Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS

It seems for every serious holocaust film, novel, or memoir there is at least one Stalag fiction novel (otherwise known as ‘holocaust pornography’) or Nazisploitation flick, with the most curious thing about this phenomenon being that Jews are the ones that are largely responsible for this seemingly sexually schizophrenic smut. For example, Auschwitz survivor, Yehiel De-Nur, Dinoor—a man who has written extensively in Hebrew about his time concentrating in concentration camps and who testified at the (in)famous Adolf Eichmann Trial on 7 June 1961, even melodramatically collapsing while on the stand after describing the camp as the “planet of the ashes” and failing to give anymore testimony—was responsible for penning the erotically charged novella House of Dolls (1955) under the penname ‘Ka-Tsetnik 135633’ which was ostensibly based on the author’s sister’s experience as a sex slave in a ‘Joy Division’ (indeed, this is where the British late-1970s/early-1980s post-punk group of the same name derived their name), which was a fictional group of Jewish women in concentration camps during WWII that were forced to sexually service young Aryan soldiers. As is also depicted in the highly worthwhile, if not considerably banally assembled, documentary Stalags (2008) directed by Israeli filmmaker Ari Libsker—a man notorious for agitating his fellow chosenites with docs like Circumcision (2004), which depicts the old kosher cock-cutting ritual as highly harmful—trash pulp novels called ‘Stalag Fiction’ with pseudo-titillating titles like I Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch featuring Jews being sadistically sexually degraded and tortured by female SS guards that were all the rage among Israeli men during the 1950s and early 1960s, but the Eichmann Trial put a stop to all that. Hell, even Otto Preminger’s epic Hollywood zio-agitprop flick Exodus (1960) starring Paul Newman features a scene where an aspiring Irgun terrorist played by Sal Mineo confesses he was anally pillaged by an evil Aryan butcher while he was imprisoned at Auschwitz. Of course, the Nazisploitation exploitation subgenre, which arguably began during WWII and reached its zenith around the mid-1970s with the release of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1976), is easily the most high-profile example of the cultural phenomenon of the fetishization and eroticization of the SS and concentration camps. Although classic Italian art house works like Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974), and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1976) were the most influential films in terms of popularizing ‘Nazi chic’ imagery and cinematic SS sadomasochism, the American exploitation effort Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS is arguably the most popular and iconic of these films, thus making it all the more curious that it was produced by kosher confederate producer David F. Friedman—a man probably best known for his collaboration with fellow Hebraic smut-peddler Herschell Gordon Lewis, including the proto-splatter flick Blood Feast (1963)—under the somewhat psychopathic tongue-in-cheek Teutonic pseudonym ‘Herman Traeger.’ Considering Friedman co-produced and had a small cameo in Lee Frost’s early American Nazisploitation flick Love Camp 7 (1969) co-produced and co-penned by exploitation hack Bob Cresse, it is fairly obvious where the producer got the idea for the film. An all the more dubious reworking of the formulaic women-in -prison film (WiP) exploitation sub genre, albeit set in a concentration camp (somewhat humorously the film was shot on the Los Angeles set of the POW concentration camp TV sitcom series Hogan’s Heroes), Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, directed by exploitation hack turned Hollywood producer Don Edmonds (Wild Honey, Terror on Tour) is basically a sick joke at the expense of the viewer’s intelligence and morality that goes further than even all the movies of Jerry Bruckheimer, Michael Bay, and Steven Spielberg combined in terms of demonstrating the inexplicable lows that certain Judaics are willing to go to earn a couple shekels.

