Jackboot Girls (1971, James Moffatt)

 

Written by that renowned schweinehund James Moffatt, shortly before coming to prominence with his 'Richard Allen' Skinhead novels. Moffatt must have thought he'd won the pools, or a lifetime's supply of Seagram's 100 pipers when somebody at New English Library approached him with the words every alcoholic, far right leaning hack writer longs to hear "how do you fancy writing a book about sexy female Nazis, Jim?". In keeping with the Dad's Army maxim of 'Don't tell him your name' however, Moffatt chose to bill himself as Leslie McManus for this slice of Nazi smut. A pseudonym he'd revive for his subsequent books dealing with the sexy side of WW2, including Operation Backlash, Unfaithful Enemy (tag line: 'Hitler's Germany was one hell of a place for an old fashioned love affair') and the four book 'Churchill's Vixens' series.

According to Jackboot Girls you can tell allot about a woman by the way she sits on a chair. If she shows a generous amount of thigh she is 'seeking inequality and seduction', if she shows little of her undergarments she is a virgin, and if she sits down in a manner that is devoid of passion, she must be a lesbian. One such dispassionate sitter is Helga Schwartz, who is tormented by the fact that her lesbianism is preventing her from fulfilling her promise in the SS. "All her life, Helga Schwartz had fought her lonely battle of passion under the impression her lesbianism could not be espied". Not even laying back and thinking of Hitler, helps Helga overcome her revulsion at heterosexual sex. Fortunately for Helga, there happens to be an opening in the SS for a lesbian interrogator. Based on the thinking that fraulein on fraulein seduction will be a more effective way of loosening the lips of female prisoners than rape and torture by male Nazis.

Rising in the ranks, Helga soon finds herself head of the Wolverines, an all female battalion of Nazi interrogators, after her ex-lover Gertrude puts in a good word for her with Himmler. Proving that even in the Nazi party, it's not what you know, it's who you know. The Wolverines fear nothing, apart from it seems naked, overweight people. Titillated by the idea that her latest victim Inge Kloffer, will be a sexy, slender thing, Helga is horrified to discover that the SS have sent her anything but. Poor Inge suffering the indignity of being judged too fat to be tortured by regular Nazis. Leading Helga to call in Lizabet Langendoff, a Wolverine with a strong stomach for S&M, having been tied up and beaten by a trusted family member as a Jungfrau. It's difficult to know which inflicts the greater humiliation on Inge, Lizabet's whip or Moffatt's poisoned pen with his references to her as 'big, flabby breasted, rolling hipped' and an 'ungainly sow'.

Lesbianism and sadomasochism are the two main themes of Jackboot Girls, with little else getting in the way. In terms of sleaze, Moffatt was at the top of his game here, the book's Nazi theme playing to both his fascistic and dirty old man tendencies. Moffatt being Moffatt he opts to tell the majority of the book from a Nazi perspective, and proves to be as disturbingly adept at getting into the heads of extreme German nationalists, as he later would with extreme English nationalists in his Skinhead novels. The rare breathing space between degeneracy here finds Moffatt gushing over the Fatherland and the grandeur of Nazi Germany, Helga being particularly impressed with Himmler's lair 'a full sized painting of Hitler surrounded by German flags helping to subdue the Security Chief's overwhelming personality'. While Moffatt's anti-Semitism, which would later flare up in his novels 'Boot Boys' and 'Glam', here finds an outlet when the only significant Jewish character in the book, Rolf Dottinger, turns out to be cowardly and treacherous, willing to sell out the resistance in return for safe passage to Poland.

It's only way into the book that it finds something resembling a moral compass, and a dissenting, heterosexual, anti-Nazi voice in uber-stud Alois Krauss. Vowing revenge on the Nazis for the death of his wife, Alois doesn't let his bereavement get in the way of bringing dick to a dictatorship. Not only is Alois getting his end away with lovesick Vera, the resistance fighter posing as his new wife, but also attracts the amorous eye of resistance head Elke Liebl. Leading to the side splitting observation "he felt like a prime bull being examined for flaws by a female farmer who needed the beast for best-breeding purposes". Alois and Elke's ensuing sex session warrants an entire chapter of its own, and brings Alois to the scientific conclusion that Elke must be ninety percent nymphomaniac and ten percent adventuress.  Jackboot Girls does give the impression that Moffatt was in a horny, morning mood when he wrote this thing, even his description of the sun rising has an air of indecency about it 'blushing dawn arrived in his hotel room like a giggling schoolgirl timidly making a surprise arrival'.

