STALAGS      




 



It was one of Israel’s dirty little secrets. In the early 1960s, as Israelis were being exposed for the first time to the shocking testimonies of Holocaust survivors at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a series of pornographic pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became best sellers throughout the land.

Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.




 
 
After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum.
 
"I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women," said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film "Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel" had its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July and is to be broadcast in October and shown in movie theaters. "We were in elementary school," he noted. "I remember how embarrassed we were."





 

 
Hanna Yablonka, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, says the film highlights what she calls the "yellow aspects of nurturing the memory of the Holocaust."
 
"Are we taking it into the realm of semipornography?" she asked. "The answer is, we are."
 
The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli society of the early 1960s, which was almost puritanical. They faded out almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography. The most famous Stalag, "I Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch," was deemed to have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the police to try to hunt every copy down.
 
The Stalags went out of print and underground, circulating in specialty secondhand bookstores and among furtive groups of collectors.
 
Mr. Libsker's 60-minute documentary puts the Stalags under a spotlight for the first time and exposes some uncomfortable truths. One is that the Stalags were a distinctly Israeli genre, created by Israeli publishers and penned by Israeli authors, although they had masqueraded as translations from English and were written in the first person as if they were genuine memoirs.
 
Until the Eichmann trial began in 1961, the voices of the Holocaust had hardly been heard in Israel. The survivors sensed the ambivalence of the old-timers who blamed them for not having emigrated in time, and questioned what immoral deeds they might have done in order to stay alive.
 
       
  
     
 
In the movie, the publisher of the first Stalag, Ezra Narkis, acknowledges that it was the trial, in all its sensational and often gory detail that gave momentum to the genre.
 
More provocatively, the movie contends that Stalag pornography was but a popular extension of the writings of K. Tzetnik, the first author to tell the story of Auschwitz in Hebrew and a hero of the mainstream Holocaust literary canon. K. Tzetnik "opened the door," and "the Stalag writers learned a lot from him," Mr. Narkis said.
 
K. Tzetnik was a pseudonym for Yehiel Feiner De-Nur. The alias, short for the German for concentration camper, was meant to represent all survivors, a kind of Holocaust everyman. One of K. Tzetnik's biggest literary successes, "Doll's House," published in 1953, told the story of a character purporting to be the author's sister, serving the SS as a sex slave in Block 24, the notorious Pleasure Block in Auschwitz.
 
Though a Holocaust classic, many scholars now describe it as pornographic and likely made up.
 
"It was fiction," said Na'ama Shik, a researcher at Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. "There were no Jewish whores in Auschwitz."


New York Times Correction: September 7, 2007

The Jerusalem Journal article yesterday, about the pornographic pocket books with Nazi themes that were circulated in Israel in the 1960s, misquoted Na'ama Shik, a researcher at Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, regarding the pocket book "Doll's House," about a Jewish woman serving in a notorious brothel called Block 24 in Auschwitz. She said the book, not Block 24, was fictitious.

 

Yet "Doll's House" and other writings of K. Tzetnik, who died in 2001, are treated as historical fact by many in Israel, and are included in the high school curriculum. Mr. Libsker's movie shows the vice principal of an Israeli school guiding a group of teenagers through Auschwitz, pointing out Block 24 and quoting from K. Tzetnik.
 
This approach to Holocaust education is being eschewed by an increasing number of Israeli academics. "The Holocaust was bad enough, without making things up," Dr. Yablonka said.
 
Sidra Ezrahi, a professor of comparative Jewish literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said, "His books were so graphic and so barbaric." Maybe at first they had an important impact, she said. "But over time," she added, "if this is what they have chosen to leave in the Israeli curriculum, it's a scandal."

For many Israelis, the most dramatic part of the Eichmann trial was the testimony of K. Tzetnik. His true identity was revealed for the first time on the witness stand, where he passed out. Simultaneously, the Stalags were reaching the peak of their commercial success.
 
Yechiel Szeintuch, a professor of Yiddish literature at the Hebrew University, rejects any link between the smutty Stalags and the writings of K. Tzetnik as "an original sin." He insists K. Tzetnik's work was based on reality.
 
But Mr. Libsker, 35, himself the grandson of Holocaust survivors, contends that it is the same mixture of "horror, sadism and pornography" that serves to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust in the Israeli consciousness to this day.

