The men’s essays formed the basis for his book, “ Why Hitler Came To Power,” published in 1938, which remains an important source in the global discourse about the Nazi rise to power. Of nearly 650 essays, roughly 30 were written by women, and Abel set them aside, explaining in a footnote that he intended to examine them separately. These essays were originally collected by an assistant professor at Columbia University, Theodore Abel, who organized an essay contest with generous prizes with the cooperation of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. However, a miserable, frail little woman from the so-called ‘weaker sex’ raised her hand and forcefully rejected the Jew’s brazen remarks he had in the meantime allegedly disappeared to attend another meeting.” Not one man made a sound, they stayed dead quiet. "Dear readers, do not think that the heavily represented stronger sex jumped up and told this Jew where to go. “I attended the meetings of all … parties, from the communists to the nationalists at one of the democratic meetings in Friedenau, where the former Colonial Minister, a Jew by the name of Dernburg, was speaking, I experienced the following: this Jew had the audacity to say, among other things: ‘What are the Germans actually capable of maybe breeding rabbits.’ One calls women’s voting rights “a disadvantage for Germany,” while another describes the political climate as “haywire,” and “everyone was everyone’s enemy.” Margarethe Schrimpff, a 54-year-old woman living just outside of Berlin, describes her experience: Most of the essay writers express distaste with some aspect of the political system. The essays unearthed at the Hoover Institution give an insight as to why some of them did.ĭissatisfaction with the attitudes of the Weimar era, the period between the end of World War I and Hitler’s rise to power, is clear in the women’s writing. By 1933, women, of whom there were millions more than men – Berlin had 1,116 women for every 1,000 men – voted in roughly the same percentages as men for Hitler and National Socialist candidates. Many German women became teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists and novelists. Top-quality high schools for girls had existed since the 1870s, and German universities were opened to women at the beginning of the 20th century. The German women’s movement had been among the most powerful and significant in the world for half a century before the Nazis came to power in 1933. They also point to the extent to which women’s attitudes on feminism differed after the Great War – a time when women were making gains in independence, education, economic opportunity and sexual freedom. Not all CabaretĪs scholars of Holocaust studies, crimes against humanity and political behavior, we believe the accounts of these women give an insight into the role of women in the rise of the Nazi party. They have since been made available digitally, but have not received widespread attention. These essays were only unearthed three years ago when three Florida State University professors arranged to have them transcribed and translated.
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It has left us with a half-formed understanding of the rise of the Nazi movement, one that is almost exclusively focused on male party members.Īnd yet more than 30 essays on the subject “Why I became a Nazi” written by German women in 1934 have been lying fallow in the archives of the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto for decades.
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What little data we do have on ordinary Nazi women has been largely underused, forgotten or ignored. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in the 1930s came on the back of votes from millions of ordinary Germans – both men and women.īut aside from a few high-profile figures, such as concentration camp guard Irma Grese and “concentration camp murderess” Ilse Koch, little is known about the everyday women who embraced the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, known more commonly as the Nazi Party.