Twenty-six years after the first publication of Eine Armee Gretchen, the movie was released. Despite the appearance of many naked female Wehrmacht soldiers on screen, the film received little attention at first. In part, this silence is due to the fact that, on the one hand, producer/director Erwin C. Dietrich’s longstanding career in the sex film industry had prepared him well to know what to show and how to avoid censorship. On the other hand, the cultural atmosphere in Europe after 1968 had grown more liberal. The Swiss production was, as mentioned, also released on the screens of neighboring West Germany in 1973, and serious critics dismissed it entirely. Only the
West German film journal Filmdienst wrote in a short review: ‘The story of female Wehrmacht support personnel in the Second World War is used as a topic for one of the usual sex movies: incarcerated prostitutes implore the SS Reichsführer to send them to the front, as even they have a right to a German man — we advise against [seeing this film].’24 Several years after EAG left the big screen, the movie’s VHS release contextualized it for the first time among more ‘canonical’
Nazisploitation movies. EAG was seen as a sadiconazista film with an accordingly cynical and degrading slant. When Erwin C. Dietrich brought EAG to the cinema screens at the beginning of the 1970s, the wave of cheap Nazisploitation movies, mainly from Italy and the United States, had not yet arrived. Nazi chic became fashionable after 1968, and films like the ultra-low-budget US production Love Camp 7 (1968), the Italian epic La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969), which combined breaking taboos with artistic pretension, and even the tremendously popular musical Cabaret (1972), had certainly paved the way. But these precursors to Nazisploitation, as well as increased public interest about the perversions of the Nazi regime, did not signifi-cantly influence Dietrich’s production. However, the Swiss producer, a fervent Catholic with a rather conservative world-view,25 looked to other, more traditional examples, with the clear exception of the sex report subgenre.
In EAG’s year of production, 1972, Erwin C. Dietrich attained the peak of his success. After some lean years, during which he had tried to break through with Heimat films (sentimental films with local/regional, often Alpine settings) as well as murder mysteries, he finally achieved a roaring box office success in 1968 with the erotic movie Die Nichten der Frau Oberst (Mrs. Colonel’s Nieces).26 Dietrich then set up a small but efficient genre movie production factory in the tradition of Roger Corman. However, he was mainly inspired by and oriented towards the West German market and its actors and movies. While Dietrich achieved some commercial success with his low-budget erotic interpretations of famous literary classics (Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers), it was his second erotic movie franchise that earned the most money. In form and content, he imitated the successful model of the West German unending series of ‘Sex Reports’, a more blatantly pornographic offspring of the sex education movies of the 1950s and early 1960s.27
The EAG film follows the novel’s main events. In both versions, the protagonists are the war-weary German university gynecologist Dr
Felix Coon (Carl Möhner) and his two young daughters Eva (Karin Heske) and Marga (Elisabeth Felchner). While Helms-Liesenhoff had aspired to a serious tale about the fate of a conscripted family in a linear narrative, Dietrich’s adaptation retains little of the novel’s seriousness. The conversational tone and the ribald, sloppy, naïve humor used in this episodic movie trace their origin to the German sex report film, with its humorously uptight way of talking about sex, which became part of that genre’s style. While this tone of voice already came across as inherently funny in the sex report films, the use of such a conversational tone in a World War II movie comes across as rather incongruous and provides one explanation for EAG’s ‘campy’
impression to modern viewers.
A further example of the movie’s close connection to the German sex reports is the physical examination scene at the start of the movie.
The staging of the examination of female prospective soldiers matches the mandatory visit to the doctor in many West German sex education and sex report movies, which provides an excuse for female characters to disrobe. The doctor’s visit justifies the display of female full frontal nudity and a detailed test of their sexual organs. ‘We are soldiers now and have to line up naked during the draft call-up,’ explains one of the female Wehrmacht prospects with great sincerity. When one of the naked women, having passed the close examination, extends her arm in a Nazi salute and shouts ‘Hurrah, I am fit for service!’, the situa-tion’s irony can hardly be surpassed. This use of irony contrasts starkly with the cruel cynicism that is a stock feature of later Nazisploitation movies. It further evinces EAG’s status as atypical in comparison to other Nazisploitation films. Indeed, the roles of victim and perpetrator in EAG are less clear and drastic. Whereas the victims are completely helpless and at the mercy of a Nazi perpetrator and his sadistic, cynical actions in a sadiconazista movie, the attribution of victim and perpe-trator roles is diffuse in EAG. Again, the influence of the West German sex reports with its ironic Doppelmoral (double standard) is evident, as the young women are portrayed simultaneously as both sex-driven seductresses as well as hapless victims — and these films supposedly warn against either danger. Like their modern ‘report’ sisters, the Gretchens in Dietrich’s movie exemplify the changing values of the sexual revolution and thus stand in youthful opposition to authority — in this case, to the Führer, the Nazi party and the Fatherland — whose sexual prohibitions and requirements they repeatedly transgress and
ridicule: ‘Here everything is blond and Aryan, especially in that one spot.’ Later on, when the radio transmits utterances such as ‘German men, have you done your duty?’, the Gretchens take this literally: ‘We too have a right to the German men. We volunteered for the Eastern front for special use in the war.’ This ‘anything goes’ mockery finally results in a petition of the Gretchens to Field Marshal Göring, in which they openly demand to be used as sex soldiers on the Eastern front.
