Film and Television

We shall now explore how Nazism and neo-Nazism have been imagined on screen, beginning with Nazisploitation films, and then moving on to mainstream films and television. In the logic of the Nazisploitation film, all Germans are Nazis and all Nazis are members of the SS with all members of the SS being war criminals, medical experimenters and sexual sadists. ¹ These films need positioning in a wider context of other exploitation films that became popular in the 1970s, including Blaxploitation, nunsploitation, Mexploitation, ‘mondo’ film, and women-in-prison movies. The term itself stems from moving beyond the common practice for promotion. Germany went through a particular type of sexual freedom from 1918 to 1933, during the Weimar Republic, but this freedom was at the cost of curbing a minority. Historians of the Nazi era such as Gerhard Ritter wrongly blamed so-called sexual immorality in the Weimar period for its collapse, spreading ‘cultural decay’ (Kulturverfall) paving the way for the Nazis. ² This link was popularized in films, such as Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972).