When we think of Finland, we think of a peaceful, historically neutral country, hence the term Finnishization, to denote a neutrality par excellence, with high results in school tests of its educational system and that accepts a large percentage of immigration in relation to its population.
However, now that, together with Sweden, it abandons its historic neutrality and violates the 1954 treaty with Russia to remain neutral, it is convenient to review its behavior in the not so distant Second World War.
Finland was a part of the Russian Empire 1809–1917 and became an autonomic part of Imperial Russia , most of the laws from the time of the Swedish rule remained in force. During the Russian rule, Finland became a special region ,a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, recognizing an autonomous parliament, the Diet
In 1917 with the Russian Revolution Finland acceded to independence.From november 30, 1939 to March 12, 1940, there was a war between Russia and Finland , finished with Russian victory and Finland surrendered a large area of southeastern Finland, including the city of Viipuri (renamed Vyborg), that before was Russian because Zar Alexander I incoporated to Finland en 1854, and leased the peninsula of Hanko to the Soviet Union for 30 years.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and with it began the Second World War, Finland allied with Germany against the USSR, collaborating on the northern front and in the siege of Leningrad where more than a million civilians died of starvation.
The behavior of the Finns with Russian civilians and with captured Soviet soldiers is completely ignored in the West and the testimonies that follow do not correspond to the image of that idyllic country that they want to present to us.
“The Red Army soldier Sergey Pavlovich Terentyev, who escaped from the captivity of the White Finns, spoke about the unbearable suffering of Soviet prisoners of war languishing in a camp near the city of Pitkyaranta. “In this camp,” Terentiev said, “wounded soldiers of the Red Army are kept. They are not provided with any kind of medical attention. ... They gave us a cup of flour stew a day. The Finnish executioners devised a terrible torture for us. They girded the prisoner with barbed wire and dragged him along the ground. Every day, the corpses of tortured Soviet soldiers are carried out of the camp." (From the message of the Soviet Information Office of October 7, 1942)
“The Red Army soldier Lazarenko, who fell into the clutches of the Mannerheims, was subjected to monstrous torture. Finnish executioners shoved cartridges into his nostrils and burned a five-pointed star on his chest with a red-hot ramrod. But even this did not seem enough for the vile sadists. They broke the skull of his victim and stuffed cookies inside. " (Pravda, July 25, 1944)
Soviet prisoners of war in Finland.
exhaustion swelling from hunger, dropsy.
“Dear Comrade Editor! Take a look at this photo. It shows the Finnish army lieutenant Olkinuorya. In his hands is the skull of a Red Army soldier tortured and killed by him. According to the prisoners testified, this uniformed beast decided to keep the skull of his victim "as a souvenir" and ordered the soldiers to boil it in a cauldron and clean it. And in the suitcase of the captured Finn Saari we found photographs like this. Saari tortured the prisoners, cutting off their arms and legs and ripping open their stomachs. He even established a system: he first cut off the feet, then the hands, then the shins, the forearms, and only then cut off the head. (From a letter of Senior Lieutenant V. Andreev, published in Komsomolskaya Pravda on August 11, 1944)
... The act and resolution of the military investigator on the corpse of an unknown Red Army soldier found on the shore of Lake Ladoga on June 25, 1944, boiled alive in a large iron barrel, testifies to what vile, sophisticated torture Finnish sadists get...
... A regime was established in the concentration camps, designed for the extinction of prisoners of war by a slow and painful death. They were hungry. The barracks in which the prisoners were placed, as a rule, were not heated all year round. The appallingly unsanitary living conditions of the prisoners of war and the rotten and inedible food were the cause of massive stomach and other illnesses. The most common disease, most often fatal, was general exhaustion ...
... There are no isolated cases when the guards of the camps arranged vile and bloody fun, throwing dogs on defenseless people.
Soviet prisoner. Severe exhaustion,
edema from hunger
Prisoners are used as experimental material in medical experiments. The Swedish newspaper Volksviljan wrote earlier this year: “It is known among Stockholm doctors that in Finland Russian prisoners of war are used as subjects of medical experiments. Finnish doctors use Russian prisoners of war to determine how much air can be injected into a person's blood. This inflicts terrible torment on the victims during the "investigation", after which death occurs. In experiments on Russian prisoners, they are also trying to find out how many drugs the human body can withstand. (From the Report on the atrocities of the White Finns in the temporarily occupied territory of the USSR, sent to the head of the GlavPU of the Red Army A.S. Shcherbakov by his deputy I.V. Shikin on July 28, 1944)
In June 2016, Finnish writer Petri Pietiläinen came up with the idea to publish the memoirs of surviving Soviet-Finnish veterans. Of the 70 men who fought in the First Infantry Regiment, only 30 were able to give an interview.
The talks with the military formed the basis of an article published this week on the website of Finnish broadcaster Yle. “30 Finnish veterans finally dare to speak out about the bloody battles of the Continuation War,” the headline read.
Despite being a very sensitive subject, this material is not full of aggression towards the Soviet Union. On the contrary, veterans painfully recall how they were ordered to brutalize soldiers and prisoners, condemn their military leadership and do not hide the fact that chaos and panic reigned in the ranks of the Finnish army during the war.*
*https://histrf.ru/read/articles/zimniaia-voina-panika-i-zhiestokost-finskoi-armii
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- Speaking about the horrors of that time, veterans often talked about war crimes against Soviet soldiers and prisoners of war, whom they "killed mercilessly." “Some were able to take not one, but two prisoners, and then boasted that they 'killed these filthy Russians'. Although many admit that these memories are very painful. Were the Finnish soldiers really not inferior to the Nazis in cruelty?
- Yes, there are confirmed cases, including documented ones, in particular, the extremely cruel massacre of the wounded during the liquidation of the encirclement of the Red Army in the Lemetti region (this is between Lake Ladoga and Onega). Relatively small garrisons held out there for a long time. When they were pressured, there was simply merciless retaliation, including from the injured. It was such a shameful stain that it remained on the Finnish army from the Winter War.
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