By Christian Shapiro
No other group in the history of fraternal orders has been as reviled -- and rightly so -- as the Nazis of Adolf Hitler infamy. A preening congregation of sadists, anti-Semites and peculiarly unrepentant pederasts, these German warmongers plunged the globe into a decade of chaos and destruction that threatened to erase the very existence of human good will.
And now, fifty years after their demise, what do these concentration-camp-erecting, Poland-invading, buzz bomb-lobbing, fishy Vichy Francophile gas-chamber engineers have to say in their defense?
"Ve had very attractive uniforms," mutter nostalgic "defenders" of the Aryan Vaterland. "Und ve built zehr gutt roads."
The better to make yourselves presentable once you have reached that final destination on your highway to hell, respond the morally outraged multitude who have banded together in unanimous and total condemnation of all aspects of the swastika swathed animals.
But there is, as unthinkable as it may seem, another school of thought considering the legacy of the most barbaric and murderous regime of modern times. Students of this particular manner of perception tend to be, through no fault of their own, lacking in the ethical gene that prompts moral outrage, at least that gene goes into recession when a pair of billowing breasts or a cushiony couple of chair cheeks are within prominent focus. Such distracting flesh visuals tend to disrupt the sense of right and wrong in a certain percentage of the citizenry, and they find themselves attracted to all manner of repulsiveness.
For these queerly amoral, pan-arousal fellows, the Nazis have provided a tremendous twisted inspiration for some of the most shameful pleasures known to connoisseurs of titillation cinema. The SS commandants, especially the statuesque, blonde female officers, adorned in black form-fitting trousers and tunics, a Tom of Finland fetish cap perched atop their flaxen tresses, flashing their icy Germanic beauty and flexing bosoms uber alles, flicking a stiff riding crop so it snaps like a pistol shot against the patent-leather calf of knee-high boots; well, the thrilling sexualized cruelty of these high-cheeked camp wardens grabs a moral defective's imagination where it can't help but like to be gripped. The afflicted aficionado's inner moral voice insists that he should be appalled by the eroticism implicit in the dynamic of captives submitting to the whims of wickedly fixated captors, but a deep appreciation for the imbalance of power necessary to satisfactory sexual relations prompts the reprobate's pleasure centers to shout down the feeble wheeze of conscience.
If you have read this far, chances are something somewhere within you is slightly amiss. The camp appeal of the eroticized death camp makes sick-but-sure sense to you. Resistance is futile. You vill become aroused!
Go ahead, try and keep up a brave, outraged front. When your stoic mein of moral rectitude wilts (at about the same rate as your below-the-belt amorality stiffens up), pretend to dismiss as a laugh, as a bit of an ironic lark, the stimulus triggered by the plight of desperate waif women confined to wire-and-wood barracks constructed in the popular and revealing open-floor plan.
Tell yourself: This detention center sex flick is just Hogan's Heroes, but with the guards playing tittie twister, and a welted buttock popping up here and there.
The disparaged images will stay in your mind, embedded until you have the opportunity to put them to use. You may surprise yourself. The scenes that you have attempted to laugh out of context or censure into insignificance will be the very visuals that your imagination calls to mind when you need that slight extra impetus to attain a proper, healthy release.
You can leave the death-camp sex-romp behind. You can vow to never view such fare again. Perhaps you will uphold your pledge to keep such entertainments off your TV screen.
But you vill come back.
Again and again, every chance you get.
LOVE CAMP 7 (1969)
The word love is one of the most abused in human language, and it is particularly misused in the title of Love Camp 7. Where is the love in a well-guarded, barbed-wire fenced, dog-patrolled compound constructed to house a population of pliable and pretty ladies? Though it is hard to see at first, the love comes in when two American WACs secretly invade the camp disguised as POWs. The WACs intend to coax valuable data from a brilliant scientist being held undercover at the facility, and then plan to escape the Nazi clutches in the embrace of the French resistance. Alas, the warriors of France let the ladies languish under the libidinal lash, and love turns to something a lot less wholesome.
ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS (1974)
This story of rapaciously mean Ilsa and her vulpine appetite for lovemaking ala duress is the most notorious of all film tales of Nazi nookie, and rightfully so. She Wolf is both the blueprint and the pinnacle of the genre.
Tall, blond and generously stacked Dyanne Thorne commands the screen as Ilsa, warden of a sort of depraved Nazi version of summer camp where nobody is ever allowed to go home. Ilsa is determined to convince her boss, a cackling SS general, that women are superior to men in withstanding pain.
The first discomfort endured by the ladies, none of whom would look out of place in a high-end lingerie catalog, is full-frontal nudity. Exposed boobs and beavers (the film predates the labial-waxing phenomenon) are essential to the grotesque hijinks of Ilsa's experiments, a series of unorthodox medical procedures that make the typical HMO's botched surgery look like a dab of ketchup on a tasty hamburger patty.
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS was made in the USA with Canadian money and is banned in Germany. Perhaps something about the unrelenting violence and the fact that the camera never blinks from the carnage has forced the good volks of Deutschland to close their eyes in shamed denial.
The DVD issue includes a trailer and present-day commentary from Dyanne Thorne, director Don Edmonds and producer David F. Friedman, whose legendary name was deleted from the credits of the original release -- the result, he explains, of a business issue and not, as one would hope from so iconic an exploiteer, a moral quandary.
THE NIGHT PORTER (1974)
Of the bedfellows made by war, few are stranger than the leading couple of The Night Porter. A rare example of Nazi erotica that a guilty pleasure-seeker can see in the company of a female who listens to National Public Radio, this Italian-made 1970s gem exploring the darker recesses of imprinted erotic obsession is presented with a convoluted chronology that makes the past and the present all the more horrific and inescapable for being folded in upon one another. A former concentration-camp prisoner, a fair, fragile, flaxen-tessed female played by Charlotte Rampling, meets by chance the commandant, Dirk Bogarde, who had thirteen years earlier been her sexual tormentor and physical savior. The camp survivor ditches her current husband and holes up with the Nazi of her nightmares. He must hide her existence from a band of unrepentant war criminals who, in the off chance that their past atrocities might someday come to trial, want all potential hostile witnesses eliminated. Rampling, as a wartime plaything of the S.S., was doing stripped, starved and sexy while Ally McBeal was only ten years old!
THE BEAST IN HEAT (1975)
What's the worst that can happen when a dominant, morally sick, physically depraved social clique from a population's ethnic majority considers its subjugate minorities to be less than human and existing only for the joy of being used for base bodily release and tormented unto death? Are you imagining a baby-sitting technique in which the infant is flipped into the air and machine-gunned until quiet; grown men being given a treatment that should be reserved for stray puppies; fingernail maintenance being conducted with pliers rather than a file; a crude form of liposuction in which live rodents chomp off the excess gut of writhing, figure-conscious females; a BMOC (Big Man on Camp) whose hunger for love possesses him to dine and digest what a lesser gourmand might only caress? If this is your conception of hell, congratulations. You share a peculiar genius with the creators of The Beast in Heat.
ELSA FRAULEIN SS (1976)
Everyone knows that the Germans are an habitually dour lot. Even the privileged SS officers were a glum bunch, despite their snappy salutes and gay uniforms.
Because man does not live by spiffy couture alone, the Nazi high command, as presented by the Franco-Italo production Elsa Fraulein SS, enlisted Elsa Ackermann (played by severely sexy Malisa Longo) to fill a train with fancy whores and deliver them to the front lines to cheer up the well-dressed but world-weary officers. Naturally, since these whores are after all Nazis, the girls have no ethics and spy on the Kraut officers, fingering traitors for execution. Anyone looking for disturbing erotic butchery will be disappointed by Elsa Fraulein SS, which may be the mildest, most mamby-pamby atrocity exhibit known to man. It's half French, and they have no stomach for the rigors of war, even in their exploitation movies. Malisa Longo gives a chat on the DVD.