 

 

The Israelis may have invented it,
but it took the Americans to do it right



 
3D Animated Flags--By 3DFlags.com



Sweats


 

US men's adventure magazines of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s had titles like True Man, Rugged Man, True Male, Rugged True Male, and so on, and are collectively known as 'sweats' because of the sweaty blue collar heroes their covers often feature. The covers are deranged, typically featuring a sweaty man and a bikini clad woman being menaced by rabid weasels, or maybe some attractive women popping out of their tops, as Nazi sadists get ready to brand them or flog them or bury them alive. Said attractive women often have a "here we go again" facial expression, and no wonder - Nazis torturing attractive women seems to be a staple of these titles. Sometimes, though, the magazines deal with rugged American men unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of Nazi women.





These magazines were first published for the WWII veteran market so they pretty much invented our iconography of Nazi bondage sadism. Some men’s adventure magazines, however, lasted into the 70s, so over time those original images of shackled women in German torture chambers went through a number of metamorphoses. By the mid-60s, for example, helpless women reappear as the victims of murderous outlaw rebel swastika wearing bikers. Ultimately, men’s pulps were outmoded by pornographic magazines. (Swank was, in fact, originally a pulp).













Japanese Waffen-SS Girl Action Figure

 

 

SS Girl Action Figure

 


 


 


 






Of the 55,000 guards who served in Nazi concentration camps, about 3,700 were women.In 1942, the first female guards arrived at Auschwitz and Majdanek from Ravensbrück. The year after, the Nazis began conscripting women because of a guard shortage.

 

The German title for this position, Aufseherin (plural Aufseherinnen), means female overseer or attendant.

 

Female guards were generally low class to middle class and had no work experience; their professional background varied: one source mentions former matrons, hairdressers, street car ticket takers, opera singers, or retired teachers.

 

Volunteers were recruited by ads in German newspapers asking for women to show their love for the Reich and join the SS-Gefolge ("SS- Retinue" an SS support and service organisation for women). Additionally, some were conscripted based on data in their SS files. The League of German Girls acted as a vehicle of indoctrination for many of the women.

 

The women were not official members of the SS, but many of them belonged to the Waffen-SS. In fact, fewer than twenty women ever served as true SS members, mostly because Schutzstaffel membership was indeed closed to women. The relatively low number of female guards who belonged to the Allgemeine-SS or SS-Gefolge served in the camps. Other women, belonged to the Totenkopf ("Death's Head") units.

 

Female guards were collectively known by the rank of SS-Helferin (German: "Female SS Helper") and could hold positional titles equivalent to regular SS ranks. Such positions were known as Rapportführerin ("Report Leader"), Erstaufseherin ("First Guard"), Lagerführerin ("Camp Leader" [high position]) or Oberaufseherin ("Senior Overseer"). The highest position ever attained by a woman was Chef Oberaufseherin ("Chief Senior Overseer").

 

The KZ Aufseherinnen uniforms consisted of wool/cotton blazers along with the wool/cotton skirts, and underneath the main uniform they wore a full length thin cotton dress [buttoned down in the front] for casual [off duty] times and of course for extra warmth and protection during the cold seasons. Most wore the trademark black SS boots, but they were not required, they were an option. Aufseherinnen could choose to wear standard black lady shoes, along with stockings. However some wore cotton socks, especially as the war went on due to their lack of available nylon etc.

 

In the Nazi command structure, no female guard could ever give orders to a male one since, by design, the rank of SS-Helferin was below all male SS ranks and women were not recognized as regular SS members but only auxiliaries.

 

No German Concentration Camp ever was run by a female Kommandant. Ravensbrück, the only camp reserved for female inmates, was run mainly by male SS troopers, aided by a minority of female assistants.

Women in SS Officer uniforms are the realm of fiction.
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SS Affidavits 95 and 96 prove that the SS womean auxiliaries were neither members of the SS nor sponsors. These girls carried out the same work as the Intelligence and Staff assistants in the Wehrmacht and must not be confused with the female supervisors in the concentration camps for female prisoners.

~The Trial of German Major War Criminals ; 9 August to 21 August 1946.

 

This translation is from Volume 3 of Beaver's Uniforms of the Waffen-SS. Beaver asserts that SS-Aufseherinnen (female camp guards) would have fallen under the category of SS-Kriegshelferinnen. Numerous pictures in Beaver's book and other sources show exactly the difference between the insignia of SS-Helferinnen and SS-Aufseherinnen and the actual uniforms of the two were also different.

 

SS-Helferinnen were allowed to wear the runes, a cufftitle, and unit emblems, while Aufseherinnen were not, makes it more likely that they, rather than Aufseherinnen, would have been considered members of the SS.



 

Famous Italian fumetti Nazi girl Hessa

Shanna the She-Devil



BloodRayne

 

 

 



 

 




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