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160 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 Finnish propaganda units. By comparing Finnish and German materials, I seek to analyse the images of the enemy present in their propaganda photographs and the various 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 propaganda, 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 studied 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 David 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.
