By Keri O’Shea
Why did Nazisploitation movies enjoy such a brief, if lurid moment in the sun during the European cinema of the 1970s? Perhaps the old adage ‘history is written by the winners’ applies as much to the arts as it does to other aspects of society; certainly, there has never been any great number of either exploitation, art-house or anywhere-in-between Western films based around the atrocities of the Soviets during WWII, though the subsequent Cold War did at least feed into a wealth of paranoid American sci-fi (a topic for another post, mind you). There are various reasons that this may be the case, above and beyond the fact that the Russians fought alongside the Allies at this time. It could be that, having come through the trials of the Second World War, exploitation cinema simply relished the opportunity to mock the defeated Nazis – at a safe distance, and after enough years had elapsed for it to be possible to deal with this subject matter without calling to mind the very real history upon which it was all based. By the 1970s, or indeed 1969 when Love Camp 7 appeared, the war wasn’t a fresh wound – though it still remained fresh enough to be vivid, so mingled with the mockery there may have been some chances to work through the trauma, even if in a rather indirect (and often salacious) way.
Of course though, there are lots of other reasons for the rise of Nazisploitation: in a nutshell, the Nazis afford a wealth of imitable aesthetics, smart uniforms and – far more so in the fictional universe, actually – an array of tall, attractive, nubile players to wear, then shed said uniforms. The Nazis allow so many possibilities for filmmakers simply because they were hyperbole and farce writ large: also, their half-baked racial policies begot a number of sexual policies which themselves provide fertile ground for directors looking to turn a buck. When any regime runs love camps, let alone a regime as notorious as National Socialism, it may be hard to resist filming a version of that. Sex, violence, torment – far and away enough elements to work with, right there. And then, there are the ladies…
I don’t pretend that this feature will be a rundown of all the main Nazi lead roles played by women, but as a number of Nazisploitation films approach or pass their fortieth birthdays, I can’t help but compare a couple of films made at very nearly the same time. Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS was made in 1974; the far less-known Elsa: Fraulein SS (also known as Fraulein Devil, Captive Women 4, Fraulein SS and – confusingly as hell – Fraulein Kitty) followed quickly in its footsteps, appearing in 1977. Now, whilst the righteously notorious Salon Kitty (1976) bears close analysis all of its own, and many of the films which followed in Ilsa’s exceptional wake follow a very similar format to Ilsa (with the lead actress of Elsa, Malisa Longo, even appearing in a bit-part in Salon Kitty, just to show how much cross-pollination was going on), Ilsa and Elsa are interesting representatives of the features of the genre overall. This is both because Elsa shows just how far Ilsa had an impact within the remits of that genre, and also because the director of the later film, Frenchman Patrice Rhomm, re-framed some key ideas for his own spin on the story. Elsa feels like the end point in a continuum, encompassing elements of both Ilsa and Kitty.
In any case, there are lots of points of comparison. Both Ilsa and Elsa are high-ranking military, selected by their superiors for various special operations. The war effort needs them: each film is set at around the time when Hitler’s glorious ‘Thousand Year Reich’ looks to be on its uppers, and desperate times require desperate measures, with each woman taking on top-secret roles. For Ilsa (the incomparable Dyanne Thorne) this means overseeing a medical facility where various crude experimentation is intended to find solutions to help the Reich; prisoners-of-war are brought to her for the purpose. She has her own pet project, though, and that is to see whether her own hypothesis – that women can withstand pain better than men – is true. If it is, Ilsa intends to use this evidence to show that women could be used for the front line. Which is vaguely egalitarian, I suppose. As for Elsa, she also works with enemies of the Reich: however, she selects her number from Nazi party members, whose families have in some way betrayed the cause. Her nubile young women have something else to prove, although the perils of the front line are also important.