Opening with a sadistically patronizing warning from fictional producer Herman Traeger juxtaposed with an Uncle Adolf speech that reads, “The film you are about to see is based upon documented fact. The atrocities shown were conducted as “medical experiments in special concentration camps throughout Hitler’s Third Reich. Although these crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes. Because of its shocking subject matter, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never occur again,” Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS purports to be a docudrama of sorts, but it ultimately makes Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) seem like an objectively directed piece of cinéma-vérité. Very, very loosely based on the purported WWII era crimes of female concentration camp guard Ilse ‘The Bitch of Buchenwald’ Koch, who was accused of turning Jews into lampshades and soap and whatnot, and who committed suicide in prison in 1967 while serving a life sentence, Edmonds' pseudo-erotic celluloid excrement is not interested in the facts, but only offending, shocking, titilating, and furthering post-WWII Allied agitprop in a work that attempts to create a torture-porn-based myth in the form of a fictional, big bosomed blonde female Joseph Mengele who gets a sadomasochistic kick out of devilishly defiling and eventually killing nubile young Jewesses and testing the sexual prowess and stamina of men until she gets tired of them and has them exterminated as well. Starring as the eponymous lead, middle-aged North American Nordic babe Dyanne Thorne (Joseph W. Sarno’s Sin in the Suburbs (1964), The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio (1971)), who began her career as a nudie cutie in pin-up mags and would eventually earn a Ph.D. in comparative religion, the film owes virtually all of its charm and charisma to its lead actress, who apparently did her fair share of reading up on Ilse Koch to prepare for the role. More of a femi-nazi than a National Socialist true believer, Ilse believes more in the superiority of Aryan womanhood than the Aryan race as demonstrated by her remarks such as, “a well-trained woman can withstand pain longer than a man.” Indeed, as her many cruel psycho-sexual conquests with her many male concubines demonstrate, Ilse’s pussy is more powerful than a panzer tank, but her Wotan-like womanhood is ultimately tested when she meets a prestigious, sexually potent German-American POW who manages to sexually service three fiercely feisty fascistic fräuleins at once.

Beginning with double-D Nazi diva Ilsa riding on some swarthy untermensch man’s cock, the anti-heroine seems somewhat sensitive initially, but that all ends after she takes a shower, declares to her subhuman male concubine, “once an prisoner has slept with me, he will never sleep with another woman again,” and proceeds to take her sex slave to a operation room/torture chamber where she has his cock cut off. Needless to say, the castrated prisoner is not exactly satisfied with the fact that he has had “the honor of sleeping with a German woman.” The real fun begins for Ilse when a bunch of female prisoners are brought in for selection, with some being sent to a ‘Joy Division’ and the others being assigned to “help the cause of medical research and therefore save thousands of lives,” with the latter group having their pussies closely shaved by sinisterly Sapphic SS guards in preparation for (anti)erotic experimentation. The same day, a group of male prisoners are shipped in and Ilse becomes smitten with a blond German-born American student named ‘Wolfe’ (Gregory Knoph), who is dismissive of his Aryan origins, stating that it is “something beyond my control.” When Ilse has the men strip and inspects their bodies, she mocks their members, stating, “you call yourself men…I see no manhood between your legs” and calls Wolfe a “bastard German,” adding, “it is clear to see that their blood is tainted.” Upon talking to a Guido named Mario, Wolfe learns that, “once he has served her, that is the end of him as a man” in regard to Ilse’s perverse proclivity towards cutting off her male concubines' cocks. Of course, Ilsa eventually calls for Wolfe to “satisfy” her and he proclaims to the cunty Kommadant that he will “satisfy you until you beg me to stop.” As he promises, Wolfe annihilates Ilse’s nether-regions and virtually turns her into his groveling sex slave. As Wolfe explains to Mario, he is a “freak of nature” and “sort of human machine” with seeming infinite sexual stamina who learned upon reaching puberty that he could “hold back […] all night if necessary” as long as he wanted. Convinced that “no man” can perform as Wolfe did that night before, Ilsa has the prisoner engage in a threesome with two tyrannical big titted fräulein guards, which he does with gusto. After proving his meta-SS-worthy sexual stamina, Wolfe is able to make sexual demands of Ilsa.

