Obama, Hitler and Women's Votes

By Eric Ross, Ph.D.

Disclaimer: except for the specific issues discussed in this article, it does not criticize or endorse any of the policies of the two major political camps in the US. The views expressed are strictly those held by the author.
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In 2008, Obama was voted into the Office of the President of the United States. Women overall voted overwhelmingly for Obama —  56 percent for, and 43 percent against him; men's votes were split almost equally – 49 percent for, and 48 percent against him. Unmarried women voted for Obama by a massive 70 to 29 percent. With women in the US being the majority – 53 percent of the 2008 national electorate, one can safely say that Obama rode into power on the backs of American women voters.    

There is an interesting historical parallel here, which may appear at first inappropriate: in 1932, Adolf Hitler, the head of the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany (NSDAP),  rode to power thanks  to German women overwhelmingly voting for Hitler and the NSDAP ticket. 

One Nation Under Socialism, by Jon
McNaughton, a well-known artist from Utah

As a pragmatist favoring the interests of the community, job creation and the growth of the middle class, I do not subscribe to the Republican dogmatic talking points any more than to dogmatic Democrat talking points,  and would never draw a “controversial” parallel like this…  if it weren’t for Obama’s oratory, which echoes the familiar Nazi-styled, sinister and divisive demagogy. When it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it just ain't a chicken.

Before we draw such a “shocking” parallel with the notorious Leader of the Nazi Germany, it is inappropriate to equate a US politician to Hitler in the scale and scope of evil. After all, Hitler lead the German youth to mass-murder millions of people all over Europe; his dictatorial rule resulted in the destruction of German cities, and in death and suffering for millions of German people.  It is wrong to trivialize the horrors of Nazism and WW-2 by comparing people with whom we disagree, political figures whom we dislike for some reason, to Hitler, when such comparison simply serves to went and denigrate. Yet, when it comes to demagogy, Obama apparently comes from the same school of thought as the notorious Nazi leader, and has mastered and perfected the Führer's oratory, adapting it to today. His strife to polarize America for the benefit of his ill-conceived election strategies is as demagogic as they come. The most recent one was to bait the Republican frugality, abhorrence of fraud and waste, and then to sell to the American people the Republican natural opposition to fraud as a “War on Women”. 

It is a shame that he dishonors the office of the President by polarizing America as part of  his ill-conceived elections strategy, by creating racial strife leading to murders, by  "leadership," which resorts to political demagogy in discussing important national issues. Thus a spotlight on such strong parallels is only fair, appropriate and timely. The Democrat-devised strategy of scaring women voters to vote Democrat with the alleged GOP's “war on women” is actually a “straw woman” argument. The concept of a "straw woman" argument has been around for quite a while, perfected by Hitler, and now employed by Obama, without much finesse. It is making an argument by using a gross misrepresentation of your opponent’s position. Then, the demagogue can easily defeat the "straw woman"  –  the fragrantly misrepresented position of his political rival, and his political rival along with it.

Hitler, prior to coming to power had not killed anyone. He was a sociopath with a gift for gab, seeking to rise into the status of God by presenting himself as a messianic figure, but few could see that he was insane. Hitler was seen as a gifted, energetic leader of the People and was hailed as the savior of Germany, who re-energized the country. He was admired by Germans and had very influential and very rich sympathizers throughout the world.  Hitler considered Henry Ford his personal friend. Indeed Ford financed NSDAP. Documents discovered in German and American archives after Hitler's defeat in 1945, show that in certain instances, American managers of both Ford and GM plants in Germany went along with the Nazi directives to convert the plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home. Ford and GM combined were producing over 70 percent of the German cars and military trucks at the beginning of the War in 1939. 

Adolf Hitler Giving Speech

Hitler was also popular among the masses of people – the working class and particularly…  among women. They shed tears when he spoke, they fainted, they devoted poems and songs to him, they screamed louder than American girls at mass rock concerts. He was not a politician, a celebrity, but a "messiah". In the eyes of many German citizens, he restored Germany’s national pride. He projected himself as their savior. He ran on the platform of change and hope. Yes, change! 
  
Despite a common misconception that it was “authoritarian men” who brought National Socialist Hitler to power, his rise to power was fully supported by the majority of German women, and only a minority of men. In contrast, his counterpart Stalin, a Bolshevik International Socialist leader of the Soviet Union was shy of his inability to speak proper Russian, and came to power as an intriguing bureaucrat, patiently pitting his more talented political foes against one another. Stalin physically eliminated other contenders to his absolute power within the Bolshevik government, undemocratic to begin with, based on the ideology of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Unlike Stalin, Hitler rose to power through democratic elections, with women’s overwhelming support, once again proving that there is but a small step from Democracy to Fascism. “The NSDAP … was much more attractive to female voters than the German Left in general, and the KPD in particular”.  

Hitler himself thought that key to his success as an orator was in his ability to reduce his audience, both male and female, to "a condition of femininity", in which he could play on their darkest emotions and abandon any attempt to appeal to their reason. In fact, he thought that the masses were already “feminine”. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler postulated that “the masses” of voters are female in nature:

“a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (...) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning.” 

From the vast mass of verbiage in Mein Kampf, the passages on propaganda and oratory are virtually the only ones, which the politicians of today find worth noting. More over, Hitler appealed, first and foremost to the least rational people in his voter base:

Joe "The Plagiarizer" Biden,
U.S. VP and a consummate liar

"All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (...) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses."

Hitler kept his people deliberately uninformed and liked it that way:

"The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another."  (all quotations above are from Chapter V of Hitler's Mein Kampf.)

