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Nazi exploitation (alsoNazisploitation) is a subgenre ofexploitation film andsexploitation film that involvesNazis committing sex crimes, often as camp or prison overseers duringWorld War II. Most follow thewomen in prison formula, only relocated to a concentration camp, extermination camp, or Nazibrothel, and with an added emphasis onsadism, 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 ofSalon Kitty andThe Night Porter led European filmmakers, mostly inItaly, 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 suchart-house films asPier Paolo Pasolini'sSalò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), andTinto Brass'sSalon Kitty (1976).[1] Prominent directors of the genre includePaolo Solvay (La Bestia in Calore, also known asThe Beast in Heat andSS Hell Camp),Cesare Canevari (Last Orgy of the Third Reich, also known asL'ultima orgia del III Reich,Gestapo's Last Orgy andCaligula Reincarnated as Hitler), andAlain Payet (Train spécial pour SS, also known asSpecial Train for Hitler andHelltrain), all from 1977.
Italian directors pioneered a blend of sexual imagery and Nazi themes. This can be found as early as 1945 inRome, Open City byRoberto Rossellini. Another Rossellini film,Germany, Year Zero (1948), connects Nazism withpedophilia. The controversial art-house productionThe Damned (1969), directed byLuchino 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 productionsDes Teufels General (The Devil's General) (1955) byHelmut Käutner andLebensborn (Ordered to Love) (1961). The French art-house filmVice and Virtue (1963), directed byRoger Vadim, is a stylized retelling of theMarquis de Sade'sJustine 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 filmThe Pawnbroker includes aflashbackscene showing nude women kept in a concentration camp brothel. The ItalianGiallo thrillerIn the Folds of the Flesh (also known asNelle pieghe della carne, 1970) has a similar flashback sequence with unrealistically attractive nude women being herded into a Nazigas chamber. However, the earliest full-blownsexploitation film set in a Nazi camp wasLove Camp 7 (1969). The film can also be viewed as a precursor to the similarly themedwomen in prison genre which was initially popularized byRoger Corman'sThe 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 amen's adventure magazine of the period (Man's Story, Men Today, World of Men,Man's Epic, et al.). In order to rescue a Jewish scientist, two female agents infiltrate a NaziJoy 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 programmerThe Cut-Throats (1969) andTorture 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.
ProducerDavid F. Friedman had a small acting role inLove Camp 7. He went on to produceIlsa, She Wolf of the SS in 1974.Ilsa was unique in that the camp commandant was a sexy, sex-crazed woman played by the busty and frequently nudeDyanne Thorne. Between sex scenes, Ilsa subjects her male and female inmates to horrific scientific tests, much likeJosef Mengele's notoriousNazi human experimentation atAuschwitz. 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 hadlampshades 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 andgrindhouse 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 becameIlsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), commander of a 1953 gulag inIlsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977), and the warden of a corrupt Latin-American prison inIlsa, the Wicked Warden (1977).
Meanwhile, European filmmakers were creating their own lurid Nazi movies with Ilsa-type villains. In 1977,Malisa Longo starred inHelga, She Wolf of Stilberg as a black-booted, leather-clad, sexually sadistic commander of a prison camp for women. That year, Longo also starred in theSalon Kitty-inspiredFräulein Devil (also known asElsa: Fraulein SS) as Elsa, a former hooker with a penchant for S&M, who manages a Nazi brothel train. This was filmedback-to-back withHitler's Last Train (also known asSpecial Train for the SS,Helltrain andLove Train for the SS, 1977). These films, plusNathalie: Escape from Hell (1978), were produced by the French studio Eurociné.
One of the most notorious films in this genre isLa Bestia in Calore (also known asSS Hell Camp andThe 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. asSS Experiment Camp 2. Magall was also inSS 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'sSS Experiment Camp (also known asSS Experiment Love Camp), depicting soft-core sex scenes and the castration of an SS officer.SS Hell Camp, Luigi Batzella's second Nazi film, featured a sexually-crazed mutant created by an Ilsa-like Nazi scientist.SS Girls, directed byBruno Mattei, is a blatant copy ofSalon Kitty. Mattei also madeWomen's Camp 119 starringLorraine De Selle. This film depicts horrific scientific experiments performed on prisoners based on actual documents.SS Special Section Women starsJohn Steiner as a sex-crazed SS Commandant whose love for a Jewish girl causes him to be castrated as punishment.Achtung! The Desert Tigers, fromLuigi Batzella, is interwoven with stock footage and scenes at a Nazi camp in the desert where tortures abound.
