loosely based on "The Witch of Buchenwald", Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Koch was known for having perverse sexual dalliances with the prisoners and was rumored to have had lampshades made from human skin. Ilsa includes the standard elements of sadism, degradation, whipping, sexual slavery, graphic torture, and a bloody finale with Ilsa shot dead and the camp set ablaze. The film was a surprise hit on the drive-in theater and grindhouse circuit. Ilsa was resurrected for three profitable sequels that ignored her Nazi origins and are closer to the women-in-prison genre. As a freelance mistress-for-hire, she became Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), commander of a 1953 gulag in Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977), and the warden of a corrupt Latin-American prison in Ilsa, the Wicked Warden (1977). Nazi films from Italy and France Meanwhile, European filmmakers were creating their own lurid Nazi movies with Ilsa-type villains. In 1977, Malisa Longo starred in Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg as a black-booted, leather-clad, sexually sadistic commander of a prison camp for women. That year, Longo also starred in the Salon Kitty-inspired Fräulein Devil (also known as Elsa: Fraulein SS) as Elsa, a former hooker with a penchant for S&M, who manages a Nazi brothel train. This was filmed back-to-back with Hitler's Last Train (also known as Special Train for the SS, Helltrain and Love Train for the SS, 1977). These films, plus Nathalie: Escape from Hell (1978), were produced by the French studio Eurociné. One of the most notorious films in this genre is La Bestia in Calore (also known as SS Hell Camp and The Beast In Heat), produced in Italy in 1977. German actress Macha Magall played Dr. Ellen Kratsch, another icy blond Nazi who is sexy, yet thoroughly evil. This film, with its extensive and graphic scenes of torture, brutality and rape, was initially banned in England. A milder, edited version was released in the U.S. as SS Experiment Camp 2. Magall was also in SS Girls (1977), another story set in a Nazi brothel. The Nazi exploitation subgenre presented an opportunity for Italian studios to make very low-cost horror pictures whilst tapping a previously ignored market; the exploitation war film. The Italian films are different from "Ilsa" in many ways, for instance, they focus on far more extreme aspects of human abuse. The films of 1976