Colonel Elsa Ackermann is somewhere between Ilsa and Kitty in that she is also charged with special duties pertaining to the SS, but she is to perform these via recruiting girls and running a kind of ‘pleasure train’ (yeah, you heard). In order to console men broken by the pressures of warfare, see, girls will be provided: the train where they will be held will be luxurious, the girls carefully chosen for their beauty – and each room will be bugged to within an inch of its life, naturally, so that the fiercely-loyal Elsa can uncover any wrongdoing as the SS officers get jiggy with her frauleins. Elsa essentially becomes a brothel madam, but one who still dresses in the uniform – except, that is, when she appears in lacy underwear and thigh-high boots. In both Ilsa and Elsa, each woman has their fair share of lacy undies and kinky boots, and each is sexually voracious, with bad things happening when their libidos get thwarted in any way. Would it really be exploitation cinema if each director didn’t remember to have them disrobe fairly regularly? And, in each film, it is a failed love affair which threatens their mission, in one way or another. Ilsa has her half-German, half-American – the only man who hasn’t been a rampant disappointment in the bedroom; Elsa has the disillusioned SS officer Hans, and his slow rejection of her steadfast Nazism is a significant factor in her increasing on-screen wickedness. Each of the women is, after all, a flawed sadist – each woman represents a mismatch between the required cruelty of doing well in the SS and being feminine, or at least, having sexual needs beyond their desire for total power over others.
Each film plumps for a somewhat different look at the realities of war, however. Elsa: Fraulein SS is spliced with real war scenes, particularly at the beginning of the film, whereas Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS keeps a closer focus on its own footage and versions of events – but Ilsa is by far and away the nastier of the two, not only because director Don Edmonds is so unflinching in what he shoots, but also because there are real historical precedents for some of the experiments shown. This is ramped up to an unprecedented level in the Chinese film Men Behind the Sun (1988), China’s bright red scream about Japanese war atrocities and a piece of cinema which truly deserves to be called horrific; you see the same experiments in Ilsa and Men Behind the Sun a decade later – each director has simply shot versions of ordeals which really happened, making for a sickening sense of deja-vu. Ilsa may be choc-full of nudity, but it never allows viewers to be diverted by this for very long before smashing our face into some gratuitous scenes of human torment. I’ve seen many people scoff at Ilsa as ‘not that bad’ in terms of its unpleasantness, but for me it’s still a genuinely very nasty film. Elsa keeps the violence and torture rather lower in the mix, and there are only a few scenes which would really qualify, but as the leading lady unravels she certainly goes some way towards playing catch-up with her would-be contemporary.
But what of their fates? Each of them does, of course, fail in their ultimate goals and in each film a pesky resistance movement comes along to threaten their ‘good work’ – aided and abetted by the women they’ve been working with, i.e. Ilsa’s medical subjects and (some of) Elsa’s women of pleasure. Each commander’s weakness for a certain man in their lives is also a key factor in their downfalls, plus in Elsa’s case, espionage simply breeds more espionage – there’s a moral in there somewhere, folks. There’s something about viewing Nazism even through an exploitation cinema lens that makes filmmakers feel they have to end things in a way which broadly mirrors the real-life end of the war, and really speaking, this kind of highly sexualised spin on Nazism had done what it needed to by the end of the decade, not really resurfacing in a similar way again (although Nazis pop up as zombies, generally tediously, quite a lot these days).
That said, both Don Edmonds and Patrice Rhomm found it difficult to simply wipe out their anti-heroines in one fell swoop. Their deaths are left fairly ambiguous; Ilsa even popped up again and again in different roles and parts of the world – though I’m not suggesting that this happened in a coherent narrative across all of the films, of course. As for Elsa, did she even die? The jury’s out, though I’d say her demise was just as ambiguous as Ilsa’s. It’s as if we have to see the good guys win, sure, but an interesting female character in good boots with entertaining sexual proclivities is just too precious to get rid of entirely.
Now, as far along in time from the films which comprise the Nazisploitation genre as the films themselves were from the events they were loosely based on, we can perhaps still appreciate that, whilst enjoying this oddball array of films along the way.