Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a 1975 sexploitation film directed by Don Edmunds and starring Dyanne Thorne. The film is controversial, and has sparked many years of debate about how ethical it is for a piece of a media to depict something as evil and horrifying as the real-world Holocaust as fodder for sadistic sexual fantasies. While the moral greyness of making Nazi uniforms sexy is certainly complicated, the exploitation genre is not the only one guilty of fetishizing the Holocaust’s violence. The film’s exploitation nature simply gave Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS license to put in the forefront what more “respectable films” already were, and continue to be, doing in the background: fetishizing the sadistic treatment of human bodies.
It’s difficult to talk about this film without examining the place and time in which it came out. The 1970s were something of a golden age for exploitation films. Having officially left behind the Hays Code of the ’60s, and existing before the advent of the home video of the ’80s, the ’70s was the decade of debauchery-ridden theaters. Drive-ins and grindhouse theaters opened a whole new market for shoestring budget films that big studios refused to make, be it because of graphic violence, over-the-top sexuality, or racially diverse casting. The 1970s opened a door in American filmmaking. Many important cult classics came from this era of grindhouse cinema, from I Spit on Your Grave and Pink Flamingos to Boss N****r and Super Fly. It was the era for “bad taste”. And “bad taste” is certainly the gentlest way to describe the “nazisploitation” sub-genre.
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS was not the first of its type. It was green-lit for its production after the success of Love Camp 7 in 1969, a sexploitation film about female inmates acting as prostitutes for German soldiers. And indeed, in between Love Camp 7 and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, we had similarly themed films such as The Cut-Throats (1969), Torture Me, Kiss Me (1970), and Night Porter (1974). Despite all these predecessors, She Wolf of the SS is still the go-to image of the quintessential nazisploitation film for many people. Love Camp 7 truly is the Black Christmas to She Wolf’s Halloween – in each case, the former originated many of the tropes of the sub-genre, but the latter distilled it into its truest, purest form.
If ever there was a year where a film that brazenly sexualized Nazis could be given a wide release in American theaters, it was 1975. And even still, the film was immediately met with intense disdain and pushback. Gene Siskel, of Siskel and Ebert fame, called it "the most degenerate picture I have seen to play downtown ... Ilsa plays like a textbook for rapists and mutilation freaks." However, Siskel was not a man poised to enjoy most exploitation films; he also referred to I Spit on Your Grave as a “vile bag of garbage.” While it’s easy to point out the bad taste in pairing genital mutilation with glamor shot of breasts, bad taste is a classic feature of the exploitation genre. The more interesting discussion about the pushback against She Wolf of the SS is the ethics of sexualizing Nazis.
Scholar Omayra Cruz once asked, “how anyone could stoop so low as to bastardize the terror and tragedy of the Nazi experience?” However, as Laura Catherine Frost wrote in her book Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, “the politically forbidden and repudiated is just as likely to be the substance of erotic fantasy and the chosen political object. ... Images of sexualized fascism derive their meaning precisely from the distance mainstream culture puts between itself and deviation.” The theory is that the sexual fascination with Nazism comes from how we eroticize the powerful and the forbidden. The more distant and taboo Nazism became, the easier it was to fetishize. The nazisploitation film sub-genre did not begin in the 1970s, but its rise in prominence then could certainly be partially attributed to the 30 years of distance that now existed between the events. There were adults by then who were born after the Nazis lost power. To some people, it became less real, a taboo “bad thing” to giggle about while playing dress up, as if the Nazis were just Dracula, a fictional monster that only existed in the pages of a book, possibly made worse by living in a world of fervent and vocal Holcaust denial.
The film Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS could certainly be deemed morally reprehensible for its flippant depiction of real world monsters and their still-in-living-memory atrocities. The character of Ilsa herself is a composite of two real-life women of the SS, Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, and not even a terribly accurate composite thereof. As Mikel Koven said in his book Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema, the film “reduces the complexities of a real person into its most sensational elements.” It can definitely be argued that despite the film’s disclaimer of “documented fact,” the movie is not in any way pretending to be a truly real story.
However, is it really any more atrocious than depictions of such events in other films that are critically acclaimed for being “serious” or “important”? Both Schindler’s List (1993) and Holocaust (1978) claim to depict true stories, but is their respective treatment of those victimized by the Holocaust not just as exploitative? The phrase “tragedy porn” comes to mind. Despite being made by Jewish filmmakers, the function of many of these films is to make gentiles feel better about themselves, often at the expense of the dignity of Holocaust victims. Judith E. Doneson, in her book Spielberg’s Holocaust, writes about the infantilization of the Jewish people in Spielberg’s film, noting how Oskar Schiendler, the “Rightous Gentile,” attempts to “rescue the weak Jews.”
An important but often overlooked detail about She Wolf of the SS is that the main people being fetishized are Ilsa and her guards. This is not to say the film never sexualizes the victims of the camp, who are stripped nude at several points. However, the women whose bodies are costumed and glamorously shot are the leather-clad dominatrixes with Nazi armbands. Their sadism is fetishized; the pain of their victims, not as much. Contrast this directly with Night Porter, a nazisploitation film from just a year prior which actively eroticizes the victim’s pain and suffering, depicting her as deriving masochistic sexual pleasure from being beaten in a concentration camp.
Consider scenes in other prestigious films about the Holocaust and how they frame the violence suffered by Jews. Schindler’s List is full of examples, most notably when Amon Goeth beats his maid, a scene that begins with him romanticizing her, cutting between them and a wedding happening at the same time. Goeth gently and erotically wraps his hands around Helen’s breasts before backhanding her across the face. No such romantic framing is ever given in She Wolf of the SS. The scene in List feels less like how we would imagine a Nazi beating his prisoner, and more like a husband striking his wife. Schindler’s List is a very emotionally driven film, so its depictions of sadism come from more interpersonal interactions. She Wolf of the SS depicts what some might call more “clinical” or “medicalized” sadism.
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS may fetishize the Holocaust, but simply in a different way than the “serious dramas” do. The film’s sexploitation aspects simply rubs off the fancy coating concealing the exploitative elements of other cinematic depictions of the Holocaust.
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