History
A blend of sexual imagery and Nazi themes was pioneered by Italian directors and can be found as early as 1945 in Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossellini. Another Rossellini film, Germany Year Zero (1948), connects Nazism with homosexuality and pedophilia. A major influence on the genre was the controversial art-house production The Damned (1969), directed by Luchino Visconti, about the rise and fall of a German industrialist family in the Third Reich. The film featured an orgy of homosexual SA-Men, and depicted one of the main characters who eventually joins the SS as a troubled multiple pervert, posing in a transvestite outfit, molesting little girls, and finally, committing incest with his own mother. Other early examples of sexual themes and Nazism combined can be found in the West German productions Des Teufels General (The Devil's General) (1955) by Helmut Käutner and Lebensborn/Ordered to Love (1961).
The 1964 film The Pawnbroker includes a flashback scene showing nude women kept in a concentration camp brothel. But the earliest sexploitation film set in a Nazi camp was Love Camp 7 (1969). It was also the vanguard of the modern women-in-prison genre that emerged in the early 1970s.
Love Camp 7 established the pattern for the many films that followed. The story resembles a "true adventure" pulp yarn from a men's adventure magazine of the period. In order to rescue a Jewish scientist, two female agents infiltrate a Nazi Joy Division camp, where prisoners are kept as sex slaves for German officers. There are scenes of boot-licking humiliation, whipping, torture, lesbianism, and near-rape, culminating in a violent and bloody escape. The stock characters include a cruel and perverse commandant, a lesbian doctor, sadistic guards who freely abuse the prisoners, and a sympathetic German who tries to help the prisoners.
Read more about this topic: Nazi Exploitation
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