Stalag fiction was a short-lived genre of Israeli fiction

Israeli literature

Israeli literature is literature written in the State of Israel by Israelis. Most works classed as Israeli literature are written in the Hebrew language, although some Israeli authors write in Yiddish, English, Arabic and Russian...

 Nazi exploitation

Nazi exploitation

Nazi exploitation is a subgenre of exploitation film and sexploitation film that involves villainous Nazis committing criminal acts of a sexual nature often as camp or prison overseers in World War II settings...

 that flourished in the early 1960s, at the time of the Eichmann Trial.

Premise

Purported to be translations of English-language books by prisoners in concentration camps, these books were highly pornographic

Pornography

Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...

 accounts of imprisonment, generally of Allied soldiers, sexual brutalization by female SS guards, and the prisoners' eventual revenge, which usually consisted of the rape

Rape

Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...

 and murder

Murder

Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...

 of their tormentors. The books, with titles like I Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch, were especially popular among adolescent boys, often the children of concentration camp survivors.

History

The books emerged from the culture of silence that surrounded the Holocaust, especially in Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

, until the Eichmann trial. Many young people lived in the shadow of these events, but could find no answers to their inevitable questions, whether from their parents or their teachers. For most of adolescents, the only answers they could find were in the book The House of Dolls

The House of Dolls

The House of Dolls is a 1955 novella by Ka-tzetnik 135633. The novella describes "Joy Divisions", which were allegedly groups of Jewish women in the concentration camps during World War II who were kept for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers....

(1955

1955 in literature

The year 1955 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*28 May - Philip Larkin makes a train journey from Hull to London which inspires his poem The Whitsun Weddings....

) by K. Tzetnik

Yehiel De-Nur

Yehiel De-Nur or Dinur, , born Yehiel Feiner was a Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, whose books were inspired by his time as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp....

, a then-anonymous survivor of Auschwitz who wrote about women prisoners forced into prostitution by the Nazi guards—his book was later еxposed to be a work of fiction. Nevertheless, it had an impact on young Israeli males as they went through puberty: questions of identity and their parents' violent past melted into their emerging sexual identity, often fostering graphic S&M fantasies. This became more prevalent during the highly publicized Eichmann trial, when these same young people were exposed to detailed descriptions of the concentration and death camps for the very first time. K. Tzetnik himself was one of the witnesses who provided graphic testimony during the trial.

Exploiting these trends, a group of Israeli publishers began to publish dime novel

Dime novel

Dime novel, though it has a specific meaning, has also become a catch-all term for several different forms of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S...

-format memoirs, describing abuse, particularly sexual abuse, in the concentration camps. Sold in magazine kiosks, the novels, ostensibly first-person memoirs, became best-sellers. According to filmmaker Ari Libsker

Ari Libsker

Ari Libsker featured in The New York Times and won several awards.-Film Making:One of his first ones, Circumcision dealt with the effect of circumcision on the sex life of Jewish people, connecting it to castration. Channel 2 tried to censor the movie and in the end broadcast it at a late hour...

, "the Holocaust pictures that I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women."

They disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared. Within two years of the appearance of the first publication, the publishers were accused by an Israeli court of distributing pornography and the books were discontinued. Although still available underground, certain titles earned the ire of the establishment, and efforts were made to find and destroy them.

In 2003, the genre re-entered public debate in Israel with the research of popular culture researcher Eli Eshed. As a result of which Israeli filmmaker Ari Libsker

Ari Libsker

Ari Libsker featured in The New York Times and won several awards.-Film Making:One of his first ones, Circumcision dealt with the effect of circumcision on the sex life of Jewish people, connecting it to castration. Channel 2 tried to censor the movie and in the end broadcast it at a late hour...

 featured the books in a documentary film, Stalags

Stalags (film)

Stalags is a 2007 documentary film produced by Barak Heymann and directed by Ari Libsker. The film examines the history of Stalags, pornography books that featured sexy female Nazi officers sexually abusing camp prisoners...

.