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A new documentary, Stalags, examines the pornographic paperbacks, featuring colorful depictions of buxom SS officers bending captives to their will, that cropped up in Israel around the time of the Holocaust trials in the early 1960s.
Claims by Max Mosley to the contrary notwithstanding – and as a subsequent slew of sexploitative titles will attest – Nazi iconography can pack a huge libidinous wollop. In a comprehensive review of the film, Lauren Wissot discusses the film’s powerful dissecting of the phenomenon:
Simply put, this film is a revelation. Like the best investigative journalists, Libsker patiently sifts through each and every contradiction to discover that something that would seem so horrifically paradoxical on its face proves ultimately inevitable beneath the surface. How could Israeli Nazi pornography even exist, let alone be a widespread phenomenon? Stalags answers, “How could it not?”
Stalags open tonight at NYC’s Film Forum and runs through 4/22.
