Nazi exploitation

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Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is considered the quintessential Nazisploitation film

Nazi exploitation (also Nazisploitation) is a subgenre of exploitation film and sexploitation film that involves Nazis committing sex crimes, often as camp or prison overseers during World War II. Most follow the women in prison formula, only relocated to a concentration camp, extermination camp, or Nazi brothel, and with an added emphasis on sadism, gore, and degradation. The most infamous and influential title (which set the standards of the genre) is a Canadian production, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974). Its surprise success and that of Salon Kitty and The Night Porter led European filmmakers, mostly in Italy, to produce similar films, with just over a dozen being released over the next few years. Globally exported to both cinema and VHS, the films were critically attacked and heavily censored, and the sub-genre all but vanished by the end of the seventies.

In Italy, these films are known as part of the "il sadiconazista" cycle, which were inspired by such

Last Orgy of the Third Reich, also known as L'ultima orgia del III Reich, Gestapo's Last Orgy and Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler), and Alain Payet (Train spécial pour SS
, also known as Special Train for Hitler and Helltrain), all from 1977.

History

Italian directors pioneered a blend of sexual imagery and Nazi themes. This can be found as early as 1945 in Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossellini. Another Rossellini film, Germany, Year Zero (1948), connects Nazism with pedophilia. The controversial art-house production The Damned (1969), directed by Luchino Visconti, about the rise and fall of a German industrialist family in the Third Reich, is also a major influence on the genre. The film features an orgy of homosexual SA-Men and depicts one of the main characters as a troubled multiple pervert posing in a transvestite outfit, molesting little girls, and committing incest with his mother.

Other early examples that combine sexual themes and Nazism include the West German productions

Des Teufels General (The Devil's General) (1955) by Helmut Käutner and Lebensborn (Ordered to Love) (1961). The French art-house film Vice and Virtue (1963), directed by Roger Vadim, is a stylized retelling of the Marquis de Sade's Justine
set during the Nazi occupation of France. This is a subtle and satirical rendering that only hints at the sexual depravity explicit in the original novel.

The critically acclaimed 1964 film The Pawnbroker includes a flashback scene showing nude women kept in a concentration camp brothel. The Italian

sexploitation film set in a Nazi camp was Love Camp 7 (1969). The film can also be viewed as a precursor to the similarly themed women in prison genre which was initially popularized by Roger Corman's The Big Doll House
(1971).

Love Camp 7 established the pattern for the many films that followed. The story resembles a "true adventure" pulp yarn from a

Joy Division
camp, where prisoners are kept as sex slaves for German officers. There are scenes of boot-licking humiliation, whipping, torture, lesbianism, and near-rape, culminating in a violent and bloody escape. The stock characters include a cruel and perverse commandant, a lesbian doctor, sadistic guards who freely abuse the prisoners, and a sympathetic German who tries to help the captive women.

The theme of Nazi sexual abuse continued in the sleazy, violent drive-in programmer The Cut-Throats (1969) and Torture Me, Kiss Me (1970), a low-budget, black-and-white B-movie about sadistic Nazi officers tormenting female civilians (including fetishistic flogging scenes) in occupied France.

The Ilsa influence

Producer

Auschwitz
. Some of the tests on hypothermia and pressure-chamber endurance were factual. Others were pure fantasy. For example, to prove her theory that women can endure more pain than men, Ilsa has a male and female prisoner flogged to death.

The character is also loosely based on "The Witch of Buchenwald", Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Koch was known for having perverse sexual dalliances with the prisoners and was rumored to have had lampshades made from human skin.

Ilsa includes the standard elements of sadism, degradation, whipping, sexual slavery, graphic torture, and a bloody finale with Ilsa shot dead and the camp set ablaze. The film was a surprise hit on the drive-in theater and grindhouse circuit. Ilsa was resurrected for three profitable sequels that ignored her Nazi origins and are closer to the women-in-prison genre. As a freelance mistress-for-hire, she became Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), commander of a 1953 gulag in Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977), and the warden of a corrupt Latin-American prison in Ilsa, the Wicked Warden (1977).

Nazi films from Italy and France

Meanwhile, European filmmakers were creating their own lurid Nazi movies with Ilsa-type villains. In 1977,

back-to-back
with Hitler's Last Train (also known as Special Train for the SS, Helltrain and Love Train for the SS, 1977). These films, plus Nathalie: Escape from Hell (1978), were produced by the French studio Eurociné.

