The ghosts in the archive: World War Two photography and landscapes crafted by the Nazis in Finland

ABSTRACT

The Finnish wartime landscape was altered by Nazi troops who were stationed there during World War Two. This paper examines wartime sceneries through Finnish Army Information Company’s photographs from the period of the war known in Finland as the Continuation War (1941–1944). The images reveal a completely different side to the Nazi co-belligerence to what is traditionally acknowledged in Finland. I discuss the ways the Nazi troops altered the Finnish landscape, adding `German-ness´ to their surroundings and more specifically, how Nazi ideology manifested in the northern Finnish landscapes. The Finns have been completely oblivious to the symbolic messages the Nazis crafted in their surroundings. Photographs as haunting representation addresses in this paper both the difficult memory of German presence that frames these pictures and the specific potency of these photographic encounters. Haunting as a theory deals with the evocative ways an image can convey information about the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Photography
• haunting
• material culture
• World War Two
• Finland
• Nazi Germany

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous reviewers for their input in improving this paper. I also thank Vesa-Pekka Herva, Titta Kallio-Seppä, Paul R. Mullins and Timo Ylimaunu for their comments, discussions and help in the preparation of this article. Any mistakes are my own. I would like to thank the staff at the Photographic Archive in the Military Museum, Helsinki, for their help in the archive. I would also like to thank Samuli

Fabrin from the Militaria Museum, Satu Ståhlberg from the South Karelia museum, and Leila

Stenroos from the Rosenlew Museum, for their help in the questions related to the museum

exhibition, ´Sodan Värit´.

Disclosure statement

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

1. The SA-images have not been utilized in museums very often save for a recent exhibition that focuses on wartime images; a display called `Sodan Värit´ (Colours of War; see Keskinen and Pekari. 2000 for the pictures), and in the museum that curates these images: the Military Museum in Helsinki, that focuses on aspects of wartime events.

2. This includes a vast number of pictures that do not directly illustrate the Nazis, but for instance pictures, where Finns are fighting with weapons bought from Nazi Germany (Elo and Kleemola. 2016, 160).

3. All of the information about the exhibition content was received from personal communication with the museums in question: Samuli Fabrin from the Militaria Museum in Hämeenlinna, Satu Ståhlberg from the South-Karelia museum and Leila Stenroos from the Rosenlew museum in Pori.

4. The database in www.Sotamuistomerkit.fi lists Finnish war monuments is not entirely comprehensive but provides a reasonable overview of the commemorative situation (Suomen sotamuistomerkit 1939–1941). One memorial was erected for the German co-fighters in Kuusamo, Finland in 1997.

5. All of the Germans’ burials are illustrated in images: SA-151165-69, 25279–80, 27298, 29938–39, 31474, 33440, 33600–01, 33736–41, 33800, 34049, 35758, 43675, 45661–62, 47223–25, 51223–25, 52886, 61217–19, 62970, 72767, 72769–70, 77646–48, 87422–30, 94293–95, 99452, 101594–95, JsDia699, JsDia734, 114122–25, 94145.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation under grant 00160458 and the Academy of Finland, under grant [275497].

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.