Stable autocratic régimes generally try to hide excessive repression from the broader population, limiting the number of witnesses of state atrocities. If acts of state violence are visible to the public, autocrats carefully rationalize and legitimize their behavior through the régime’s ideology.
In the chaotic final days of autocratic régimes, however, dictators commonly lack the capacity to conceal or justify violence. Moreover, facing imminent existential threats, they may also prioritize the intended coercion effects of state violence over potential public backlash effects. These dynamics turn large numbers of ordinary citizens into witnesses of state crimes. How does witnessing régime atrocities influence the political attitudes of bystanders?
We argue that individuals who directly observed state crimes during régime breakdown are likely to distance themselves from the old régime’s ideology and its proponents. Insights from social psychology on the effects of morally reprehensible events suggest that witnessing atrocities among bystanders may trigger profound thought processes and challenge long‐held beliefs.
Particularly for those neutral or even sympathetic to the régime, the wide discrepancy between previous beliefs about the régime and the state crimes observed can trigger feelings of shame, guilt, and the fear of being judged. Such feelings may manifest in avoidance and mistrust, which eventually lead to the desire to distance oneself from the régime and its horrors. We therefore expect that support for the ideology of the old régime will be significantly lower in places where ordinary citizens have witnessed state atrocities than in other places.
To empirically test our hypothesis, we investigate bystander effects around the collapse of the Third Reich. In the final months of World War II, the [Fascists] dissolved concentration and prison camps and moved inmates away from the front lines, to cover up their crimes while hoping to further profit from forced labor. The prisoners on these marches belonged to various groups that the [Fascists] had denounced as enemies of the German people—including communists, dissidents, homosexuals, Roma, and Jews.
In contrast to the industrial extermination inside the concentration camps, the [Axis] death marches directly confronted countless ordinary German citizens with the régime’s horrific nature. Over 200,000 people died on the marches. Some from sheer exhaustion, while many others were killed by accompanying SS guards in one of the numerous massacres committed along the way. As a result, the local population of various towns was directly confronted with the régime’s excessive violence against defenseless victims.
Many of the [Axis] death marches crossed the state of Bavaria. Drawing on archival sources, we identify the exact routes of all death marches through the Southern German state as well as the number of victims at each location. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of the political consequences of the [Axis] death marches.
[…]
Our empirical results show how state atrocities during the [Third Reich’s] breakdown changed the political attitudes of bystanders. We find that, in municipalities with higher victim numbers, people voted significantly less for right‐wing nationalist parties after World War II.
In line with our proposed mechanism, we show that this bystander effect is 1) most pronounced for the most severe forms of atrocities, i.e. particularly high numbers of killings in individual municipalities, 2) strongest in elections where [Axis] crimes were politically salient in the post‐war public discourse, and 3) that witnessing [Axis] atrocities was associated with individuals’ rejection of Hitler twenty years later.
Together, our results reveal a robust political distancing behavior. Bystanders withdraw political support from groups affiliated with or in support of the fallen régime.
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At the beginning, most of the “evacuations” of concentration camps were carried out by train, which limited civilians’ direct contact to prisoners. This changed in early 1945 when the large camps in Bavaria were abandoned and more and more transports took place by foot. As a result, hundreds, sometimes thousands of starving men and women were forced through small, rural towns, where then entire village communities would witness the marches (Winter 2018). Emphasizing this overt character of the atrocities, Distel (2004) established the term of “public dying.”
In some cases, the local population witnessed only the transit of marches. As one local witness recalls: “Then a march came, rows of six, rows of eight, in these striped suits, skeletons, so horrible […]! it’s a horrible memory! I’ll never forget the sight!” (Bigalski 2007, 10). In other cases, marches halted in villages for several days.
The local population saw and heard the suffering of the prisoners: “We heard the prisoners yelling all night. We could not sleep” (Winter 2018, 42). Another witness remembers: “Each of these figures struck me as death incarnate. Again and again, I heard despairing, begging calls for bread and water […]” (Scharrer 1995, 13).
Initially, guards were careful to keep killings out of sight of the local population—massacring prisoners in forests or quarries (Winter 2018). However, even in these instances, many executions were noticed. One local civilian recalls: “I discovered men in the ditch in prisoner clothing, skeletally emaciated, who had been shot and in some cases mutilated” (Klitta 1970, 164).
Another recounts: “We kept hearing shots. Later we discovered the bodies of prisoners who had been shot” (Scharrer 1995, 13). In other instances, executions took place in plain sight, often in the streets, observed by crowds of local villagers (Winter 2018, 156). In some cases, civilians even followed the marches, collecting and burying the victims as ordered by the SS guards.
