Sex & the Swastika

[Paul Mackin]

On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, rj wrote: (quoting DeLillo)

>     "So you have this pornographic interest. You have the fact that
> movies were screened for him all the time in Berlin and Obersalzburg,
> sometimes two a day. Those Nazis had a thing for movies. They put
> everything on film. Executions, even, at his personal request. Film was
> essential to the Nazi era. Myth, dreams, memory. He like lewd movies
> too, according to some. Even Hollywood stuff, girls with legs."


I have nothing definitive to offer on the question of what did we know and
when did we know it. However I firmly believe I heard a naive account of
the gruesome Nazi filming-of-executions-for-entertainment phenomenon as
early as 1937. A girl of German nationality in my sixth grade class took
time off from school to go with her family to Germany to attend the
wedding of her older sister to a German military officer (don't remember
if he was SS or just army). Upon her return, as was the usual practice in
my school when someone had had an interesting vacation experience, the
girl (better not give her name as she could still be alive) got up before
the class to relate her impressions of Hitler's Germany. I now only
remember clearly  one topic she touched on. It had to do with what in our
child viewpoint was simply the subject of movies and movie making. We were
all movie crazy and we were in the part of the country where observing
movies being made on the city streets was not all that uncommon.  Many of
the movies involved people getting killed, particularly Westerns. Anyway,
what the little girl shocked us all by revealing (and I don't remember how
she came upon the information-probably just had overheard it being
discussed) was that when someone got killed in a German movie they
actually killed real people (words to that effect). 

			P.