Page 44 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

convenience, a doctor could rationalise his experimentation with the thought that since his
patient was ultimately condemned to death in any case, he could truly do no harm. 18
Furthermore, 'with the help of an advanced medical student, relatively healthy Jewish inmates had
toxic substances, some petroleum-based, rubbed into their arms and legs. It was hoped that the
resulting infections and abscesses would provide information useful in detecting ruses by malingerers
trying to avoid military service'.15 Although the case of Dr Mengele is perhaps the better known, also
at Auschwitz, Dr Wirths experimented with infectious diseases that 'might threaten the health of
troops'.20 The litany of medical atrocities reads like an outline for Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS; 'Camp 9'
is an experimental medical camp, designed to research the effects of various extremes (air pressure,
heat, cold) on soldiers, but using (naked) women for experimental purposes. Furthermore, at Camp
9, prisoners are injected with infectious diseases so Reich doctors can experiment with new drugs.
As Lifton and Hackett note with regard to Auschwitz, 'the Hygienic Institute used human, rather
than animal, muscle for its culture media. Animal meat was simply dearer in such an environment,
even as Auschwitz substituted human guinea pigs for lab animals'.21 Again, as with the issue of the
presumed fictional 'Love Camps', the experimentation on human guinea pigs was less a Sadean desire
for torture, and more the ideology which saw Jews and other non-Aryans as simply sub-human - the
equivalent of animals. Strangely enough, apart from the experimental testicular transplant in Lager
SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur, the other kinds of 'experiments' going on have no apparent factual
appeal, unlike Ilsa's: they seem to be experiments in 'arousal' and really consist of little but Aryan
men raping different prisoner women in different situations. There is no attempt to explain these
experiments, other than as voyeuristic 'sex numbers'.
Again and again, what we see in these Nazi sexploitation films are composites' of historical reality
— Jewish doctors working in the camp infirmaries, specious medical experimentation, sexual assaults
on women prisoners - composites which 'for dramatic purposes', as the Ilsa title card reads, simplify
the historiographic complexities of the Third Reich. However, these Nazi sexploitation movies are
merely doing what exploitation cinema has always done, namely reducing complex issues to their
most basic and primal meanings. Finally, we end up back at the Luther-Smith quote cited at the
outset. What perhaps does make these particular films feel different is their relationship to a much
more recent history - often still a living history.

CONCLUSION

Studies of cult and exploitation films often try to justify their interest based on kitsch or aesthetic
grounds. Jeffrey Sconce's 'paracinema' attempts to explore the inherent aesthetics of the film, even
when they violate academy-defined notions of taste and quality. He notes:

By concentrating on a film's formal bizarreness and stylistic eccentricity, the paracinematic
audience ... foregrounds structures of cinematic discourse and artifice so that the material
identity of the film ceases to be a structure made invisible in service of the diegesis, but becomes

30