WOMEN IN BONDAGE

d. Steve Sekely (1943)

Cheap but potent propaganda, Women In Bondage takes the unusual step of showing Nazi Germany on the home front, and from the perspective of the women caught up in the mad world of Hitler and his murderous stooges. 

All women must join a paramilitary organisation, for instance, and spend their time marching, identifying enemy planes and informing on their friends, colleagues, neighbours and anyone else who dares question the Fuhrer. On their spare evenings, the girls are expected to be sexually promiscuous, particularly with soldiers, doing their bit to keep the master race well stocked. Then there are the intrusive medical examinations, and the obsession with Aryan purity (one girl is unable to marry her SS man boyfriend because she fails an eye test), as well as other sundry surprises that the insanely inhuman and unsentimental logic of the Reich throws up (a woman's husband returns from the Russian Front a hero but an impotent invalid; she is officially instructed to get pregnant by his brother instead). 

It's occasionally strong stuff, and is particularly successful in the way that it presents the regime (quite realistically) as a sick but ultimately rather banal bureaucracy that, like all totalitarian states, can only function by the constant exertion of force, a mountain of paperwork and a willing workforce of goon-like enforcers. 

Please note that the title refers to bondage in the sense of serfdom or slavery, not the act of tying or binding for sexual pleasure. Although there is a bit of that, and some whipping.   

THE MADMAN OF MANDORAS

d. David Bradley (1963)

More brains. Well, sort of. Hitler crops up a lot in psychotronic films, either in person or as the justification for various nefarious goings on. Although he is clearly a villain, he is not always the genocidal monster that we know and despise him as. Instead, he is a stereotypical bad person and common or garden megalomaniac, sometimes slightly silly, even comical. It's a facile and potentially offensive view, but I think it comes from an understandable place: these films were made in the aftermath of the war and, even twenty or thirty years later, the enormity of Hitler's crimes were still too much to process - too hard to remember.        

The Madman of Mandoras is a load of claptrap about poison gas and the threat to world peace posed by a Third Reich who have run away / relocated to South America. The Nazis have Hitler's head in a jar and it is still giving them orders and rolling his eyes in frustration and anger. No idea why they haven't attached a body to the head, they're clearly pretty technologically advanced. Perhaps it's better to know where that guy is.

Do the Nazis succeed? Do they fuck, and we get to see the flesh burned from Das Fuhrer's skull, a sight that is unedifying but strangely satisfying, which is perhaps why we get to watch it for a whole minute and a half.   

HITLER'S CHILDREN

d. Edward Dmytryk (1943)

At first I wondered why, in 1943, US audiences were watching a film about the dangers of Nazism set in 1938, especially as America had already been at war with Germany for two years. Then I thought about the timing and realised that it was probably preparing them for D-Day: when there is sacrifice ahead, it's a good idea to remind people what it's all for.

In order to connect with audiences, the film uses a handsome boy and a pretty girl, a sort of Nazi Romeo and Juliet: he is a German born in America; she is an American born in Germany, and they love each other, despite their political differences. In the early days, it's picnics and sing-a-longs in the stereotypical hale and hearty way of the old Fatherland, all jolly rucksacks and strudel. When Hitler begins his conquests, however, things change. The boy joins the SS and the girl, because she has 'German blood' is sent to a re-education centre for lessons in National Socialism. 

Being a decent, freedom loving girl she doesn't take to the teachings of Herr Hitler one bit, of course, so is publicly whipped and scheduled for enforced sterilisation. The boy, belatedly realising that Nazism is as fucked up a philosophy as you can get, tries to save her, but is arrested. He has time to denounce Hitler at his trial before he and the girl are shot.

Heavy stuff, but then what else could it be? A light musical would have been completely inappropriate. Behind the fractured love story we occasionally get glimpses of other heinous policies: the rounding up of Jewish schoolchildren, no doubt destined for concentration camps; talk of the extermination of the physically and mentally impaired to further the bloodline of 'the master race'; the suggestion that it is the girl's duty to get pregnant by an approved Aryan at the soonest opportunity, no relationship required. The overall picture is of a sick, almost surreally inhuman society presided over by sadists who are either thugs or pseudo-intellectuals or an unsavoury combination of the two. 

Hitler's Children was an absolutely enormous box office success. Propaganda is always propaganda, of course, no matter which side it comes from, no matter how many facts (or lies) it contains. It's purpose is to create the collective frame of mind where it is okay to hate, to fight, to kill, to die - and this film, with its emphasis on the way the Nazis stamp down on personal expression and individual liberty, chimed absolutely with American audiences. They've always been very big on the old freedom thing in the US of A - for Americans, anyway.