Pornifying History: Stalags, Sex, And The Holocaust

September 6, 2007
JONNO

Despite its more obvious intentions and effects, like any example of visual culture pornography serves as a reflection of the time and place in which it was produced: witness the cocaine-soaked ambiance and Reaganesque paranoia of such 80s porn classics as "New Wave Hookers" and "Cafe Flesh", or for that matter any of the celebrity culture-obsessed porn knockoffs of the current decade. But there's few examples of the collusion between porn, popular culture, and history stranger or more disturbing than the series of pornographic comics produced in Isreal during the early 1960s known as "Stalags", in which testimonies of Holocaust survivors were used as the inspiration for graphic tales of hot female Nazis, sadism and sexual torture.

Filmmaker Ari Libsker drew from his own exposure to these works for a new documentary film that examines this "distinctly Israeli genre" of porn: "I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women ... We were in elementary school. I remember how embarrassed we were." While they were ostensibly based on actual first-person accounts by survivors of concentration camps, Libsker contends that the stalags were a "popular extension" of works by the writer who gave the first account of the Holocaust in Hebrew—and who allegedly embellished the historical record with tales of sexual slavery and prosititution in the Nazi's notorious Pleasure Block in Auschwitz. Whatever their provenance, stalags faded from the Israeli publishing scene only a few years after they first appeared, although their legacy lives on in any number of BDSM and sexploitation works produced since then. Midnight movie classic "Ilsa: She-Wolf Of The SS" didn't exactly come from nowhere, you know.