Oldal 164 [164]
OCR
162 Olli Kleemola their equipment, as well as views of the occupied areas. The photos of POWs were mainly taken shortly after the beginning of the war, most likely due to the fact that the majority of the prisoners of war in Finnish captivity were captured during the so-called assault phase of the Continuation War, that is, during the summer or autumn of 1941, and thus the prisoners of war topic was of most interest at that time. The photo archives of the Finnish Army survived the war almost completely intact, so these so-called TK photographs and their original captions are now accessible at the SA-kuva-arkisto (Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive) on the Internet (www.sa-kuva.fi; on Finnish propaganda troops, see Perko 1974; on their photographs, see Paulaharju & Uosukainen 2000; Porkka 1983; Kleemola 2011; Pilke & Kleemola 2013). During the war, the German propaganda photo archives consisted of up to 3 500 000 photographs. In the final phase of the war, the German Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, gave an order to destroy them. Fortunately, this order was disobeyed and approximately 1 500 000 photographs survived the war, 1 200 000 without captions. These photographs are stored in the Bundesarchiv Bildarchiv in Koblenz, Germany (Buchmann 1999: 29). The rest, approximately 300 000 photographs, belong to the archive of the German wartime photo agency, Scherl Bilderdienst (Hofmann 1993: 23-25). These PK photographs, also stored in the Bundesarchiv, are from all fronts of the Second World War.” Photographs from the eastern front compose a significant part of this material. Approximately 1500-2000 of them show Soviet prisoners of war. For this chapter, I have studied the photographic materials of both countries and chosen five visual themes to analyse. These five themes—photos of prisoners being captured, photos of large prisoner masses, photos of the good care the prisoners enjoyed, ‘type photos’, and photos of ‘comical enemies’ —reflect in the best possible way the similarities and differences between Finnish and German propaganda photography. Other than these topics, there are only photos of prisoners of war working and of interrogations, both of which can be seen as snapshots with no clear propagandistic purpose, and thus of no interest to this study. In addition to the photos found in the archives, I also study selected illustrated magazines from both countries in order to examine which kinds of pictures were published and which not. For the German section, I analyse three leading wartime illustrated magazines: Die Wehrmacht (the official army magazine, published biweekly from 1936 to September 1944), Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung ("Berlin's Illustrated Magazine’, the biggest illustrated magazine in wartime Germany, published weekly from 1892 to 1945; Stahr 2004: 81-83) and Zlustrierter Beobachter (‘Illustrated Observer’, the official Nazi Party magazine, published weekly from 1928 to 1945). For the Finnish section, I analyse two leading illustrated maga # TK? stands for Tiedotuskomppania, which translates literally as ‘information troops’. > A small part, approximately 2000 photographs, is stored at the Dokumentationszentrum des P PP y photograp Osterreichischen Widerstandes (DOW), in Vienna, Austria.
