From the History Channel
At least in the early 1930s women were more likely to vote for the Nazis than for the Left, and on the Left the KPD appears to have been much less attractive to women than to men…. In July 1932 a higher proportion of women than men voted Nazi….
That’s a weird construction, given that 1933 was the last election and practically no one of either sex was voting for the National Socialists prior to 1930. And, as often happens with pop history, the writer fails to realize that the National Socialists were by almost every measure a left-wing party. Another article adds:
“Brustein responds that the Nazis did not emphasize their anti-Semitism during their rise in the 1920s and ’30s. “Anti-Semitism was there, but most parties played the anti-Semitic card,” he says. And how can anti-Semitism explain the fact that single women were more likely to join than married women?“
I don’t think it needs to. More likely, the appeal of the National Socialists was because its electoral program was very similar to the platform of the modern Democratic Party, which is obviously much more appealing to women than to men. I’d very much like to find the breakdown by gender of the 1932 and 1933 German elections, but I haven’t found it yet. If anyone does, please send it to me.
Finally, there is this: “Similarly there are many facts identifying females as accomplices of the National Socialistic regime, one of them being that one third of the women in Germany in fact did vote for Hitler and the NSDAP.” It’s not clear what that means since the National Socialists won 43.9 percent of the vote, so either a lot more men voted for the NSDAP in 1933 than in 1932, or the writer is speaking literally about the number of women voting, not the percentage of the voting electorate. I may have some hard totals on the election, so I’ll see if I can work out the percentages this would indicate later.
The title of this post is somewhat inaccurate, by the way, since the National Socialists always denied that they were Fascists but were admirably forthright about their socialism. Remember, the Communist Party was vehemently opposed to the Socialist Party too, that did not make either of them conservative capitalists.
UPDATE – I’m going to have to find the actual votes broken down by gender, because unless my math is wrong or the German electorate behaved very, very differently than the USA, (where 74 percent of the populace is eligible to vote and only 38.7 percent actually do) that last writer’s figure of one third – even reduced by the ineligible and eligible non-voters – would indicate that 8 million German women provided 76 percent of the National Socialist vote in 1933.