They were titillating. Best selling pulp erotica fiction in Israel, they told sordid narratives of sadistic female SS officers--decked out with whips and boots--abusing captured American and British pilots in prisoner-of-war camps in Nazi Germany. The stories usually ended with the victimized pilots getting revenge by raping and killing their tormentors. Called ‘Stalags,’ they were named for the camps in which these tales were set.
“Ka-Tzetnik 135633” writes House of Dolls
The first ‘Stalag’ was not a Stalag, but was instrumental in bringing the short-lived genre to life. The pseudonymous author Ka-Tzetnik 135633--concentration camp slang for “prisoner,” and his Auschwitz number--published his book House of Dolls in 1953. It was the first Israeli book to confront the Holocaust, a diary of a sexually abused 14-year-old Jewish girl who was forced to be a prostitute in Auschwitz. The girl was the author’s sister, who was put to work in the brothel of Block 24 in the notorious death camp.
House of Dolls is required reading in Israel school curriculum
House of Dolls is essentially the Israeli equivalent to The Diary of Anne Frank in the United States and Elie Wiesel’s Night in Western Europe. Ka-Tzetnik 135633 became Israel’s official literary witness to the Holocaust, similar to the role Elie Wiesel has in Europe and America. House of Dolls is required reading in the Israeli school curriculum, and gives students their first exposure to the Holocaust. But there is a problem. Considered a Holocaust classic for many years, scholars now consider House of Dolls to be pornography and made up.
Ka-Tzetnik 135633's work now considered "fiction" and "graphic and barbaric"
Na’ama Shik, a researcher at Yad Vashem, says, “It was fiction. There were no Jewish whores in Auschwitz.” House of Dolls, however, is treated as historical fact throughout Israel. “His books were so graphic and barbaric,” says Sidra Ezrahi, professor of comparative Jewish literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “…if this is what they have chosen to leave in the Israel curriculum, it’s a scandal.” It was House of Dolls that inspired the 'Stalag' genre of Israeli fiction.
Stalags an Israeli genre of pulp fiction
The Stalags were an Israeli genre of erotic pulp fiction that employed Nazi characters. These books, which were very popular in the early 1960s, had graphic scenes of domination, torture and sadism between female SS guards and Allied soldiers in German POW camps. The readership of these Stalags were primarily teenage boys, a majority of whom were the children of Holocaust survivors. These pulp fictions are an example of the international post-war cultural trend of presenting Nazism as intrinsically decadent. The introduction of the genre coincided with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
The first Stalag was Stalag 13. All of the Stalag books were promoted as translated fiction written by pseudonymous authors with "American" names. A name of a fictitious translator--alongside banners such as "For the first time in Hebrew..."--is added for "authenticity." But all authors were Israeli and wrote in Hebrew. Stalag 13 tells the tale of Mike Baden, British pilot held prisoner in a POW camp. One day the camp's SS staff is replaced by "Two platoons of female SS storm troopers, wearing tight pants, shining boots, and vests from cloth that stretched across tall and upright breasts." Please click here to see a brief video about Stalags.
Stalag 13 sold 70,000 copies
Ezra Narkis, the publisher of the first Stalags, had specialized in men's magazines and porn pulp. He claims that Stalag 13 sold 70,000 copies. Another account says that producers of the TV show Hogan's Heroes heard about the book's success during a visit to Israel and decided to adapt it. The show also took place in Stalag 13. There were about 80 titles of Stalags in all, beginning in 1961 with one title published in 1965.
Nazi dominatrix in charge of SS guards
A common plot device is a dominatrix in charge of a unit of female SS guards. Some were adapted from real life SS women such as Ilse Koch (the "Bitch of Buchenwald") and Irma Grese (the "Beautiful Beast") of Auschwitz. The brutality of these Nazi female characters has a price. In Stalag of Leaches, the dominatrix is tossed into a pit of leaches, while in Stalag 217 the female in charge is strangled by her ex-lover. Every Stalag ends with "settling the score."
The Nazi characters in the Stalags are presented with dualities that they slip between quite easily. Pinchevski and Brand write in their essay that Nazi "bipolarity" is "on the one hand, the realization of ideology and instrumental rationality, on the other the incarnation of savagery and corruption."
Both the books of Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (House of Dolls and others) and the Stalags have had a lasting effect upon Israeli society. According to Israeli filmmaker Ari Libsker, whose 60-minute documentary Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel was released in 2008, it is a similar blend of “horror, sadism and pornography” that perpetuates the memory of the Holocaust throughout the Israeli consciousness into the 21st century.
Eric Brothers - Eric Brothers' forthcoming book,The Berlin Ghetto, will be published by The History Press in the U.K. in 2012.
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