartoons, showing a gigantic, obese Jewish banker hanging a starving German businessman, or a rotten apple with a human‐faced worm inside, against a background of the names of Jews associated with scandals, including Goldschmidt’s.

While the [Fascist] press was banned for much of the crisis period, some regional newspapers affiliated with the [NSDAP] continued to publish.

Representative for much of their sentiment is the Bielefelder Beobachter, which lays the main blame for the “catastrophe” of the banking crisis at the feet of the “great banker” Jakob Goldschmidt; the Koblenzer Nationalblatt claims that Goldschmidt, through Danat’s bankruptcy, personally benefitted from Germany’s incredible economic suffering, turning in “another fat Jewish bankruptcy”. Goldschmidt is frequently insulted as a “bank Jew” or “financial Jew”, and as a reckless gambler (“Hassadeur”).

While the papers mention alleged victims of Danat — small private banks that quit the business — they did not single out another bank like Dresdner or Deutsche, nor any of their board members.¹³ Not only the [Fascist] press, but also mainstream newspapers focused on Goldschmidt during the crisis, and to a much greater extent than on managers of the other great banks (Figure 1, panel B).

[…]

Figure 2 summarizes our main finding. It plots the distributions of the change in vote shares for the [NSDAP] between September 1930 and July 1932 — the last election before the banking crisis, and the first one after it. The [NSDAP] gained votes everywhere, but the distribution is sharply shifted to the right for Danat‐exposed cities, where votes for the NSDAP increased by an additional 2.5 p.p. (equal to 15% of the mean vote change and 0.37 sd).

[…]

Column (1) in Table 4, panel A indicates that in municipalities with a Danat presence incomes fell by 6.5% more than in those that did not have one. When we control for province fixed effects, the effect remains significant at the 5% level and increases in magnitude to 7.8% (column 2). This is a dramatic difference: the Danat‐induced drop in incomes represents 54% of the mean income decline of 14.4% over the period 1928 to 1934, or 0.44 sd.²⁰

Income declines went hand‐in‐hand with greater electoral support for the [NSDAP]. Columns (3)–(6) suggest that, for every standard deviation drop in income, [Fascist] voting surged by an extra 0.7 p.p. from 1930–July 1932 (column 3), by 0.9 p.p. for 1930–November 1932 (column 4), and by 1 p.p. for 1930–March 1933 (column 5). Using the average change across all elections provides similar results in column (6).

The majority of papers on the rise of the [NSDAP] rely on unemployment data and has found little evidence of immiserization as a major driving force. Based on new data, we provide the first evidence that falling incomes increased support for [Fascism].

The banking crisis was not the only reason why incomes decreased during the Great Depression. Lower incomes in general could produce radical voting. In panel B we first show that income declines, predicted by exposure to Danat, are associated with markedly more [Fascist] voting in July 1932 (column 1).

Second, we include both predicted income and actual income changes in our voting regression in column (2). Predicted income has a much greater effect on voting, despite the fact that income and predicted income have a similar mean and dispersion. While income declines led to radical voting, those induced by financial collapse had a much more pronounced effect.

(Emphasis added.)