Who Became a Nazi?[Qui est devenu un Nazi ?]

What led Germans to support and join the Nazi party? Did they benefit materially from their membership? And how did they justify their choices? Nazi ideology caused a world war and one of the deadliest genocides in history. About 8.5 million Germans were members of the Nazi party (NSDAP). However, what caused individual Germans to vote for and join the Nazi party in the 1930s is still not fully understood, in part because current research relies on either aggregate quantitative or small-scale qualitative data. Moreover, existing historical individual-level data does not allow researchers to follow individuals over time, is often unrepresentative, and overlooks important socio-demographic information. In this project, we propose to collect individual-level longitudinal data from the denazification questionnaires (Fragebogen) distributed in Germany's US occupation zones between 1945 and 1949. The Fragebogen contain detailed information about individuals' past membership in Nazi organizations, retrospective voting records, as well as academic and occupational histories, income, assets, and other socio-demographics. With the DFG-ANR grant, we digitized a population-representative sample of 12,500 questionnaires for the former American occupation zone, from the approximately 500,000 denazification files located at the National Archives (NARA) in College Park, Maryland. This data will allow us to answer which demographic groups voted for or joined the Nazi movement, and which life events (e.g., unemployment) led to these decisions. More broadly, it will allow us to leverage quantitative analysis techniques to draw representative inferences about the individual causes for vote choice and party membership. This project will contribute to our understanding of individual motivations to vote for and participate in populist radical right-wing movements. It will further add to political science, economic, and historical accounts of how the Weimar Republic slid back from democracy to dictatorship. Additionally, the data will be made available to scholars and citizens in a relational database through a web platform.