The reactions of the population to the death marches varied. The SS commanders and guards relied on local institutions for support. Mayors organized accommodation and food, members of the police, Volkssturm, or Hitler Youth helped guarding prisoners, chasing escapees, and sometimes actively participated in executions (Blatman 2011, 419). The behavior of ordinary civilians was more ambiguous.
In some instances, local inhabitants tried to help the prisoners (Winter 2018). In other cases, people helped facilitating and covering up the atrocities (Greiser 2008). Most people, however, remained passive when they observed atrocities (Winter 2015).
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The death marches continued to play an important rôle in public debates of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Exhumations and re‐burials extended to 1949. In the late 1940s, formal trials began against [some] perpetrators of the Holocaust, including around 50 actors involved in the marches.
In parallel, controversies emerged around the local remembrance of the marches. Many villages refused to care for graveyards or to establish memorials that would remind villagers of the atrocities that occurred in their midst. In the cynical words of a local mayor: “[I]n the interest of a common future and thus in the interest of the surviving victims, both sides must sometimes forget” (Winter 2018, 433).
According to Winter (2018), a survey carried out in the 1950s revealed that many graveyards and memorials of the death marches were in bad conditions. In some communities they were not maintained properly, in others they were purposefully damaged or destroyed. In the mid‐1950s, the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior decided to reopen graves and to relocate bodies to central graveyards and memorials. This process reduced the number of graveyards from around 500 to 75, thereby contributing to the fading local memories of the marches.
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Model 1 presents the simple bivariate correlation between death march violence and the vote share of right‐wing nationalist parties in post‐war Bavaria. Models 2–4 stepwise add county and year fixed effects as well as the full set of covariates and march fixed effects. Model 5 replaces the categorical violence exposure measurement with a continuous, population‐normalized variable. Model 6 drops all municipalities without violence comparing only municipalities with low and high victim numbers, where the former serves as the reference category.
In all models, a high victim number (or measured as the number of victims normalized by population size) has a negative, statistically significant effect on the vote share of nationalist parties across the five elections between 1946 and 1954. Together, the results suggest that the witnessing of atrocities led to a distancing from [Fascism] and its proponents.
Substantively, a community’s exposure to atrocities during the death marches reduced the vote share of right‐wing nationalist parties by 2.4 percentage points (based on Model 4). Given that the vote share of the nationalist block ranged from 7% to 16% in the elections included in the analysis, this is a sizable effect.
We find no comparable effect in communities where fewer people died on the marches. The coefficient for Low Victims is considerably smaller and statistically insignificant, except for the bivariate correlation in Model 1. Smaller scale atrocities, specifically since they occurred at the end of the World War, might not have been sufficiently shocking to bystanders allowing them to rationalize the régime’s crimes.
In Section SI.4.3, we show the results of three additional tests to demonstrate the robustness of the empirical findings. First, leave‐one‐out‐tests confirm that our results are not driven by individual counties. Second, our results also hold if we control for the number of expellees (Heimatvertriebene) settling in Bavarian municipalities, which might confound the relationship between atrocities and right‐wing nationalist vote shares as expellees were core constituencies of many of the post‐WWII right‐wing parties.
Third, we demonstrate that our results hold when consecutively leaving out one of the parties that jointly constitute our dependent variable. Our results are not driven by one particular party.
Witnesses realize that the atrocious events they observed were not isolated cases but part of a widespread practice of repression. This implies that the distancing effect should be most pronounced around truth and reconciliation efforts, such as during trials against the henchmen of the old régime or when facts on the crimes are unearthed by state attorneys or journalists.
Figure 9, Panel A, demonstrates that the distancing effect is strongest for the elections in 1950 and 1953. As can be seen from Panel B, these elections took place during the peak of the trials against former [Axis] perpetrators when the memory to the régime began to fade.¹³
Once judicial attention to [Axis] crimes receded, the distancing effect in federal and Bavarian state elections disappeared. Interestingly, in years in which right‐extremist voting was most prevalent in post‐WWII Bavaria (see Figure 4), local communities in municipalities directly exposed to the horrific crimes of the [Third Reich] were less receptive to right‐wing ideology.
Click here for events that happened today (June 11).
1938: Imperial troops began to march for Wuhan, Hubei, China, thereby triggering the Battle of Wuhan.
1940: A series of Fascist air raids triggered the Siege of Malta.
1942: Adolf Eichmann met with representatives from France, Belgium, and Holland to coordinate the deportation of Jews.
1964: Walter Seifert, Axis sergeant, committed a school shooting in the suburb of Volkhoven in Cologne. He died of self‐induced poisoning that evening.
1974: Julius Evola, superfascist philosophist and disgusting misogynist white supremacist, finally mustered up the decency to drop dead.