There is a burgeoning literature across the social sciences examining the legacy of violence on political behavior. Most studies are focused on the long-term effects of individual or family victimization. In this paper, we examine the legacy of violence that selectively targets community elites. Inspired by theoretical literature on identity formation and transmission we hypothesize that elites play an important independent role in shaping political values and beliefs. To empirically test this argument we study the aftereffects of Nazi-era repression of Catholic parish priests in Germany’s Bavaria. We construct a dataset of priest repression and, hypothesizing that especially activist priests were ones that had been targeted by state authorities, ask whether repression of activist priests in the 1930s is associated with higher vote for the Christian Social Union (CSU), Bavaria’s Catholic party, in post-war elections. We find a strong and persistent association between Nazi-era repression of Catholic clergy and post-war vote for the CSU. Nazi repression signaled the quality of activist priests who forged beliefs consistent with political Catholicism and also catalyzed priest activism by juxtaposing authoritarian Nazi ideology against the Catholic value-system. Our findings suggest that violence shapes political behavior via mechanisms other than only direct victimization.