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Soviet Prisoners of War in Finnish and German Propaganda Photography 1941-1944
less aggressive image of the enemy, which also enabled Finnish propaganda to
describe the enemy as child-like and having comical features (Luostarinen 1986:
417-419; see also Halmesvirta, this volume).
Research Questions, Material and Methods
WWII broke out in the autumn of 1939, when the National Socialist Germany
had long been planning to produce and spread war propaganda. The Wehrmacht
were the first armed forces in the world to set up special propaganda troops,
Propagandakompanien (abbreviated as PK; Knightley 1975: 220-221), which were
in charge of both domestic and foreign war propaganda. Until 1942, these troops
were part of the signal corps. After having grown to a size of about 15 000 men,
it became an independent branch, subordinate to the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS,
but also took orders from the Propaganda Ministry. No correspondents or
photographers from any German magazines or newspapers were allowed at the
front, and the press received all of its photographic, and a large amount of textual,
war material from these Propagandakompanien (Uziel 2008: passim).
In the summer of 1941, when Finland—side by side with Germany—went to
war against the Soviet Union, the Finnish Armed Forces set up their own propa¬
ganda troops. The Finns were given practically no training in producing propagan¬
da, whereas the Germans had to attend special courses before they were released to
the front. During these courses, the propaganda troops to be were taught, among
other things, two topics that were certainly helpful when taking propaganda pho¬
tographs: the basics of propaganda production, and the way that German photo
censorship worked. While most Finnish propaganda troops did not necessarily
have any expertise in the field of photography at all, the German propaganda corps
was mostly either professional or amateur photographers (Major Gunnar Waselius’s
travel report from Germany 1942). Moreover, although the Finnish organisational
structure was borrowed from Germany, the Finnish propaganda troops’ tasks were
more varied: while, according to the instructions given to the German propaganda
corps they were only allowed to take purely propaganda photographs, the Finns
tasks even included ethnological photography in occupied areas (Major Gunnar
Waselius’s travel report from Germany 1942).?
The primary subject of this chapter is a set of propaganda photographs taken
by Finnish and German propaganda troops featuring Soviet prisoners of war. Ihe
Finnish propaganda troops took approximately 150 000 photographs in total dur¬
ing the Continuation War (for general background information about the Con¬
tinuation War, see Kinnunen & Kivimäki 2012). Approximately 1000-1500 of
them show Soviet prisoners of war; the rest mainly depict Finnish soldiers and
> While the task of the German Army’s propaganda troops was indeed only to produce propaganda pho¬
tographs, there certainly were other organisations in wartime Germany that were in charge of ethnological
photography.
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