Did the Nazis make porn? Historical dispute over Sachsenwald films

Did the Nazis produce pornographic films and barter them for supplies? Do some of these films survive? The Guardian reported on a publishing world brouhaha in Germany earlier this year.

He is one of Germany's hottest young novelists. And, until last week, few in Germany's literary world doubted that Thor Kunkel's latest novel, Final Stage, was going to be anything but a rip-roaring success. The novel had all the right ingredients - sex, a lot of sex, Nazis, more Nazis, and a spectacular romantic finale. Furthermore, the book was based on original research carried out by Kunkel into one of the Third Reich's best-kept secrets - a series of pornographic films shot by the Nazis in the woods around Hamburg.

Last week, however, Kunkel returned from a holiday in Amsterdam to discover that his publishing house had abruptly decided to cancel his novel two months before its scheduled release. Kunkel's publisher, Alexander Fest, said that he had shelved the novel at the last minute because of what he said were "aesthetic" and "content" differences with its feted 40-year-old author.

Fest did not elaborate. The affair has dominated the literary pages of Germany's broadsheets for more than a week, with most observers believing that Kunkel's real crime was something else - he had made the characters in the novel, who work for a fictional SS Hygiene Institute in Berlin, appear far too glamorous. And he had downplayed the Holocaust.

Kunkel defends his revisionist, humorous depiction of the Nazis. Other publishers have stepped in with offers to publish the book. More about the Fest/Kunkel feud in the Telegraph. But back to the Nazi porn.

Before submitting his manuscript to his publisher last summer, Kunkel had researched long and hard into one of the most subterranean aspects of the Nazi era - a series of erotic home movies known as the Sachsenwald films, shot secretly in 1941. Officially, pornography was forbidden under the Nazis; in reality, however, the films were not only screened privately for the amusement of senior Nazi figures, but were also traded in north Africa for insect repellent and other commodities.

Kunkel discovered two of the black and white films - the pastoral Desire in the Woods and The Trapper. In one of them, a man ties a naked woman to a tree. Incredibly, Kunkel tracked down the actress some 60 years after her woodland nude scene, living in an old people's home outside Hamburg. "I found her via a photographer who had known her since she was 14, when she posed for nude photographs," Kunkel says. [...]

Kunkel also interviewed 57 elderly German soldiers who had served with Erwin Rommel in north Africa, where much of the novel is set. They confirmed what he already suspected - that during the second world war, the German military traded Nazi pornography with the locals. The Sachsenwald films even ended up in the hands of the Bey of Tunis, a regent with a legendary collection of pornography. "It was the thing the locals were most interested in. In return, the soldiers got food, water and supplies," Kunkel says.

This week Deutsche Welle reports that the two films cited by Kunkel were probably not Nazi productions after all.

The scandal over the so-called "Saxon Wood Films" Nazi porn movies has taken a new twist. The films, exposed by author Thor Kunkel in his controversial novel "Endstufe," were alleged to have been made during the World War II and sold or exchanged for goods to aid the war effort. But new reports on Wednesday claim that the films could not have been made by the Nazis. Experts analysing the filming techniques used in the movies say that the porn flicks were likely made in the 1950's or 1960's, and not in the late 1930's as previously claimed. Also, the firm Sachsenwald GmbH which is credited with producing the movies is not known by experts who have a wide knowledge of production companies operating during the Nazi era.

This short item doesn't broach the question of whether Kunkel's claim was a hoax, an honest mistake or something in-between. There must be much more on this story in the German press.

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