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The 1934 essays are first-person explanations written by supporters of Adolf Hitler’s movement in answer to a contest, and roughly 30 of them came from women, according to a 2020 report. They give individual, personal reasons for joining the Nazi cause, including dissatisfaction with Weimar politics, nationalism and antisemitic commitments. They do not show what German women as a whole believed, and they say nothing direct about how women voted.
What the 1934 contest asked
In 1934, Theodore Abel, a sociologist at Columbia University, ran a contest that invited supporters of the Hitler movement to explain why they had joined or supported it. The result was a large body of self-written accounts. Because each entry is a person explaining their own commitment, the essays read as personal testimony rather than survey data. Abel later used the men’s entries as the basis of a book and set the women’s entries aside for separate study.
How many essays there were, and why the figures differ
The two most-cited totals come from different accounts and are not interchangeable.
| Account | Total entries | Entries by women | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Irish Times, 2018 | 683 responses | Not stated in this report | 581 are described as surviving |
| Scroll.in and The Conversation, 2020 | Nearly 650 submissions (approximate) | Roughly 30 (approximate) | Neither account explains the gap between the two totals |
Quote each figure with its outlet and year. Neither account gives an exact, reconciled count, so treat “roughly 30” as the best available estimate of women’s entries, which would be under five percent of the total by the 2020 account’s approximate figures.
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Where the essays are held and how to read them
The 2020 report places the women’s essays in the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford University. It says the essays were transcribed and translated and made available digitally. The reports do not give a catalog record, a collection identifier or a digital item address, and they do not state current access terms.
- Search the Hoover Institution Library & Archives catalog for Abel’s 1934 contest materials before planning a visit or citation.
- Confirm current digital access directly with the archive, because the reports cited here do not say whether the scans remain online or under what terms.
- Treat every quotation from the essays as a translation of the original German, not the author’s own wording.
What the women wrote about
The reported accounts describe several recurring themes. They are drawn from individual submissions, so each one describes a particular writer rather than all women.
Dissatisfaction with Weimar politics
Accounts report discontent with Weimar-era politics as a starting point for many writers’ commitment. The essays frame joining the movement as a response to the political order of the day, not as an abstract ideological decision.
Nationalism as duty
In one contributor’s account, quoted by Sarah R. Warren, Daniel Maier-Katkin and Nathan Stoltzfus in their 2020 article for Scroll.in and The Conversation, the writer, identified as Helene Radtke, describes a “divine duty to forget about all my household chores and to perform my service to my homeland.” The phrasing is a translation, and it shows how a domestic life could be recast as national service.
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Antisemitic nationalism
The accounts include expressions of nationalist commitment that were also antisemitic. Readers should not take this as a measure of how common such views were among German women at the time. It records what some contest entrants chose to write.
Faith in Hitler’s speeches
The Irish Times, in 2018, quoted Hilde Boehme-Stoltz, a 40-year-old respondent, who wrote: “Hitler’s speeches contained something that made be believe again.” The wording is reproduced as printed in that translation, including the phrase “made be believe.” The statement is personal and emotional, and it points to the appeal of the speeches for at least one writer.
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How the women’s essays relate to Abel’s 1938 book
Abel’s Why Hitler Came to Power (1938) was built on the men’s submissions. It is not a collection of the women’s essays, so it should not be cited as a source for them. The reports cited here do not establish the current edition or availability of the book, so check current editions through a library or a bookseller before relying on a particular printing.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why the essays cannot answer “Why did women vote for Hitler?”
Readers often arrive at these essays through the question of women’s voting, but the contest records are a different kind of evidence from election results.
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- The writers were self-selected. They answered a contest, so they were people willing to write about their support, not a random sample of women voters.
- The women’s entries are a small minority of the total, so they cannot serve as a proxy for women’s votes as a group.
- The essays record reasons given after the fact by people explaining their commitment. That is valuable testimony, but it does not reveal what any voter did in a polling booth.
Answering the voting question requires electoral data and other historical evidence, which these essays can complement but not replace.
Quick Recap
Citing the essays responsibly
- Name the outlet and year for every total, and do not merge the 683 and nearly 650 figures into one number.
- Present each quotation as an individual writer’s translated statement.
- Note that the contest prompt asked writers to justify their own support, which invites self-presentation.
- Pair the essays with election results and other scholarship when making claims about women as a whole.
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