Hot Docs 2008

The improbable but true story of a wildly popular series of racy paperbacks called 'Stalags'. They became national bestsellers and took conservative Israel by storm in the early 1960s. Their perverse and bizarre narratives, based on Nazi themes, were the only erotic 'literature' available in the country at that time (one of the more lurid books was titled I Was Colonel Shultz’s Private Bitch). Disguised as American publications, it was later discovered that these tales of female SS officers with boots and whips were in fact penned and published by Israeli Jews. The Stalag phenomenon immediately followed the notorious Adolph Eichmann trial, which was credited as a factor behind the genre’s brutal and sadistic tone. At a time when Holocaust scholarship was in its infancy, for many young Israelis these pornographic fictions were their first exposure to the brutal realities of the Second World War.