stalag fiction

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: 7 September 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. Large heated building had library, where inmates could borrow books from forty-five thousand volumes available, storage, and offices on main floor and part-time brothel upstairs (photo: 1987) Auschwitz Brothel and Library Just inside the main gate of Auschwitz is a building [Block 24] used during the war as a brothel for the inmates. It was not a secret that the camp had a brothel; it was mentioned in books and its existence was confirmed by Auschwitz Museum officials. Felderer first heard about the brothel during his work for the Jehovah's Witnesses. [German prostitutes could also work in the camp whorehouse, which had been established for specially "honoured", usually "Aryan" prisoners] Today, the building houses the museum's archives and library. Felderer joked with Franciszek Piper, whose office was in the building, about how it felt to work in a brothel. Piper had blushed and laughed about it. -- Ditlieb Felderer "The 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel -- 1988" In World War II, Nazi Germany established brothels in the concentration camps (Lagerbordell) to create an incentive for prisoners to collaborate, although these institutions were used mostly by Kapos, "prisoner functionaries" and the criminal element, because regular inmates, penniless and emaciated, were usually too debilitated and wary of exposure to SS schemes. In the end, the camp brothels did not produce any noticeable increase in the prisoners’ work productivity levels, but instead, created a market for coupons among the camp VIPs. The women forced into these brothels came mainly from the Ravensbrück concentrationtion camp [2] except for Auschwitz, which employed its own prisoners. In combination with the German military brothels in World War II, it is estimated that at least 34,140 female inmates were forced to serve as prostitutes during the Third Reich. The first camp brothel was established in Mauthausen/Gusen in 1942. After 30 June 1943, a camp brothel existed in Auschwitz, and from 15 July 1943, in Buchenwald. The one in Neuengamme was established in early 1944, Dachau's in May 1944, Dora-Mittelbau's in late summer, and Sachsenhausen's on 8 August 1944. There are conflicting dates for the camp brothel in Flossenbürg: one source claims summer 1943; another states it was not opened until 25 March 1944. The camp brothels were usually built as barracks surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, with small individual rooms for up to 20 women prisoners, controlled by a female overseer (Aufseherin). The sex workers were replaced frequently due to exhaustion and illness, and were usually sent away to their deaths later. The brothels were open only in the evenings. No Jewish male prisoners were allowed as patrons. Those with access to the customer lineup (Aryan VIPs only), had to sign up for a specific day and pay two Reichsmarks for a 20-minute "service" based on a predetermined schedule. The prostitutes were matched with their clients by an SS-man. The market for the "prize-coupons" was routinely cornered by the common criminals who wore the green triangles (hence the "green men" denomination). There is evidence (somewhat controversial) that in some of the brothels, women might have had tattoos inscribed on their chests saying "Feld-Hure" (Field Whore). Some of them underwent forced sterilizations as well as forced abortions, often resulting in death. The subject of camp prostitution was alluded to in survivors' memoirs at least as early as 1972, when the first edition of Heinz Heger's book, "Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel" was published. However, the subject remained largely taboo in studies of Nazism until the mid-1990s, when new publications by female researchers broke the silence. [see Christa Schulz, "Weibliche Häftlinge aus Ravensbrück in Bordellen der Männerkonzentrationslager" (Female prisoners from Ravensbrück in brothels for male concentration camp prisoners) and Christa Paul, "Zwangsprostitution. Staatlich errichtete Bordelle im Nationalsozialismus" (Forced prostitution: Brothels established by the National Socialist State), Sometimes the SS enticed women into becoming sex workers by promising them better treatment or reductions of their indefinite sentence. This caused anger or envy among some female inmates Homosexual prisoners and camp brothels In addition to using camp brothels as a means to control inmates, encourage collaboration, and prevent riots and escapes, Heinrich Himmler also intended them to be used as a means of teaching pink triangle prisoners "the joys of the opposite sex",  i.e., as "therapy" for their homosexuality. Heger claims that Himmler directed that all gay prisoners were to make compulsory visits to the camp brothel once per week as a means of curing them of their same-sex attraction. Cultural references German concentration camp brothels were re-enacted in fictional Nazi exploitation films made in the 1970s such as "Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS" , "Last Orgy of the Third Reich", "Love Camp 7", "SS Experiment Camp" and "Nazi Love Camp 27". Examples of Israeli fictional literature on the subject include writer's Yehiel De-Nur alias K. Tzetnik's book "The House of Dolls and Stalag fiction genre".  Czech author Arnošt Lustig wrote a novel "Lovely Green Eyes", which tells a story of a 15-year old Jewish girl forced to serve as a prostitute in a German camp brothel during World War II. The Israelis may have invented it, but it took the Americans to do it right 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.

