However, the earliest full-blown sexploitation film set in a Nazi camp was Love Camp 7 (1969). The Italian Giallo thriller In the Folds of the Flesh (also known as Nelle pieghe della carne, 1970) has a similar flashback sequence with unrealistically attractive nude women being herded into a Nazi gas chamber. Scene showing nude women kept in a concentration camp brothel. The critically acclaimed 1964 film The Pawnbroker includes a flashback This is a subtle and satirical rendering that only hints at the sexual depravity explicit in the original novel. The French art-house film Vice and Virtue (1963), directed by Roger Vadim, is a stylized retelling of the Marquis de Sade's Justine set during the Nazi occupation of France. Other early examples that combine sexual themes and Nazism include the West German productions Des Teufels General ( The Devil's General) (1955) by Helmut Käutner and Lebensborn ( Ordered to Love) (1961). The film features an orgy of homosexual SA-Men and depicts one of the main characters as a troubled multiple pervert posing in a transvestite outfit, molesting little girls, and committing incest with his own mother.
The controversial art-house production The Damned (1969), directed by Luchino Visconti, about the rise and fall of a German industrialist family in the Third Reich, is also a major influence on the genre. Another Rossellini film, Germany, Year Zero (1948), connects Nazism with pedophilia. This can be found as early as 1945 in Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossellini.
Italian directors pioneered a blend of sexual imagery and Nazi themes. Prominent directors of the genre include Paolo Solvay ( La Bestia in Calore, also known as The Beast in Heat and SS Hell Camp), Cesare Canevari ( Last Orgy of the Third Reich, also known as L'ultima orgia del III Reich, Gestapo's Last Orgy and Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler), and Alain Payet ( Train spécial pour SS, also known as Special Train for Hitler and Helltrain), all from 1977. In Italy, these films are known as part of the "il sadiconazista" cycle, which were inspired by such art-house films as Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), and Tinto Brass's Salon Kitty (1976).
Globally exported to both cinema and VHS, the films were critically attacked and heavily censored, and the sub-genre all but vanished by the end of the seventies. Its surprise success and that of Salon Kitty and The Night Porter led European filmmakers, mostly in Italy, to produce around similar films, with just over a dozen being released over the next few years. The most infamous and influential title (which set the standards of the genre) is a Canadian production, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974). Most follow the women in prison formula, only relocated to a concentration camp, extermination camp, or Nazi brothel, and with an added emphasis on sadism, gore, and degradation. Nazi exploitation (also Nazisploitation) is a subgenre of exploitation film and sexploitation film that involves Nazis committing sex crimes, often as camp or prison overseers during World War II. Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is considered the quintessential Nazisploitation film