One of my (numerous) pet peeves is the notion of the "women's vote" or "women's issues." In some quarters you get the impression that women are inherently virtous and wise, and that merely by electing more women to public office, we'd make life better and more peaceful. Via Rauschning, I offer a modest counter-example:
Hitler was discovered by women, society ladies who pushed him forward, when still a young man, after the Great War. It was the wives of some great industrialists, before their husbands, who gave him financial support, surreptitiously supplying him with money.
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Hitler knew very well what he was about. He "cultivated" these connections as carefully and calculatingly as any adventurer in pursuit of a rich wife. He gave his Gauleiter cynically concrete instructions, urging them to devote particular attention to propaganda among women. In the struggle for power it was the women's vote that brought Hitler to triumph.
Don't blame the messenger, ladies. Incidentally, our copy of Voice of Destruction bears the following inscription from August 10, 1940 --66 years ago precisely:
Lots of love to my darling baby --Annette
A romantic inscription on a book about Hitler? How odd.