1977 saw the release ofGestapo's Last Orgy (also known asLast Orgy of the Third Reich andCaligula Reincarnated as Hitler), which depicts a love affair between a camp Commandant and a prisoner.SS Camp 5: Women’s Hell isSS 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, starringSirpa Lane as a Jewish girl forced into a brothel, is notable for its hardcore sex scenes and for being written by famed scripterGianfranco Clerici.
By the end of the decade the genre had run its course.
Adult films also exploited Nazi scenarios in a string of sadomasochistic "roughie" pornographic films in the 1970s and early 1980s. Examples include theMitchell brothers'Hot Nazis,Hitler's Harlot (1973), and 1980'sNazi Love Island (also known asPrisoner of Paradise) withJohn Holmes andSeka. One of the last entries,Stalag 69 (1982), starsAngelique Pettyjohn as an Ilsa-type SS officer. The story was largely a remake ofLove 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, releasedGestapo,Gestapo 2, andDr. Mengele in 2008, all of which are set in a Nazi prison camp and pay homage toIlsa and the Italian exploitation films.
In 2007, as part ofRobert Rodriguez andQuentin Tarantino's tribute to exploitation cinema,Grindhouse, directorRob Zombie created a trailer for a fake film calledWerewolf Women of the SS, starringNicolas Cage andUdo Kier. According to Zombie, "Basically, I had two ideas. It was either going to be a Nazi movie or awomen-in-prison film, and I went with the Nazis. There's all those movies likeIlsa, She Wolf of the SS;Fräulein Devil; andLove Camp 7—I've always found that to be the most bizarre genre." On December 18, 2007, Zombie posted an entry on hisMySpace page, asking if people would want to see afeature-length version ofWerewolf Women of the SS.[2]Iron Sky andNazis at the Center of the Earth (both released in 2012) are in a similar vein.
Most of the Nazi exploitation films havestalag settings with young female inmates likeWomen's Camp 119. Their tormentors are female or maleNazi officers inSS uniforms, usually speaking with a fake German accent and irrelevant or mispronouncedGerman words, who often use "experiments" as excuses to implement sadistic physical violence (perhaps inspired by the work of people likeJosef Mengele, who performedmedical 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 thegore 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 innon-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 asBordel SS (1978) ofJosé Bénazéraf (one of the very few Nazi exploitation films to hold the dubious honor of having actualhardcore sex) andSalon Kitty (1976) ofTinto 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 filmIl portiere di notte (The Night Porter) (1974) byLiliana Cavani that (in the opinion of many) lacks the exploitation motive, may be deemed one such film.
Laura Frost's bookSex 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).
Sometime in the early 1980s, Nazi exploitation films made their way onto theBritish market, made popular by the growingVHS home video technology. With majorHollywood studios steering clear of the new format, it was left to small, domestic companies to populate the shelves with tapes. A small company fromEngland,GO Video, purchased the rights to an Italian film namedSS Experiment Camp. The company ran a marketing campaign with full-page ads showing a naked woman hanging from her feet, aswastika dangling from her wrist and anSS commander looming in the background. Advertisements for the film invideo rental stores became a target for protestors, who picketed such stores and petitioned for the film to be banned. After theVideo Recordings Act, most of the Nazi exploitation films (labelled 'NaziNasties') were deniedBBFC classifications. The following Nazi exploitation films were taken off the shelves:
Of the above films, onlySS Experiment Camp is now available in theU.K.
In Israel specifically, during the 1960s, "Stalag fiction" was pocket books whose stories focused on the unique features of this genre. The phenomenon took ground in parallel to the 1961Eichmann 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 byKa-tzetnik 135633'sHouse of Dolls, the experiences of a Jewish girl prostituted in the "Joy Division" (Block 24) of theAuschwitz camp, the factuality of which is disputed.[3]
