Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

his house into “a prison, head q u arters and courtrolled into one"; Goebbels himself headed a com ­mission o f investigation; and he and H im m lercross-exam ined the arrested generals throughoutthe night. T hose condem ned, then or th ereafter,w ere executed with revolting cruelty. T hey werehanged from m eat-hooks and slowly strangled.Goebbels o rd ered a Him to be m ade o f their trialand execution: it was to be shown, in terrorem toW ehrm acht audiences. H ow ever, the reaction o fthe first audience was so hostile that it had to besuppressed.Hugh Trevor-Roper in hisintroduction to Final Entries 1945:The Diaries of Joseph GoebbelsAs far as I can determ ine, Goebbels’ film of the generalsslowly, horribly dying— their innards caving in from theforce of gravity on their hung bodies, the slow strangulationpushing out their tongues and eyes and causing erection(which strangulation invariably does in the male)—was the first snuff film. T h e m aster of hate propagandadidn’t get it right though— a rare lapse. Audiences becamephysically sick. These were Nazi audiences watching Nazigenerals, men o f power, the society’s patriarchs, so whitethey were Aryan; rulers, not slaves. It only works whenthe torture is done on those who have been dehum anized,made inferior— not just in the eyes of the beholder but inhis real world. Goebbels started out with cartoons o f Jewsbefore the Nazis came to power; he could have moved onto the films m ade in Dachau in 1942, for instance, of “thereactions of the men placed in the Luftwaffe’s low-pressurecham bers”15; desensitizing his Nazi audiences to the humiliation,the torture, o f Jews, he could have m ade a filmthat would have w orked— o f Jews hanging from meathooks, slowly strangled. But never o f power, never of those1 5 . R o g e r M a n v e l l a n d H e i n r i c h F r a e n k e l , Himmler ( N e w Y o r k : ( i . P . P u t n a m ’sS o n s , 1 9 6 5 ) , p . 1 0 5 .