One of the most notorious films in this genre is

La Bestia in Calore (also known as SS Hell Camp and The Beast In Heat), produced in Italy in 1977. German actress Macha Magall played Dr. Ellen Kratsch, another icy blond Nazi who is sexy, yet thoroughly evil. This film, with its extensive and graphic scenes of torture, brutality and rape, was initially banned in England. A milder, edited version was released in the U.S. as SS Experiment Camp 2. Magall was also in SS Girls
(1977), another story set in a Nazi brothel.

The Nazi exploitation subgenre presented an opportunity for Italian studios to make very low-cost horror pictures whilst tapping a previously ignored market; the exploitation war film. The Italian films are different from "Ilsa" in many ways, for instance, they focus on far more extreme aspects of human abuse.

The films of 1976 include: Sergio Garrone's

SS Special Section Women stars John Steiner as a sex-crazed SS Commandant whose love for a Jewish girl causes him to be castrated as punishment. Achtung! The Desert Tigers, from Luigi Batzella
, is interwoven with stock footage and scenes at a Nazi camp in the desert where tortures abound.

1977 saw the release of

Gestapo's Last Orgy (also known as Last Orgy of the Third Reich and Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler), which depicts a love affair between a camp Commandant and a prisoner. SS Camp 5: Women’s Hell is SS Experiment Camp's sister film featuring the same cast and crew. Red Nights of the Gestapo is a soft-core sex film with SS soldiers abusing women in a castle. Nazi Love Camp 27, starring Sirpa Lane as a Jewish girl forced into a brothel, is notable for its hardcore sex scenes and for being written by famed scripter Gianfranco Clerici
.

By the end of the decade the genre had run its course.

Nazi pornography

Adult films also exploited Nazi scenarios in a string of sadomasochistic "roughie" pornographic films in the 1970s and early 1980s. Examples include the

John Holmes and Seka. One of the last entries, Stalag 69 (1982), stars Angelique Pettyjohn
as an Ilsa-type SS officer. The story was largely a remake of Love Camp 7, bringing the cycle back to its origins. The genre remained mostly dormant for the next two decades. In 2006, Mood Pictures, a Hungarian producer of S&M films, released Gestapo, Gestapo 2, and Dr. Mengele in 2008, all of which are set in a Nazi prison camp and pay homage to Ilsa and the Italian exploitation films.

Present

In 2007, as part of

feature-length version of Werewolf Women of the SS.[2] Iron Sky and Nazis at the Center of the Earth
(both released in 2012) are in a similar vein.

Themes

Most of the Nazi exploitation films have

Nazi officers in SS uniforms, usually speaking with a fake German accent and irrelevant or mispronounced German words, who often use "experiments" as excuses to implement sadistic physical violence (perhaps inspired by the work of people like Josef Mengele, who performed medical experiments that often killed people). There are scenes of sexual conduct or, more routinely, exposed nude bodies of the victimised inmates. The level of violence depicted in these films may often reach the gore
level.

This genre mainly focused on female SS officers. It presented them as lusty as well as buxom women, such as Dyanne Thorne's Ilsa, who also sexually abused their male prisoners (mainly in non-statutory female-on-male rape fashion). As the setting is a Stalag (prisoner-of-war camp), not a concentration camp, the prisoners are mainly Allied soldiers, not Jewish civilians.

There are also many films that do not follow the conventions of Nazi exploitation, such as Bordel SS (1978) of

hardcore sex) and Salon Kitty (1976) of Tinto Brass. These films are not usually considered as "prototypical" Nazi exploitation films and qualify more for the "art house" subgenre. However, because of the vague term, even the film Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) (1974) by Liliana Cavani
that (in the opinion of many) lacks the exploitation motive, may be deemed one such film.

Laura Frost's book Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (2002) (

ISBN 0801487641) says that the genre is part of a problematic attempt to link political deviance (i.e. fascism, militarism, genocide) with sexual deviance (i.e. sadomasochism, homosexuality, transvestism, pedophilia
).

Legal status in Britain

Sometime in the early 1980s, Nazi exploitation films made their way onto the

BBFC
classifications. The following Nazi exploitation films were taken off the shelves:

Of the above films, only SS Experiment Camp is now available in the

U.K.

Israeli literature

Eichmann trial. Sales of this pornographic literature broke all records in Israel as hundreds of thousands of copies were sold at kiosks.[3]
They were inspired by
Auschwitz camp, the factuality of which is disputed.[3]

See also

References

  1. ^ Hughes, Howard Cinema Italiano I. B. Tauris; First Edition (August 30, 2011)
  2. MySpace
    . Retrieved 2007-12-21.
  3. ^ a b Kershner, Isabel (September 6, 2007). "Israel's Unexpected Spinoff From a Holocaust Trial". New York Times. Retrieved February 20, 2011.

Further reading

External links
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