Pulp Atrocities

 

I just love the way that even the panthers being set on these semi-clad captive girls are branded with Nazi symbols on this May 1963 cover of Man's Action.  I mean, why?  Not to mention, how?  Are those decals of some kind that have been slapped on their heads?  Or, perhaps they are shaved into their fur, or maybe only the circle is shaved, with the swastika tattooed?  Then again, I suppose that they could have dyed the circles into their fur, with a stencil, to keep the swastika bits black.  Whatever the answer, we're still faced with the question of why?  Were there also Allied panthers on the loose, with Union Jacks, Stars and Stripes or red stars on their heads?  After all, the Germans wouldn't want to shoot their own panthers by mistake, would they?  But whatever the hows and whys of the situation, there's no denying that setting big cats onto their victims is possibly the weirdest war crime that the Nazis have been accused of carrying out.

Which brings us to the whole business of the way these men's magazine covers depict the nastiness of the Nazis - it is always in the most bizarre manner possible, usually focusing on semi-naked women undergoing various tortures or being frozen in blocks of ice, dipped in molten gold or roasted on spits and so on.  But bearing in mind all of the real atrocities they committed - the genocides, the concentration camps, the human experiments and so on - these all seem utterly ridiculous and more than a little tasteless in their avoidance of the reality of Nazi war crimes.  It is as if, somehow, the publishers of these magazines felt that reality wasn't sensational enough, or that their adolescent readers simply wouldn't be able to comprehend the real crimes or identify with the real victims.  After all, while the real victims of Nazism were minorities, most notably the Jews, but also homosexuals, the disabled, Slavs, etc - all of their victims on these covers seem to be beautiful and very Aryan looking young women.  In truth, it probably had more to do with the fact that these magazines traded in male fantasies and real war atrocities were considered to be far too depressing to be depicted.  Which isn't to say that these covers can't be enjoyed on their own terms as pieces of pulp art, but it is important to remember that they essentially trivialise the very serious matter of Nazi war crimes, (not to mention Japanese war crimes, Soviet human rights abuses and the like, according to which conflict they were illustrating).