Ye Olde Staging Point

Knowledge, it is said, is a prize to be pursued above all else; and so any day in which I learn something entirely new to me I consider a successful one. Today, to my meager but enthusiastic pool of knowledge about World War II has been added a fact of history that has, strangely enough, never come up once in my readings about that most brutal of wars. Yes, my friends, today I have learned about the role of Nazi Dominatrix SS Stormtroopers in the crucial battle for Europe, circa 1944.

The source of this revelation is none other than the acclaimed computer game Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a first-person-shooter lauded by historians for its responsible and painstakingly realistic depiction of the Second World War (the links above point to screenshots from said game). Amazingly, I was not aware of the crucial role these uberfrau played in the war until I encountered them in this game. In fact, had I not known better, I might have dismissed this as a ridiculous idea conceived by an all-male team of computer game programmers. Curious, I did some research and found almost total silence among historians on this topic.

A reading of the leading historians of the war reveals so little on the topic that a less-informed reader might get the impression that legions of these elite fraulein commandos were, in fact, not present in large numbers defending top-secret Nazi installations. Weinberg, otherwise a respectable scholar, mentions them not at all, and Cooper makes only vague references to these black-leather-clad stormtroopers in his groundbreaking work The German Army 1933-1945. Sternbrecht's oft-dismissed work Vixens in the Werhmacht is the only source with the courage to address the topic, and it is in his work that we find illuminating discussions on the practicality of skintight leather bodysuits as a standard-issue infantry uniform.

It is sad to see such a crucial part of history all but ignored by mainstream historians, although the upcoming HBO miniseries Band of Babes promises to shed some light on the feisty frauleins of the XXII Supervixenkorps during the invasion of Poland, just as Band of Brothers illuminated the story of the Allied 101st Airborne in Normandy. Until then, we'll just have to rely on what we learn from Castle Wolfenstein: that these commandos are extremely fast-moving, are skilled at kicking grenades back at the thrower, and are armed with submachineguns that can reduce your health to 0 in no time at all. They apparently ultimately met their end (along with several legions of Nazi cyborgs and zombies, but that's a topic for another post) at the hand of a single heavily-armed Allied agent while guarding the ultra-secret Nazi archaeological excavations and experiments at the aforementioned Castle Wolfenstein, located somewhere in Europe. Find that in your high school history textbook, I dare you.

Chalk one up for history.