GESTAPO'S LAST ORGY (1976)
Just as all good things must end, so too do eras of bloodthirsty sexual excess also come to a close. But, in the case of Hitler's elite butcher boy troops, not before one final blowout. Put on your party hat, and let the games begin. Of course simple spin-the-bottle or musical chairs is much too tame for these connoisseurs of feculent fun. The theme of the festivities is degradation, with the object of the evening being to suck the soul from a fair ethnic damsel, and no indignity is going too far - not even eating large chunks of flesh from her blood relatives. Sleek-coated Dobermans share in the dining experience, while animals of the higher orders snack on doo-doo bits. What to wear? How about a merkin made of human hair! One of the few scenes of Gestapo's Last Orgy climax that is not also totally nauseating is a surprisingly tasteful and effective blowjob bestowed upon the barrel of a pistol. Watch out for that hair trigger!
SALON KITTY (1976)
An Italian extravaganza replete with fully constructed sets, detailed costuming, professional quality lighting, accomplished cinematography and more full-on nudity than in some XXX releases, Salon Kitty blends the evil Nazi genre staples of eugenics experimentation and brothel eavesdropping in a drama of exploitation, betrayal and slaughter (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5). The current Blue Underground double-DVD release is the best Salon Kitty ever, an uncensored, never-before-seen director's cut, including a bonus interview with that director, the high class and notorious Tinto Brass.
Ingrid Thulin, a compelling broad who's fifty if she's eighteen, plays Kitty. Twenty pure Aryan maidens fuck a gauntlet of hunchbacked, obese freaks to prove their allegiance to National Socialism, after which the damsels are prepared to receive the affections of the Fatherland's most distinguished military gentlemen, who they encourage to compromise themselves in ill-advised pillow talk.
Thulin's primary pupil is a soft, silken and heartless sex kitten played by pale-white venery vision Teresa Ann Savoy. A British-bred waifish temptress of the highest order, the coppery blond crumpet squats butt-out on a bidet, preparatory to raising her rear entry to the camera, which hungrily devours bush-shrouded puffy, pink lips and a puckered winky stinky. Sensations of impure ecstasy promptly goose step up and down the viewer's spine.
In Nazi flicks, men are commonly killed post-orgasm; that's one danger the home viewer needn't fear.
SS CAMP 5: WOMEN'S HELL (1976)
A woman's hell might at first thought be summed up as an elegant department store where her credit cards are all over the limit, her cell phone has no reception and the bathroom has only one kind of soap for both face and hands and no scented candles, but that scenario wouldn't make for much of an exploitation flick.
Better to throw a dozen or so ladies into the depraved clutches of crazed Nazi scientists eager to engage in beastly orgies of revolting sexual excess and conduct their kooky and nauseating medical experimentation.
Along with an all-Italian cast of beautiful prisoners presented in head-to-toe nudity, SS Camp 5: Women's Hell also includes archival footage from genuine Nazi death camps, which gives a rather somber tone to the party scenes and adds a jolt of genuine repulsion to the gory moments.
NAZI LOVE CAMP 27 (1977)
Purists might balk at the use of love and Nazi in the same phrase, but Nazi Love Camp 27 was not shot for the enjoyment of purists.
Not to be confused with the numerically inferior Love Camp 7, Nazi Love Camp 27 follows the misadventures of an irresistibly alluring young Jewish woman (Hanna Meyer as played by Sirpa Lane) who enters a concentration camp and through luck and pluck rises to the top of the lust slave heap.
This being an Italian production, sex and all that goes along with it-complete and utter nudity, focus on crotch shots-is a primary concern of Love Camp 27, although the psychologically damaging aspects of hateful love relationships are by no means ignored.
Actually combat footage from World War II is used to punch up the action scenes. Hanna's fianc?as, in her absence, joined the German army and become an officer. At the film's ending, the couple is reunited in a bleak apocalypse of insanity and death. Recommended.