Folternde, vollbusige SS-Frauen {Torturing,  big-breasted SS women)
Holocaust and Pornography - the connection has a tradition in Israel.

"Die Wohlgesinnten“ (The Kindly Ones}, writes the cultural scientist Eli Eshed, is a modern "Stalag". In Israel, a pornographic sadistic pulp series with the same name made a turnover in the millions in the early 1960s. Eshed, a self-confessed collector of "Stalagim" and explorer of light Hebrew literature, does not hold back with his enthusiasm. Jonathan Littell's book will open your eyes readers, he promises.
Place and theme of the "Stalagim" are always the same: busty SS women torturing prisoners of war in the Nazi camps. "We made the women, the weaker sex, Mistresses, especially to American pilots, who having been humiliated and raped by them are reduced to 'Jammerlappen' (Whining Rags). Eli Kedar, one of the authors, said decades later in a documentary on the subject. Kedar collected the ideas for his texts at home. "My parents (both Holocaust survivors) talked. I wrote".

According to the Tel Aviv documentary filmmaker Ari Libsker in his film "Stalagim - Holocaust and Pornography", in dealing with the phenomenon, the blending of reality and fiction is the problem.

Both Littell and Yechiel Dinur, himself a Holocaust survivor and the first Israeli author who dealt with the Holocaust after the war, mixed witness testimony and fiction. Under the pseudonym K. Zetnik, Dinur published his memoirs. partly wildly elaborated  memories of the horrors at Auschwitz, including descriptions of concentration camp brothels where, Jewish women were brutally forced to provide sexual services to the German officers.

"It has long been proven that there were no Jewish women in the 'Freudenhäusern' (brothels} of the camps," Libsker asserts. He calls  "Die Wohlgesinnten" an "infantile book", which reveals the world view of the author, in "mixing Kitsch, sex and death with Nazism and the horrors of the Holocaust"

The young director denounces the "morbid fascination and ignorance" of educators who, with their "pornographic portrayals  brainwash their students". In his documentary, Libsker shows a woman teacher explaining to  an Israeli middle school class where exactly the brothel had been in Auschwitz , and reads corresponding excerpts from  K. Zetnik's book, which is included in the curriculum for secondary schools. "I fear that in a few years a different teacher faces the crematoria, and reads excerpts from "Die Wohlgesinnten“ by Littlell

Stalag is an acronym for 'Stammlager', the name in Nazi Germany of the prisoners of war camps of WW II. The authors of the Stalag novels were all Israelis and mostly children of Holocaust survivors.

-- Die Presse, print edition, 02.08.2008

Schultzes Hündin (Schultze's Bitch)During the Eichmann trial, Israel experienced a wave of pornographic dime novels, which took place in German camps. A documentary has  rediscovered the "Stalags"

In 1962, in Uri Avnery's political pulp magazine "Haolam Hase Bunny" (This World) an illustrated report of the appeal in the Eichmann process appeared as the main news. Another process was  reported on the last page that was reserved for colorful anecdotes and gossip. An Israeli Court had banned the distribution of a paperback with the title "I was Colonel Schultze's Bitch" due to its alleged anti-Semitic and pornographic content. The book is about how an SS officer tortures a French female inmate, who had slapped him in the face, in a prison camp, A reporter described it as "the worst book ever published in Hebrew".

The process occurred at the peak of the wave of so-called Stalag novels that had captured the country parallel to the Eichmann trial. Hundreds of these dime novels were sold in large quantities at newsstands across the country.

The Israeli documentary "Stalags - Holocaust and Pornography" by Ari Libsker is devoted for the first time in detail to this phenomenon. "Stalag 13" was the first book that in 1961 gave its name to the genre (itself inspired by Billy Wilder's film "Stalag 17" of 1953).

Its unexpected success provoked the serial production of Stalag stories whose plot was, on the whole, always the same: an Allied soldier, usually an American pilot is captured and interned in a German Stalag, ruled by sadistic female SS officers. The prisoner will be humiliated, sexually assaulted and raped. But the story has a happy ending: the soldier can free himself and can now sexually exploit and punish the SS women. .

The illustrations on the covers were adaptations from American pulp literature. The authors all were Israelis, but wrote under English pseudonyms such as Mike Baden, Archie Berman, Mike Longshot, who were also the heroes of the stories at the same time. The film now reveals, most of them had a direct or indirect connection to the Holocaust. Many were children of parents who lived in the shadow of the trauma. The parents were survivors of the camps, or they had lost their families there.

