DPP72 The Gestapo's Last Orgy. Revisited

The film I am going to talk about today is called The Gestapo's Last Orgy. The film was listed as an official video nasty and subsequently banned by the BBFC. It has yet to receive a UK release. It is also known as Last Orgy of the Third Reich and Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler. So with the words Gestapo, Third Reich, Hitler and the word orgy I think it is very obvious what kind of territory we are in here if you had not guessed it’s a Nazi sexploitation film.

So why did I decide to takle this film, well the DPP72 has a number of Naziploitation films among its number and as I was trying to keep things fresh by reviewing diffrent types of film from among the DPP72 list and I had already done a zombie film and a mockumentary I figured I would either need to do a cannibal film or a a Naziploitation and as some of the promotional material for The Gestapo's Last Orgy had refered to it as the sickeest of the Naziploitation films then why not start here.

The film is about a prisoner-of-war camp for female Jews. There is the typical Nazi rhetoric about them being the super race and how Jews are inferior. The camp itself is basically run as some kind of bordello; training centre where the German officers and soldiers can learn to see Jewish people as animals, use them for sex and generally do as they please.

The female inmates are raped, tortured, sodomized, you see a woman thrown into a pit of quicklime you see whippings, there is cannibalism, infanticide and an Officer is sodomised with the end of his whip. SS staff sit and debate Nazi theories over dinner and one of them mentions his dream that eventually they will have farms where Jews are bred as to be eaten. There are so many things in this film that someone could take offense to that it is not hard to see why the Director of Public Prosecutions decided this film should be banned.

I need to make it clear here that I have seen far worse in other films but I think part and parcel of the issues people have with this film are connected to the fact that its about Nazi's, lets be honest Zombies and Demons and such do not exist but Nazi's did and well to some degree still do, the fact that we know that at least some of what is done in this film was done in real life during World War 2. Some people will dislike this film and films like it because it is trying to make a profit out of one of the worst things to have ever happend in our history, others will simply not want to think about it or be faced with this kind of stuff.

I have visited the concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau and it was an experience I will never forget. I am not a man who is typically a believer of the supernatural but when your there at one of the camps you can practically feel the death in the air. You can see the ovens where people where cremated, there’s a room full of human hair, and there are bullet holes in a wall which people were shot against. Having been there you would expect me to be the first to complain about this film or any other film making light of what happened or trying to turn it in to some horror porno in order to make money.

This might be the case if not for the fact that I also had the honour of meeting and talking to Leon Greenman. For those of you who have not heard of him he was a British anti-fascism campaigner and an actual survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. In the latter part of his life he made it his mission in life to make sure that no one ever forgot what had happened in those camps. He gave regular talks to school children about his experience at Auschwitz, and also wrote a book about his experiences. This was not enough for him though he also campaigned against the far right and he regularly received threats of violence as a result of this but he never gave up. I asked him what he thought of the fact that parts of world war 2, concentration camps, Nazi’s etcetera had been used to make films and he was of the opinion that as long as it meant that what happened was never forgotten then it was a good thing.

Sure The Gestapo's Last Orgy is a strange film it’s a Nazi exploitation film a mix of horror and porn yet it occasionally it almost shows a bit of class and moves into art-house territory with some editing and camera work which would not be out of place in a far better movie. The films use of montage and inter-cutting images in certain scenes nearly makes you forget that it is an exploitation film. The uniforms the camp itself everything seems so real and we all know that the Nazi’s did some awful things so at times it even seems to come across in an almost documentary for a second or two in a kind of way. I am not suggesting that anyone goes and watches this as part of their degree in history, but if one person watches this and it makes them pick up a book or go looking for documentaries so they can learn more about the past then in a strange and twisted way wouldn’t that make this movies existence worthwhile? 

This was not the only film in the Nazi Exploitation genre to end up on the Director of Public Prosecutions list of banned films but it is the only one I will be talking about. The rest of them are similar the only difference is that I found them to come of a lot cheaper and with more of an air of campiness about them. I decided that in my opinion this was the one that it would be easiest for people to see why it was banned and so this would be the one I would tackle. I will end with a question, I won’t answer it, it is for you to go away and consider yourself. The Nazi’s where fascists, they believed that what they held as true was the only truth and that they had the right to say who should live and die, who could have freedom. Given the fact that one of the reasons we went to war was to protect our freedom from a government which felt it knew better than us can our government justifiably ban films or books in an attempt to try to tell us what is right and wrong?

I would find this film very hard to give some kind of score to, its hard to score a lot of these banned films, I guess its because a lot of them seem to be so much more about shocking people rather than telling a good story, and thats very much the case here, the level of story is equal to the worst of low budget soap operas, but at the same time there is some good camera work, some good costumes and sets, I do think when originally talking about this though I sounded too poitive, its definetly a 3 out of 10.