`They are also victims of the war´: heritage narratives of the Nazis and their victims in Finland

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the contemporary perceptions and representations of the Finnish cooperation with Nazis during World War II. The Finnish-German relations were complicated during the war, as Finland was first an ally of Germany but later turned against the German troops in the country. Focusing primarily on the uses of photographs, personal memoirs and oral histories in museum exhibitions and related contexts, we examine how the complex Finnish relationship with Germans is narrated. In particular, we consider the significance of the emotive and affective qualities of the presented material and how they mediate perceptions of and relationships with the wartime past. We first examine the friendly relations between Finnish civilians and German troops and move on the discuss how Finns perceive and position themselves to the Nazi racialized warfare and the Holocaust.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage
• museum
• representations
• Holocaust
• Nazis
• Finland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Klooga camp had become an established Jewish labor camp in September 1943 and supposedly did not have civilian internees until then (Weiss-Wendt 2009, 301–302). Perhaps Liisa Tenkku has gotten the date wrong, or the site had housed civilian internees prior to September 1943, when Lithuanian Jews were brought there.

2. In fact, most of the people involved were supporters of this right-wing organization that promoted tribal unity between the Finnic tribes, i.e. Finns, Ingrians and Karelians (and Russo- and Judeophobia).

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported by the Söderholm foundation and the Jenny and Antti Wihuri foundation under grant number [00190227].

Notes on contributors

Tuuli Matila

Tuuli Matila is a PhD candidate in archaeology in the University of Oulu. Her research focuses on the representation and commemoration of World War Two in Finland, with a special interest in wartime photography.

Vesa-Pekka Herva

Vesa-Pekka Herva is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Oulu, Finland. He has studied various aspects of material culture, human-environment relations, cosmology, and heritage in North-Eastern Europe from the Neolithic to modern times. He is the author, with Antti Lahelma, of Northern Archaeology and Cosmology: A Relational View (Routledge, 2019).