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Nazism

Passed November 12, 1918, Article 118 of the Constitution of the Weimar Republic abolished all censorship. This atmosphere of sexual freedom, combined with inflation, led many into such marginal industries as pornography, and porn exploded in storefronts. (Joseph Slade, "Nazi Imagery in Contemporary Culture," Dimensions, V. 11, No. 2, pp. 9-15)

The public protested and on May 29, 1920, the Reichstag passed the Reich Film Act, re-establishing censorship for movies. In 1926, Germany made all forms of porn criminal. Jewish intellectual Kurt Tucholvsky said the law truly aimed at allowing the government to curb all independent expression.

Tucholsky at one time edited the Berlin weekly Die Weltbuhne, whose staff was mainly composed of Jewish radicals. (Dennis Prager. Why the Jews. p. 64)

The magazine indiscriminately attacked Germany. Tucholsky wrote: "This country which I am allegedly betraying is not my country; this state is not my state; this legal system is not my legal system."

Ordinary Germans reacted with fury to these nihilistic attacks, electing the Nazis in 1932 to bring order. On May 6, 1933, Nazi sympathizers raided the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, the creation of Jewish physican Magnus Hirschfield (1868-1935). Dr. Hirschfield fought for rights for homosexuals and for open sexual discussion. He authored the two-volume Sexual History of the World War and the five-colume Encyclopedia of Sexology; "both mapped uncharted terrains of human sexuality." (Slade)

A month before the raid, Dr. Hirschfield shipped boxes of scholarly and pornographic material to Argentina which eventually found its way to the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Reproduction, and Gender at Indiana University.

The Nazis campaign against sexual expression ranged from common porn to high art. The Nazis hated such artistic movements as Dad, Expressionism, and Futurism, which overflowed with erotic themes.

Imprisoning pornographers as "asocials," the Nazis held public trials which may've been greeted by public approval. Porners were identified in concentration camps with black stars.

The Nazis used pornography, however, when it suited them. Hitler's lieutenant Julius Streicher, who bragged about his porn collection, edited the tabloid Der Sturmer which showed drawings and fiction of Jews raping Aryan women. "Those of a psychoanalytic bent could make much of the fact that a number of German fascists demonized Jews by using the language and lore of pornography - while castigating Jews for immorally wielding pornographic material against the German nation in order to corrupt its youth." (Slade)

A bureaucrat in Goebbels Propaganda Ministry, said that when pornography goes public, it produces "a truly pagan Kulturpolitik." When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, they flooded bookstores with pornography. In 1940, Josef Goebbels proposed a plan to turn the French against the English by faking a "pornographic diary" of an English prisoner of war, "with a detailed and salacious account of his bedroom adventures in Paris with their wives, sisters and sweethearts of French soldiers at the front." (The Jewish Presence)

During World War II, Allied troops told each other dirty jokes about the Fuhrer's supposed "missing testicle." Writes Dr. Slade: "It is a classic example of the political function of pornography; a demotic - perhaps even democratic - attempt to reduce the mighty by rooting their motives within the mechanisms of basic bodily functions."

Americans after the War took revenge on their enemies by caricaturing the Nazis in pornographic stories and images. Eventually Nazism became sexy.

The Mitchell Brothers released Never a Tender Moment in 1979, featuring Marilyn Chambers, Tanya Robertson and Carol Christy in a series of vignettes. The film lives up to its title, particularly in its second story "Hot Nazis." First you see two naked women doing each other until Nazi guards, both men and women, arrive and brutally rape the women.

The Mitchell Brothers also released Beyond De Sade in 1979, as a continuation of Never a Tender Moment. "If you don't do bizarre things and enjoy them, that will screw you up," says Marilyn Chambers. "So, 24 hours a day, I think of all kinds of ways to have sex."

Bob Rimmer recommends collecting this movie because it's "the only real-life demonstration of masochism I have ever seen. It's mind-boggling!"(Guide, p.216)

It's no accident that Beyond De Sade and Never A Tender Moment appeared together, for there's a straight line from the Marquis De Sade's philosophy of might makes right to Hitler and German fascism.

