September 7, 2007--Fanaticism LXXXIX: Nazi Porn

How guilty I felt as a 10-year-old whenever I would sneak into the back room of the corner candy store to thumb through the lurid paperback novels that had on their covers pictures of voluptuous girls with ripped blouses. What lustful feelings they evoked, especially those with Nazi themes that pictured U.S. prisoners of war being erotically "punished" by female Nazi prison guards wearing leather bras and thigh-high boots.

But wouldn't you know it, while I was torturing myself because of my addiction to this most-forbidden kind of pornography, pretty much the same thing was going on in Israel of all places. Forget about me for a moment—though I had heard stories about what went on in Germany during the 1940s, many of the people living in Israel at the time had gone through the reality, either having survived the Holocaust or having had numerous family members slaughtered. How could they be “getting off” on stories about such evil events?

It was during the trial of Adolph Eichmann in the early 1960s that a series of best-selling pocketbooks began to appear in Israel with titles such as I Was Colonel Schultz’s Bitch. Called Stalags, most had plots that involved American or British POWs being abused by female SS officers wearing much the same kinds of outfits I was drooling over in Brooklyn.

This unspoken-about phenomenon is coming to light now as the result of revisionist Holocaust studies and the appearance of the documentary “Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel.” (See NY Times article linked below.) During the 1960s, Israel was an extremely puritanical society with strict laws forbidding anything resembling pornography. Though it is no surprise that in spite of this smut still flourished (perhaps in fact abetted by the prohibition), it is beyond interesting that its most explicit manifestation involved Nazi themes.

Needless to say, the same interest in things Nazi was true for me and all the others who slinked through the back door to get sweaty hands on those dirty books. Though there is more than enough to think about in regard to whatever it was that compelled us and what this might say about our and even human nature, there is the more serious concern about the connection between depravity, barbaric violence, and the erotic.

The reality of life in the concentration camps, where mass evil was on daily display, included a full blending of this kind of violence and unleashed sexuality. Though the Stalags in Israel and the dime novels of my youth were all about men being “pleasured” by women, in the camps, though men too were sexually tortured, women inmates were commonly at the cruel disposal of the male (and female) guards and administrators.

And, as is usual, both in reality and in pornographic distortion, men are in charge and write the script while women remain the object of desires in all their unfathomable forms.