Moffatt displays a worrying admiration for his female Nazis, for more so than he would later do with his English skinheads. Helga lives in the shadow of failure, and is under constant pressure to break prisoners and get results. Moffatt's Nazis are also a suspiciously compassionate bunch. Helga's lover Frieda Weber is a self confessed romanticist, filled with good will for the British troops "how kind they had been, how considerate of the aged and the struggling poor'. Later, a male Nazi displays a momentary flash of conscience and allot of chauvinistic double standards by being shocked at female on female sadism, even though he'd think nothing of dishing out the same to a male prisoner 'a woman- no, a fiend! A woman and her victim another woman! Gott Im Himmel!'.

Despite Helga expressing women's lib like sentiments, becoming annoyed that male subordinates refer to her as fraulein rather than obersturmbannfuhrer, only a fool would mistake Moffatt for a feminist. In a move to appeal to a red blooded readership, Moffatt's Sapphic schweinehunds invariably fall prey to the 'Wham, Bam, Thank you, obersturmbannfuhrer' desires of heterosexual males. While Goering, the only significant male homosexual in the book, is depicted as a sexual predator, using alcohol to corrupt young, fresh faced soldiers who are (literally) willing to bend over backwards to serve Nazi Germany. For all of the claims of a secret bond existing between gays and lesbians, theorized by Moffatt in Jackboot Girls 'it was common knowledge that lesbians and, especially homosexuals walked a higher path than those indulging in normal male-female sex', Helga's relationship with Goering ultimately suggests that there's no honour among Nazi homosexuals.

While playing to his strengths as a writer, Jackboot Girls also exhibits a few of Moffatt's flaws as well. There's the usual Moffatt tendency to flood the book with very similar characters... Jackboot Girls subscribing to the idea that there's no such thing as too many whip wielding Nazi lesbians. Jackboot Girls' narrative paradoxically manages to be both overly complicated and little more than a series of sex and torture set pieces slung together. There are so many characters in Jackboot Girls that it is probably best approached as an anthology piece, with Helga and Frieda being the only consistently reoccurring ones. In keeping with the WW2 movies of the day, German characters converse in English, only occasionally breaking into basic German. There's an overkill of 'Nein', 'Mein Gott', 'Jawohl' here, which in a post 'Allo Allo! world can't help but add a layer of unintentional hilarity to Jackboot Girls, in spite of Moffatt's deadly serious approach to the material.

Only towards the end of the book does its Nazi allegiance give way to Canuck pride. Moffatt, who was Canadian by birth but of Irish heritage, gives away his own nationality by reliving the German Alois Krauss of his hero/stud role and replacing him with the Canadian Edward Spencer Morash. An even more hard living, virile and patriotic example of manhood, Canadians clearly being the true master race in Moffatt's opinion. Edward proudly confessing under Nazi integration "I'm single, enjoy beer and rye whisky, gamble only on big name horse-races or poker and I've been bedding gals since I was fourteen". The references to Edward venturing to Soho for sexual thrills, does make you wonder just how much personal research Moffatt had done into that neck of the woods. Illusions to Soho vice being common in his books, and the major backdrop for 1973's Massage Girls, written under the name 'J.J. More'. Edward takes the war to the bedroom, getting tied up and set upon by Nazi vixens, who are posing as English girls in order to gain his sympathy as well as the top secrets he keeps. Since he was a Canadian living in Britain, one wonders if Moffatt wasn't writing from personal experience when it comes to the culture clash that erupts between the German girls, who've been educated in England, therefore indoctrinated in English ways of politeness and decency, and the crude, tough talking, working class Canadian. Edward delights in offending the prudish Nazi ladies, shocking them with his frequent usage of the word 'screw', before letting them have it with the double barrel vulgarity of "you Kraut whores- clear out".

Jackboot Girls stands as tribute to Moffatt's unsavory imagination, to which it seems there were no limits. Few sadomasochistic avenues go unexplored here. Apart from Canadian Edward, no characters emerge with any honour. Moffatt's women are sadists and murderers, men folk from both sides of the battlefield aren't above committing vengeful gang rape. Jackboot Girls owes a debt to older WW2 themed Men's magazines, while bluntly expanding on their S&M preoccupations. In some respects however, Moffatt was a little ahead of his time here, anticipating Ilsa- She Wolf of the SS, made by his fellow Canadians, and the Naziploitation to come from Italy. Jackboot Girls is a prime example of why New English Library books ended up being called Nasty NELs, yet mysteriously avoided the censorious backlash that would later plague the video industry, whose more extreme offerings would inherit the 'nasty' nickname. Maybe NEL's masterstroke was to keep any potential enemies close and on the payroll. Not long after they let loose the whip cracking, leather boot licking Jackboot Girls onto an unsuspecting British public, NEL also published Mary Whitehouse's autobiography 'Who Does She Think She Is'. The latter proved a particularly lucrative venture for Whitehouse, who always remained silent over the sleazy excesses of her fellow NEL writers. Funny, that.