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Olli Kleemola
Soviet Prisoners of War in Finnish and German
Propaganda Photography 1941-1944!
In this chapter, I study the photographic material produced by German and Finn¬
ish propaganda units. By comparing Finnish and German materials, I seek to ana¬
lyse the images of the enemy present in their propaganda photographs and the vari¬
ous ways in which these pictures were used as part of the war propaganda of both
countries, and to create and strengthen enemy images. Although the main focus
of this chapter is on the differences between Finnish and German visual propa¬
ganda, I also discuss the similarities between these same photographic materials. In
general, the chapter seeks to discover general tendencies in the use of propaganda
photographs in Finland and Germany from a comparative perspective. Comparing
these propaganda materials is interesting because both countries were waging war
against the Soviet Union, but doing so based on quite different premises. While
textual propaganda and the images of the enemy it creates have already been stud¬
ied rigorously in both countries (see, for example Luostarinen 1986; Pilke 2009;
Pilke 2011; Volkmann 1994), a vast amount of photographic propaganda is still
practically untouched.” This might be due to the fact that, to date, the vast majority
of historians have been reluctant to use photo materials as primary sources. As Da¬
vid E. Crew put it: "Yet German historians have only recently begun to pay serious
attention to the politics of images” (cited in Paul 2014).
Even though only few instructions about how prisoners of war (POWs) were to
be photographed can be found in both countries, I expect the photo production of
Finland and Germany to reflect different premises. Germany was fighting a racially
motivated “war of extermination” that was defined by Adolf Hitler as follows: “We
must get away from the idea of the camaraderie of soldiers. The communists are
no comrades—neither before [the battle] nor after it. [The fight against the Soviet
Union] will be a fight for extermination” (Hitler, March 30, 1941, cited in Streit
1997: 9). According to Heikki Luostarinen, the Finns were not fighting a racially
motivated war and thus their propaganda was able to construct a more nuanced,
! This chapter is connected to my dissertation project “The Soviet Union in Finnish and German private
and propaganda war photography 1941-1945”, in which I analyse the enemy image of the Soviet Union
in Finnish and German propaganda and private photography.
? In his book Visual History. Ein Studienbuch, the German photo historian Gerhard Paul encourages
historians to analyse the images of the enemy taken under National Socialism with the help of photo
material because photos played a central role in national socialist propaganda (Paul 2006: 13-20). As
I write this, Harriet Scharnberg is writing her doctoral thesis about the image of Jews in national socialist
photography for the University of Halle in Germany.