We examine the effect of Protestant-Catholic antagonism on political fragmentation in Weimar Germany and the Nazi electoral breakthrough in 1932. Our conceptual framework shows how confessional politics—with a strong vote norm for the Catholic Center Party among Catholics and a fragmented center-right among Protestants—increased political fragmentation in the Weimar Republic and partially immunized Catholics from voting for the Nazi party than Protestants. We test and confirm these predictions in novel parish-level data from the German Southwest, using the historical religious divide between neighboring parishes for identification. Finally, we examine whether the formation of the pan-denominational Christian Democratic Union was able to overcome the confessional divide in voting after the Second World War.

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