Soviet Footage of War Crimes, between Propaganda and Judicial Evidence, 1941–1946

Soviet authorities have taken great care to shoot film footage of Nazi crimes by incorporating camera crews into the army and giving them detailed instructions. Thousands of meters of film have been preserved, constituting an archive of mostly unexplored source material. This chapter analyses the Soviet policy of filming and showing war crimes footage in the war and postwar years. Footage of atrocities served both judiciary and propaganda purposes, which are explored in three phases in the text: the mobilisation phase (1941–1943), the “archival” phase (from late 1943) and the judicial phase (1943–1946).