A Note on Hitler and Women, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I was reading in The Nation, 1933¹, and stumbled upon the article "German Culture in Exile", which was poking through the brittle blocks of Hitler's newly National Socialistically crumbling society.  What caught my eye in particular was this note about the role of women, which although I knew about this still put it all in a different light: 

This was all quite different from the experience  of women in the Weimar society (1919-1933) where the new democratic experience resulted in numerous advances not the least of which was the right to vote.  Nazis in--women, out.  Except, really, for the home and hearth and reproductive part, substantially different from women comprising 35% of the workforce in 1925.   And just for the serendipitous aspect of it I checked out Mein Kampf on the Internet Archive: I did a text search and found only 22 mentions of "women" and eight for "woman"; on the other hand "men" occurs 2839 times, and "man" 2773.  Does this mean something?--well, yes.  But the question about what it means is quite something else, the answer to which I am not privy. But it does seem to support something obvious in and of itself.  

In the not-quite two dozen mentions of "women" in that horrible book, Hitler uses two of them to discuss what he saw as the miserable nature of women writing letters to their men at the Front during WWI: 

"In this direction the enemy propaganda began to achieve undoubted
success from 1916 onwards."

"In a similar way letters coming directly from home had long since been
exercising their effect. There was now no further necessity for the
enemy to broadcast such letters in leaflet form. And also against this
influence from home nothing was done except a few supremely stupid
'warnings' uttered by the executive government. The whole front was
drenched in this poison which thoughtless women at home sent out,
without suspecting for a moment that the enemy's chances of final
victory were thus strengthened or that the sufferings of their own men
at the front were thus being prolonged and rendered more severe. These
stupid letters written by German women eventually cost the lives of
hundreds of thousands of our men..."  
                                                         --Mein Kampf, 1941 edition, NY, Reynal Publishing

Well. 

Notes:
1. The Nation, volume 136, no. 3543, May 31, 1933, p 608.