This one was a little bit of a surprise to me. It's another of those delicate and tasteful films that fell under the nazisploitation sub-genre. These films still cause a shudder in many even forty years after they were released. The mixing of the Holocaust with sadistic horror and salacious sexploitation being a combination that continues to trouble today; if nothing else, the nazisploitation sub-genre is one of the few types of genre cinema that remains shocking decades after its heyday. But I digress, as I mentioned earlier this one shocked me. And the reason wasn't the usual one when it comes to this kind of thing, in that it wasn't the salacious content that struck me, it was the fact that when watching it I thought to myself could this possibly be an actual German movie? It seemed incredible that the German nation, so directly associated with the evils of Nazism would ever have the brass neck to produce a film remotely in the ballpark of nazisploitation. The Germans would spend decades trying to shrug off the Nazi association so had they gone insane in 1973 and made a Nazi sex film? Well, as it turned out, no they had not. This movie had been produced by none other than Germany's 'neutral' neighbours, the charming Swiss! But given the shared language, this is the nazisploitation film that feels most 'German'. Which certainly gives it a whole new aspect of wrong-headedness.
During the last days of World War II a battalion of female Nazis are sent to the eastern front to service battle weary soldiers fighting the relentless Soviet advance. There's really not very much more plot to it than that and what there is really serves as no more than a framework for a succession of soft-core sex scenes. This one came out very early in this cycle of films and in fact was a year ahead of the movie that is often considered to be the template in this genre, Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS (1974), so its perhaps unsurprising that it seems a bit different. Unlike that film, or all of the subsequent outrageous offerings from the Italians, this one focuses on Nazi women, as opposed to female victims of the Nazis. There is no death camp setting, nor is there any real violence to speak of. Its sex, sex and more sex in this one; although I found it oddly unerotic (thank god). Somewhat unusually, the Nazis are presented as essentially sympathetic and not really the baddies we are used to them being, which is unsurprisingly not something you see very often! It also seems to possess higher production values than these types of movies normally have, with more sets and some battle scenes too. But it ultimately is kind of boring too. It lacks the sheer excess that the later nastier films still radiate. It's really a soft-core sex film with Nazi iconography, which makes it very odd, that much I will admit. Its worth at least checking out if you are interested in the seamier side of 70's exploitation cinema but there are more entertaining nazisploitation movies out there, and yes I know that is a strange thing to say.
