Stalags: Pornography and Holocaust in Israel

Directed by Ari Libsker

Review by Roberto Azula

The subject matter of Ari Libsker’s Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel is utterly outrageous and absurd, yet this remarkable documentary manages to retain a sober, balanced tone, as if it were calmly analyzing global warming or rising unemployment. Stalags chronicles the rise and fall of a genre of literature that beggars belief. In the early 1960s, Israelis got caught up in “stalag books”, a series of phony accounts of American soldiers in World War II who get captured by the Nazis, and then must endure torture and “rape” at the hands of gorgeous, buxom SS agents. Publishers could not print enough of these ridiculous paperbacks (adorned with graphic and shocking covers) as horny teenagers and adults alike snapped them up as quickly as they were put on the street. Small wonder, as these books were the only pornography that was permitted at the time. The popularity of these books reached a crescendo during the 1962 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann; in many newspapers, ads for stalag books were placed next to articles about the Eichmann trial!

The documentary gives an exhaustively researched portrait of the men who penned these tales, and shows how the stalag genre eventually evolved into an arms race of more violent and sexually charged stories. I was fascinated by the analysis of the writing style of these books; they were written in a deliberate “translated” style, as if they were genuine English documents transliterated into stilted Hebrew. The result was prose so bad it’s genius, as the Israeli hack writers lovingly mimicked the lurid, hardboiled English syntax of pulp novels in their formula narratives of tough GIs being whipped, fondled, and sexually humiliated by beautiful women in tight fitting SS uniforms and stiletto boots. “There were no such things as female SS officers!” laughs one historian, but it is fairly clear that authenticity was not exactly what stalag readers were after.

But Stalags is much more than just about absurdity of the genre. It is also an even-handed and often discomforting look into the psychology and context of these books’ popularity. The film delves into sexual fetishism that fed the stalags’ popularity, from the simple lust for blonde German women to the more tangled issues of misogyny and the desire for vengeance. I was also surprised to learn that before Eichmann trial, the Holocaust was rarely discussed in Israel, and was even a source of shame for survivors. Libsker takes aim at the authenticity of K. Tzetnik’s The House of Dolls, a narrative of Jewish sex slaves in World War II that is now required reading in Israeli schools. Stalags poses the provocative theory that The House of Dolls, the first published account of the Holocaust, was not only fake, but served as the direct inspiration for the S&M excesses of the stalag genre.

Stalags is destined to be a classic. The film is shot in the pleasing, old-fashioned style of 1970s documentaries, a refreshing contrast to CGI and reenactment dominated productions that often kill the credibility of many of today’s documentaries. Stalags clocks in at a tidy sixty minutes, but in this short span you will be shocked, delighted, and provoked into not only thinking about the darker corners of human sexuality, but what may be dwelling inside of you.