At the beginning of the sixties survivors of the Holocaust were about half of all Israelis. The second world war was still a presence, and the gap between the Isarelis who had experienced it and the camps, and those who had lived in Palestine during the war could not be bridged. The Holocaust was almost never talked about. Information was scarce, and survivors were often treated with arrogance and ignorance. The Eichmann trial then put the Holocaust on the agenda. It was planned by Ben-Gurion as a public event with an educational character, which should also show in the course of the negotiations on the compensation, that there was a difference between the Nazis and the Germans. However, it developed  into a form of group therapy for the whole country, for the first time the hard to tolerate reports of survivors, were seen, heard and read.  Reports appeared daily in all Israeli media.

The Stalag genre flourished in the shadow of this procedure. It broke a double taboo - it touched the Holocaust on the one hand in a trivializing manner, albeit indirectly: the stories took place in prison camps, only rarely in concentration camps. On the other hand, the novels introduced pornography to a larger audience in a Puritan country. The recurring and bureaucratic grey yet sadistic characters of the camp commanders were modeled on Adolf Eichmann. Other people, who boosted the fantasy of the productive authors, were Ilse Koch, the 'Witch of Buchenwald', the sadistic 'Oberaufseherin' in Auschwitz-Birkenau Irma Grese - and Leni Riefenstahl.

"We turned to the figure of the submissive, raped woman around. We made her the ruler, gave her slaves, namely pilots and officers who became worms", the publisher of the first set of Stalags, Esra Narkiss, said with barely hidden pride, about this subversion of the traditional roles. The historian Omer Bartov describes in the film, that at the beginning of the sixties in Israel a hardly tolerable atmosphere of repression  prevailed. One can easily imagine, that in  a socialist State still under construction, the Stalags had a liberating effect, both in sexual terms, as well as in relation to previously unspoken trauma.Fantasies of empowerment and a happy endings, triumphed over the reality of mass destruction in the Stalags. One of the accusations against the survivors was that they went like sheep to the slaughter. In some ways the Stalags were also a Zionist narrative in their own way: Due to the Zionist doctrine Jews had always been persecuted and killed because they were not living in their own State. One can thus see the raped and humiliated American pilots of the Stalags as placeholders for the Jews living in the Diaspora. It is also a known phenomenon that victims sometimes identify with perpetrators and this identification can be also sexually charged.

In the film, Stalag authors talk for the first time about the now displaced pop phenomenon. Even though hundreds of thousands of copies of individual novels between 1961 and 1963 were sold, Israeli society did not like to be reminded of the Stalags. In this respect, the current documentary almost operates as an educational work.

But the documentary understands the Stalags ultimately only as an incentive to think about the "bizarre way" of teaching about the Holocaust in Israel today, and this is its formal as well as its conceptual weakness. Filmmaker Ari Libsker recognizes a still canonicalized predecessor of the Stalags namely K. Zetnik. Under this pseudonym, Yechiel Feiner Dinur, who fainted during his dramatic testimony at the Eichmann trial, in which he poetically described Auschwitz as another Planet, wrote. Already a few months after his liberation from Auschwitz-Birkenau he had the novel "Salamandra" written about the camp which to this day is part of the school material.

However, Libsker overestimates the influence of K. Zetniks. By reputable researchers, he has always been accused of pornographic impact by serious researchers  Also, he now also by no means provides the Central texts in the curriculum of Israeli schools  as Libsker feared. His first book is available  in addition to works by Levi, Semprun, Kertész, Celan, and Appelfeld, and also the question of the representation of the Holocaust is explicitly addressed in schools today.

Libsker's film touches on the question of how the Holocaust is still taught today to young people by ill-informed teachers. For instance, he shows an Israeli school class in Auschwitz, whose woman teacher speaks, with a certain relish, of "pretty Jewish women" that were supposedly available to German SS men and soldiers as 'Feldhuren' (Fieldwhores) in the so-called led 'Vergnügungsblock' (Entertainment Block), of which K. Zetniks later book 'Doll's House' tells. At best, Jewish prostitutes were exceptions, says Libsker's  crown witness, the writer Ruth Bondie, about this widespread idea. She accuses the myth of the Jewish camp prostitute of pushing the daily terror, that the female inmates of the camp such as mothers were the exposed to, into the background of a lurid colportage.