 One of the most successful demagogic orators of all time, Hitler’s words on public speaking didn’t fall deaf on Obama’s ears. Both appealed first and foremost to women, and to those voters limited in their capacity to think rationally, those predisposed to “straw woman” arguments, to demagoguery, which plays on their emotions of greed, fear, hatred and mistrust. 
As social fads in history go, pre-WW-2 German women liked or at least did not mind the idea of being pampered by the Nazi hierarchy. In a Nazi state, a German woman would be a reward, the Blau Blume (a Blue Flower, in German Romantic literature). A German woman would be responsible for nothing, but in charge of her household, while her husband is conquering for her the new lands, Lebensraum (killing off their native populations.)  Hitler was the top dog in the Nazi male-supremacist hierarchy, and there is hardly any doubt that the majority of German women of all ages were captivated by his persona. “His animal magnetism” and “messianic” appearance, were canonized and made iconoclastic by his personal film director, the Nazi beauty-and-the-brain, the movie producer Leni Riefenstahl. At mass rallies, women reacted to his presence with complete, utter hysteria, perhaps feeling quite justified in their public display of orgasmic ecstasy “expected of them” due to the pop-culture mythology of women being “emotional creatures.” 

For women, Hitler exuded magnetism, which today is comparable only to the mass appeal of a rock star, usually affecting the female part of the audience much more than the male. The adulation of Adolf Hitler was no less electrified, than the teleprompter-guided, demagoguery-infused oratorical events by Barack Hussein Obama.  Hitler was it. A woman whose hand he touched at a political rally, did not wash her hand for many days, so she could kiss it, thus touching her Furher. Doris K., then 14, wrote in her diary, “Everybody screamed like crazy. Mass suggestiveness! The scream became a roar . . . Especially the women were fascinated. Their emotions were strongly touched and so were, without a doubt, unfulfilled sexual wishes and desires.”  

Electoral support for the NSDAP was spread unevenly across the age range, similarly to how enthusiastically younger women voted for Obama. The Nazi Party has often been portrayed as dynamic and youthful, while contrasted with the alleged sclerosis and conservatism of the traditional Right, the 60-year-old geezers who saw Hitler as a danger to democracy and the nation. The youthful, energetic image of the NSDAP was not without a reason:  NSDAP membership was younger than that of other parties; the average age of those joining between 1925 and 1932 was around twenty-nine. It rose to an average of thirty-two in 1932. As with Obama, younger women, factory workers, university students and clerical personnel flocked to NSDAP. 

The youth, the easiest to brainwash voters block

Of the few attempts to explain why German women voted for Hitler in 1932-33, the most popular, the most widely repeated, and generally accepted to this day was that, which explained Hitler’s popularity with women in terms of their supposed inherent irrationality.

Contemporary analysts claimed that women were letting their hearts rule over their heads, “in a female way”. Arguably it was a sexist point of view, as men are probably affected by emotion no less than women.  The first major commentator to advance such "Freudian analysis" was the disillusioned Nazi provincial leader, Hermann Rauschning, who fled to France.  He remarked on the emotional affect which Hitler had on women, having witnessed from an angle close to the Furher’s podium the rapturously rolling, moist, veiled eyes of the females in the audience, which in his mind left no doubt as to the sexual character of their enthusiasm. Other commentators adhered to similar views. Thus, Richard Grunberger wrote: 

“Hitler's monkish persona… engendered a great deal of sexual hysteria among women . . . not least among spinsters, who transmuted their repressed yearnings into lachrymose adoration.”  

According to some contemporary writers, the sexual sublimation, which served as the driving-force of popular, mostly female enthusiasm for Hitler, was not merely one-sided: Hitler, too – they suggested – found an outlet for his frustrated sexuality, a compensation for his lack of a “normal sexual relationship”, in whipping up hysteria of adulation among his female listeners. Thus, Nazi rallies became a “collective debauch”, resembling “the public sexual acts of primitive tribes.” 

We'll just tell the dumb broads that Republicans declared a
War on Women, and that we are here to "protect and defend."

Regardless of whether such "keen observations" by contemporary commentators of 1940's hold any value today, Hitler the politician “systematically adapted himself to the taste of women”, as there was very considerable political capital to be gained. According to his biographers, Hitler exploited and manipulated “specific female qualities, such as capacity for self-surrender or demand for authority and order", to the advantage of his party and himself. 


Devised in 2012, the Democrat political stratagem to corral American women voters into the Democrat barn by alleging Republican "War on Women" is not only “a straw woman” argument denying American women their intelligence, it is a hardly veiled “War on Truth” waged by President Obama and his advisers. As for Obama's "sex appeal" to women, sooner or later, the "beauty" is what comes from within. His divisive racial, gender and class demagoguery is ugly as mortal sin. 

Eight years Later

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Sources:

1. Behind Obama's Victory: Women Open Up a Record Marriage Gap. By KENT GARBER November 5, 2008; US News & World Report; http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2008/11/05/behind-obamas-victory-women-open-up-a-record-marriage-gap
2. Article by Prof. Dick Geary, "Who voted for the Nazis? (electoral history of the National Socialist German Workers Party)". This article first appeared in History Today, October 1998. Dick Geary is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham and the author of Hitler and Nazism (Routledge 1993);
3. Doris K. in Lothar Steinbach, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Glaube. Ehemalige Nationalsozialisten und
Zeitzeugen berichten über ihr Leben im Dritten Reich (Berlin, 1983),  85–86.
4. Kater, Das “Ahnenerbe” der SS; Sautter, 222.
 Erna Benze, “Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft und das Deutsche Frauenwerk,” in Benze and Gräfer, 301.
5. Melita Maschmann, Fazit: Keine Rechtfertigung, 5th ed. (Stuttgart, 1964)
6. Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration. By Michael Dobbs, Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 30, 1998; Page A01.

Copyright (c) Eric Ross, Ph.D. 2012