In a standard Nazisploitation movie such frivolity would have hurt its generic and hence commercial value. Showing such unclear power relations and ironic refractions would have destroyed the intended exploitative effect more than any external appeal to morality.
The Gretchens’ naïve desire falls back on them, when the young women are captured and have to be liberated in a commando action by the movie’s true authority, namely the uptight, aristocratic and essen-tially fatherly doctor Coon. Again this protagonist’s character contrasts starkly with Nazisploitation typecasting, in which doctors are associated almost reflexively with torture and cruel medical experiments in concentration camps. One may assume that with this personification of a dutiful ‘good German’ with an anti-Nazi heart, Dietrich felt inspired by West German war movies from the 1950s and 1960s such as Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1959), celebrating the good Wehrmacht officer as victim of the evil Nazi and SS demons.28 Nazisploitation follows a totally different script: Germans appear nearly by definition as sadistic Nazis and concentration camp guards. There is little demand for inner strife within German soldiers or German gallantry heralded, for instance, in German films about Rommel’s desert war.
The producers of Nazisploitation may have seen themselves as professional executors of their audiences’ perverse desires, which thus limited their personal auteur role. On the other hand, EAG was Dietrich’s personal pet project, as evidenced by the fact that with this film the producer-director is credited for the first time under his real name. For a long time, he had dreamed about making a war movie with tank battles and other big-budget trappings.29 Basing his war movie on a popular literary work such as EAG increased its claim to seriousness, which appears to have been important to Dietrich, as he planned to reinvent himself as a respectable producer of mainstream films.30 He also accepted Helms-Liesenhoff’s ideological point of view, whose Gretchen novels were, as mentioned, his form of indictment against the Nazi system. This was important to Dietrich and also for
its success with Swiss as well as with West German audiences, his most important markets. Presumably his technique of mixing education, adventure and rehabilitation as well as sex scenes would open up his movie beyond his usual clientele to a more mainstream audience, sowing the seeds for a profitable future and increasing his reputation.
What Dietrich imagined a viable strategy for a commercially successful and serious movie turned into a unique bastard among a discredited movie genre, a strange and confusing combination of membra disjecta that today gives a fascinating picture of the particular situation given in 1973. The most spectacular scene of the movie illus-trates this confusion well. After their liberation from strangely invisible Russians, a group of about thirty naked female Wehrmacht soldiers run across a minefield amidst a battle in progress. Like the naturists from the sex report films, the naked Gretchens hop through open nature, hampered only by frighteningly real mine explosions and forces fighting a war all around them.
The orgy featured in the third part of the movie, however, can be traced neither to the sex reports nor to the classic war movies.
Analogous scenes in movies such as La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969) or — more likely, due to its popularity — Bob Fosse’s Cabaret of 1972 may have served as inspiration. While orgies in these movies are indispensable elements in their plots and character psychology of violence, power and sex, EAG’s orgy is but a nod to less sinister sexploitation movie standards. Copying the setting of an unleashed Götterdämmerung à la Visconti with this naïve voyeuristic illustration results again in an unintended satiric effect. A striptease in front of a draped swastika flag and a cream gateau with chocolate swastikas is the moment where EAG comes closest to Nazisploitation, albeit with a decidedly campy flair.
Everything connected with both the person of Erwin C. Dietrich and his productions appears unimaginative and naïve. Nothing was ever intended to be revolutionary in any dimension, given Erwin C.
Dietrich’s character and standing. Nor does the avid boy scout and conservative Swiss entrepreneur fit into the role of a taboo breaker.31 Nevertheless, Dietrich’s name and one of his most expensive produc-tions are often used in the context of a most frowned-upon genre in the history of cinema. While EAG may appear as a surreal piece of art brut, which finally bamboozled its way into the canon of Nazisploitation, it stands to reason that this is not due to one person’s
motivation or categorization but rather to the workings of an industry that bases its profits on fooling the expectations of its audiences. EAG may be an atypical Nazisploitation movie, but atypical exploitation it isn’t, by a long shot.