Libsker is trying to put this popularisation of the Holocaust and the need  to shock, in conjunction with the phenomenon of the Stalags. However, the Stalags are just proof that the problem of the link between Pornography and Nazism can be not so easily solved. In the 1970s, some Italian art films examined the explicitly sadistic aspects of Nazism and Fascism, including Visconti's "The Damned", Cavanis' "Der Nachtportier" and above all Pasolini's "120 days of Sodom". The directors at that time covered the sexual charge of power and the inevitable theatrical dimension of fascist society. By Adorno is the dictum, 'the complex of industrial mass destruction has triumphed in the camps'. Precisely this view did the psychoanalytic analysis of the perpetrators, which appears in such films, make inconsequential, argues Klaus Theweleit  in his book "German Movies". So the theory of the "violence/pleasure problem" may be got rid of elegantly. 

The industrial form of the 'Lager System' does not exclude the sadistic activity of individuals, both rather complement each other.

For the victims and their descendants this academic question does not even arise, because they have experienced the sadistic aspect of the extermination camps. Even in the always sober description of Primo Levi, the superfluous, excessive violence, the staging of the meaningless rituals of order play an important role. Both are for Levi not the result of the sadistic inclinations of individuals, but an integral, and even essential part of the extermination apparatus, which aimed first and foremost at humiliation and dehumanization. The Stalag novels may have been crude, vulgar and disrespectful - but they broke through the silence of those who escaped the camps. The children of survivors who had felt the daily presence of a constant fear of random death of their parents, made this experience public. The Stalag writers realized intuitively the connection between sex, sadism and the staging of the violence in the Fascist project. Libskers film uncovers this connection, but its moral position against a malicious "Pornographication" of the Holocaust eventually loses it from sight.

Israel’s Nazi-porn problemHot she-wolves of the SS, rescued from the memory hole
By Andrew O'Hehir   
Taking their name from the Nazi prison camps in which they were set, Stalags were Israeli pornographic paperbacks featuring Nazi themes.How do you make a movie about a disreputable and totally defunct literary genre? That question never quite gets answered by Ari Libsker’s hour-long documentary “Stalags,” but the questions Libsker raises about truth, fiction, sexuality and post-Holocaust Jewish identity are so interesting the film’s lack of cinematic sensibility may not matter. For some reason Libsker shot most of “Stalags” on black-and-white video, a distracting and perverse choice given that the Nazi-themed pulp novels of his title sported titillating covers in lurid color. Maybe he wants to dampen the sensationalistic aspect of his subject matter, but there’s really no way to do that.

As many older Israelis evidently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early ’60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as “Stalags,” whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic, voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and murder his captors.

Stalags thrived for a few years and then disappeared, banished to the memory hole as a massive cultural embarrassment. Libsker meets a couple of the dubious characters who collect them; one insists that his face be obscured on camera (like a corporate whistleblower or a child molester on “60 Minutes”), and also appears to believe that the scenarios depicted actually occurred during World War II, or at least could have. (Just in case you’re wondering, there were no female SS officers, nor any other women assigned to guard Allied POWs). Israel’s national library appears to contain a trove of them, buried deep in the catalog software and hidden from public view. Yet as some Israelis who were children and teenagers at the time testify, the Stalags provided sexual titillation in a society that repressed it, and also the illicit thrill of accessing a dark, secret recent past their European-born parents never discussed. They offered a Stockholm-syndrome equation of evil with eros and a juvenile revenge fantasy, all rolled into one.

As an outsider to both Judaism and Israeli society, I don’t find the existence of the Stalags mysterious in the least. Given the scale of trauma that brought the State of Israel into being, and brought so many of its inhabitants over the sea, some kind of twisted and perverse fantasy reaction was inevitable. As Libsker’s film further explains, the televised trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann transfixed Israelis in the early ’60s, providing many younger people their first look at the horrific and dramatic events many of their parents had witnessed first hand. The Stalags may be understood as a dream-world, midnight version of the Eichmann revelations.

Libsker tracks down a former Stalags author, who still seems injured that the phenomenon did not bring him massive literary fame, along with a publisher who cheerfully shrugs the whole thing off: "We gave the public what they wanted, and who am I to judge?" But "Stalags"” is most interesting when Libsker explores the deeper significance of this craze, as it reflects Israel’s pseudo-pornographic relationship to the past. Many Jews and non-Jews remain fixated on salacious details of the Holocaust, such as the “Night Porter” idea that female camp inmates ensured their survival by sleeping with German officers, or that the Nazis maintained brothels of Jewish women at Auschwitz and other camps. Such things may have happened here and there, but they are not clearly attested, and in any case fade into total insignificance against the scale of the tragedy.