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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 propaganda troops. The Finns were given practically no training in producing propaganda, 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 photographs: 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 during the Continuation War (for general background information about the Continuation 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 photographs, there certainly were other organisations in wartime Germany that were in charge of ethnological photography. 161
