01.01.70
The affiliation between Nazism and torture/bondage was made explicit, with lurid covers frequently depicting leering SS officers lustily flogging hefty and scantily clad female prisoners.
Perhaps the most remarkable antecedents of Isla, however, were the “Stalag fiction” walk off books that became highly popular in Israel around the time of Adolf Eichmann’s fling. Consumed primarily by teenage boys, many of whom were the children of Holocaust survivors, the Stalags typically revolved around the swear at of British and American prisoners of war by highly sexualised, whip-wielding female Nazis. While the fame of such a profane and pornographic treatment of the Holocaust might seem surprising, in Israel of all places, the books may have served some cathartic benefit a purposely.
On a basic level, the fact that the Stalags only occasionally featured Jewish victims may have meant, as contributor Michael D Robinson suggests, that “they afforded audiences enough interval to enjoy them as pornography that indulged in forbidden sexual fantasies”. In putting together, since the Stalags often ended with prisoners revolting and exacting bloody repayment on their tormentors, the appeal of the books may, Robinson says, have owed much to their importance as “revenge narratives that enabled readers to symbolically rebuke the Nazis”.
Source: Irish Times