Nazisploitation, Neo-Nazisploitation, and the Margins of Holocaust Film

• In Event: Very Marginal Holocaust Texts: Alternative Tropes and Traditions

Abstract

In 1975 a reviewer for THE NEW YORK JEWISH WEEK described ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS as “the worst film of the generation,” lamenting that despite being “jam-packed with swastikas, sadism, sex and storm troopers,” it was “produced, distributed, exhibited and promoted by Jews.” ILSA appeared amid a wave of revisionist books and films that Susan Sontag famously critiqued as “fascinating fascism” for coding Nazism as desirable. The film came to epitomize an entire genre of cheaply produced, gratuitously violent, historically inaccurate, and sexually explicit representations of World War II and the Holocaust.

Known in North America as “Nazisploitation” and as il sadiconazista (“sadism with Nazis”) in their Italian art-film manifestations, these exploitation films are underrepresented or entirely absent from canonical histories of Holocaust film, even as mainstream Hollywood films have subsequently adapted their iconography and narrative tropes. Whereas in the mid-1970s critics indignantly denounced Nazisploitation for desecrating Holocaust memory, by the early 2000s ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS was being sold in deluxe DVD box sets. Moreover, filmmakers (Tarantino, Wirkola, Libsker) have appropriated and recycled once-taboo imagery and narrative motifs—often ironically—in “neo-Nazisploitation” fiction films and documentaries, many of them critically acclaimed.

This paper maps the shifting margins of social acceptability in Holocaust film through the changing reception of ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS and similar Nazisploitation and neo-Nazisploitation films. It argues that today’s casual trafficking in once-taboo Nazi imagery bespeaks a widespread normalization of Holocaust memory and the fallacious notion that fascism has been overcome and viewers are inoculated against its contemporary manifestations. At the same time, the paper argues that the decidedly non-mimetic idiom of (neo)Nazisploitation offers a corrective against unspoken but now reified rules that privilege reverential representations of the Holocaust and emphasize its singularity.

author

• Daniel H. Magilow, University of Tennessee - Knoxville