Nazi exploitation
Its surprise success and that of Salon Kitty and The Night Porter led European filmmakers, mostly in Italy, 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.
[1] Prominent directors of the genre include Paolo Solvay (La Bestia in Calore, also known as The Beast in Heat and SS Hell Camp), Cesare Canevari (Last Orgy of the Third Reich, also known as L'ultima orgia del III Reich, Gestapo's Last Orgy and Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler), and Alain Payet (Train spécial pour SS, also known as Special Train for Hitler and Helltrain), all from 1977.
The controversial art-house production The Damned (1969), directed by Luchino 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.
The French art-house film Vice and Virtue (1963), directed by Roger Vadim, is a stylized retelling of the Marquis de Sade's Justine set during the Nazi occupation of France.
The critically acclaimed 1964 film The Pawnbroker includes a flashback scene showing nude women kept in a concentration camp brothel.
The Italian Giallo thriller In the Folds of the Flesh (also known as Nelle pieghe della carne, 1970) has a similar flashback sequence with unrealistically attractive nude women being herded into a Nazi gas chamber.
The film can also be viewed as a precursor to the similarly themed women in prison genre which was initially popularized by Roger Corman's The Big Doll House (1971).
In order to rescue a Jewish scientist, two female agents infiltrate a Nazi Joy Division camp, where prisoners are kept as sex slaves for German officers.
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.
Between sex scenes, Ilsa subjects her male and female inmates to horrific scientific tests, much like Josef Mengele's notorious Nazi human experimentation at Auschwitz.
In 1977, Malisa Longo starred in Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg as a black-booted, leather-clad, sexually sadistic commander of a prison camp for women.
One of the most notorious films in this genre is La Bestia in Calore (also known as SS Hell Camp and The Beast In Heat), produced in Italy in 1977.
Nazi Love Camp 27, starring Sirpa Lane as a Jewish girl forced into a brothel, is notable for its hardcore sex scenes and for being written by famed scripter Gianfranco Clerici.
In 2007, as part of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's tribute to exploitation cinema, Grindhouse, director Rob Zombie created a trailer for a fake film called Werewolf Women of the SS, starring Nicolas Cage and Udo Kier.
It presented them as lusty as well as buxom women, such as Dyanne Thorne's Ilsa, who also sexually abused their male prisoners (mainly in non-statutory female-on-male rape fashion).
The company ran a marketing campaign with full-page ads showing a naked woman hanging from her feet, a swastika dangling from her wrist and an SS commander looming in the background.
[3] They were inspired by Ka-tzetnik 135633's House of Dolls, the experiences of a Jewish girl prostituted in the "Joy Division" (Block 24) of the Auschwitz camp, the factuality of which is disputed.