Meanwhile, Mario meets up with female prisoners, including tough bitch Anna (played by mulatto actor/director Mario Van Peebles’ German mother Maria Marx) and Rosette (Jacqueline Giroux), and begins plotting a prison revolt. Indeed, being forced to endure gigantic electric vibrators, syphilis injections the slow removal of fingernails, and electric volts to the nipples, among various other forms of inhumane treatment, the female prisoners are just dying to escape from the clutches of the crazed kraut cunt commandant, whose lard ass scientist ‘Binz’ (played by George ‘Buck’ Flower of John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and They Live (1988)), enjoys doing extensive research on untermensch genitals. When Ilsa’s lard ass goon boss the ‘General’ (B-movie character actor Richard Kennedy of Farewell, My Lovely (1975) starring Robert Mitchum and The Buddy Holly Story (1978)) and his small blond beast aide Richter (Lance Marshall), who bears an almost disturbingly startling resemblance to Austrian-German actor Oskar Werner, show up at the debauched death camp, the carnally cruel Kommadant must rationalize her insanely inhumane experiments, stating of her choice not to provide anesthesia during surgery, “One does not give caviar to guinea pigs.” Luckily, the General thinks of Ilsa of as “some blonde goddess” and looks the other way, although, in a scene echoing the fictional story of Uncle Adolf deriving sexual pleasure from his niece urinating on his face, the SS she-bitch is forced to give her pervert boss a nice warm golden shower. On the day of the planned prison revolt, Wolfe manages to coerce Ilsa into allowing him to tie her up before they commence coitus, but instead of banging the bitch, he shoves a handkerchief in her mouth and proceeds to release all the prisoners in the camp who exterminate all their former tormentors in similarly heinous ways as they were once tortured, even though the German-American hero advises them to face the courts of the Allies. After killing virtually all the Nazi guards, nurses, and scientists, the General’s aid Richter shows up in a Panzer tank with an SS brigade and liquidates virtually all of the prisoners, including Mario. Ironically, in a cynical twist ending, it is not one of her many victims (Anna tries but dies from her wounds before she can carry it out), but Richter who kills Ilsa, which he was ordered to do by SS- Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who wants no evidence that the death camp or its experiments ever took place. As Richter radios to his boss after carrying his orders out, “General, your orders have been carried out. Camp 9 has ceased to exist. You may tell the Reichsführer that the Allies will find nothing. They will never know.” In the end, only Wolfe and Rosette survive.

As one could expect from a relatively successful sadistically salacious flick featuring such an iconic SS blonde beastess as the lead, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS spawned three innately inferior sequels, including Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976) directed and produced by Don Emmonds, Ilsa, the Wicked Warden (1977) directed by Spanish exploitation auteur/pornographer Jess Franco, and Ilsa, The Tigress of Siberia (1977) directed by Jean LaFleur and produced by Roger Corman and Ivan Reitman, with Dyanne Thorne reprising her role as the eponymous lead for all three films. Aside from being directed by the same non-auteur as the original film, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks also wallows in cheap zionist agitprop as a work where Ilsa, like some real ex-Nazi leaders (i.e. Johann von Leers, Otto Skorzeny), teams up with an ‘Islamofascist’ dictator. Although amateurishly directed and a total abject insult to both the real National Socialists and their victims, as well as the German language (indeed, most of the characters sound like second-rate extras from Hogan’s Heroes), Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS is shockingly effective in that, unlike most Nazisploitation and women-in-prison flicks, the film plays out in a fairly serious and thus brutal fashion that lacks the goofy and low-camp elements that give the viewer temporary relief from all the lowbrow aesthetic savagery. In other words, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS is an ugly and sadistic film for ugly and sadistic people that reminds the viewer of what true and unadulterated exploitation cinema is all about, as a seriously sick flick that has about as much aesthetic merit as a Mexican drug cartel snuff flick. Undoubtedly, the film even makes Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty (1976) seem like a remake as opposed to a semi-parody of Visconti’s The Damned (1969). Somewhat fittingly, director Don Emmonds went on to co-produce True Romance (1993) penned by Quentin Tarantino, who would go on to mainstream Nazisploitation via Inglourious Basterds (2009), thus reflecting how much society has degenerated since the release of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS.  Indeed, when it comes down to it, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and its similarly psychopathic celluloid bastard spawn Inglourious Basterds more or less reflect the average Hollywood and public school indoctrinated American filmgoer's historical perspective regarding the Second World War and the Third Reich, thus indicating that Dr. Goebbels could have learned a thing or two from his Hebraic enemies in Hollywood, whose incessant post-WWII depiction of Adolf Hitler as the virtual devil incarnate make the titular Joseph Süß Oppenheimer of Veit Harlan's Jud Süß (1940) seem like an eccentric old uncle by comparison.  Of course, then again, it is probably more appealing to have a big breasted blonde SS she-bitch like Ilsa as a representative of the more unsavory elements of one's race and people than a swarthy rat-like schemer like Jud Süß.

-Ty E