Nazism, as portrayed in the rape sequence in Never a Tender Moment, is a common theme in porn and pop culture.

"We are the Master Race," proclaims the American rock group The Dictators on a record album. Another rock group, Blue Oyster Cult whose umlaut over the capital O in Oyster seems to be part of the message, uses a quasi-swastika emblem and sings such songs as "Career of Evil," "Subhuman," and "Dominance and Submission." Many rock performers sport swastikas and Iron Crosses as adornments. Trade in Nazi memorabilia is big business. Best-selling souvenirs include portraits and photographs of Hitler, Himmler, Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, etc..

"The stuff that sells the best," a storekeeper told a reporter, "are concentration-camp objects. Photographs, shots of concentration camps. That's what people want."

Generally, softcore films more than hardcore sexualized Nazism. The all-male film The Golden Boys of the S.S. said in ads that it was "the first daring look at the secret tortures and brutal pleasures" of those golden boys. The earlier film, 1975's Ilse the She-Wolf of the S.S. is set in a Nazi Concentration camp where male prisoners were sterilized. It's for those who like straight sex with their sadomasochism. Nazism and big tits proved a winner at the box office with the sequel, 1976's Ilsa, Harem Keeper. In the same year, Russ Meyer combines big tits with Nazi humor in Up!. Lieben-Camp promises "violence and horror in a female concentration camp." Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter reduces the Holocaust to sadomasochistic sex between an SS officer and his lovely virgin victim, first performed in a concentration camp and then later in a postwar reunion. "Seducer and seduced, torturer and victim become locked in an embrace of sexual perversity. In this film, as in Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties, the concentration camp, even the death camp, serves as a kind of prefabricated locale, with its images of sadism built it - whips, beatings, tortures, naked bodies, blood, urine, excrement. The Nazis, who mastered, refined, and mass-produced methods of torture and murder, continue to fascinate today's generation of sadomasochists and other consumers of the culture of pornography." (The Jewish Presence by Lucy Dawidowitz)

William S. Pechter termed this combination of sex, sadism, violence and Nazism "death-camp chic" in his May 1976 Commentary essay.

"Nazism is a ready source of authority fantasies," writes Craig Anthony of RAME. "It doesn't follow that an interest in such fantasies translates into affiliation with racism and genocide. Fantasies are the ultimate refuge from conformity."

Commenting on the relations between Nazism and pornography in reviewing the pornographic The Olympia Reader, Lewis Corey wrote: "That those who turn to Sade, to books on torture or to the interminable floggings and humiliations detailed in a number of Olympia Press publications also dream of Hitler and the beauteous SS, of pogroms and the sexual torment of children is an obvious yet profoundly disturbing truth.... It makes it doubly important that we reexamine the political, psychological, social aspects of "total freedom" of publication. "Total freedom" of publication includes Streicher on the need to castrate all Jews; or any flysheet instructing us of the racial inferiority and sexual aggressiveness of Negroes or West Indians."

In his 1952 essay, Lewis Corey traces the influence of de Sade and his philosophy of perversion among nineteenth and twentieth century writers, artists, and intellectuals who "were overwhelmingly anti-humanist, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic" (italics in original). The Italian decadents turned to Mussolini; the artistic and literary cults turned to Hitler.

"The Nazi elites were adepts in the practice of sadism, from homosexuality to lust murder. Their concentration camps became a king of 'public brothel' where sadistic practices flourished. including hypochorematophily (sic), necrophilia and anthropophagy."

Pornography and Nazism have mutually reinforced each other over the decades. Their joint enemy is Western values which are largely based on Judaism and Christianity.

"The anti-humanists and sadists helped create and develop Fascism and Nazism. These movements, in turn, bred new generations of anti-humanists and sadists, providing ever-increasing audiences for the consumption of pornography, plain and political. Today a sizable population views the Third Reich's terrors and murders only through a prism of pornography. Their loss of moral affect becomes a loss of political affect. Morally dulled, they become more vulnerable to the appeal of antihumanist movements and eventually more receptive to the obscenity of anti-Semitism." (The Jewish Presence by Lucy Dawidowicz)