“Even children of seven or eight years old are imprisoned in a cell for the fact that they, hungry and broken, walk in the city and ask for bread… In an attempt to escape, three prisoners <… > were beaten to death… “ – this is from the testimony of prisoners in a concentration camp, 1942. And it’s not a German camp, but a Finnish one. RIA Novosti, within the framework of the project “Without a statute of limitations”, publishes evidence of the war crimes of Finnish fascists committed against peaceful Soviet citizens, declassified by the regional administration of the FSB in Kareliya and transmitted to the National Archive of Kareliya.

Nazism Finnish-style

Every fourth person in Kareliya in the years of the Great Patriotic War passed through Finnish concentration camps, where prisoners were considered “slaves without any rights” – this is how Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim spoke about Russians, Karelians, Tatars, and other local inhabitants. Hard labour and starvation killed thousands, and the occupied territories were truly under a Nazi regime.

“Unlike the Finns, Karelians, and Vepsians, every Russian man is ordered to wear a red bandage on his left sleeve. He and people of other nationalities – Tatars, Georgians, and others – are given half as much food,” says another quote from the declassified archives.

In the captured Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic in 1941-1944, the Finns built 14 concentration camps (six in Petrozavodsk). By April 1942, there were about 24,000 people – about 30% of the population. These were mostly Slavs, and more than 90% – Russians, Belarusian, and Ukrainians. Historians estimate that about 50,000 people passed through the camps.

The doctor struck, the sick died

“The camp has introduced rod discipline, for the slightest violations of the regime the camp prisoners are beaten with canes and rubber batons,” testifies Egor Petrovich Egorov, who fled from detention in May 1942. “Britkin, who was held in the camp, was sent to the Kutižmu logging station, where he fell ill and went to the doctor for help, but instead of helping, this doctor beat Britkin. The patient was sent back to the concentration camp, where he died a week later. Ivan Ivanov was beaten unconscious by the same doctor,” reads the testimony of another prisoner, teacher Pavel Filippovich Yakimets. He gives the names of the torturers: commandant of concentration camp No. 2 in Petrozavodsk Valentin Miks, and security guard Pauli.

About a third of prisoners died from starvation. According to the Karelian expert community, the Finns destroyed people without weapons, artificially creating starvation and not providing medical care. They considered the Karelians, Ingermanians, Vepsians, Estonians, and Mordovians to be “kindred peoples”. The rest, mostly Russians, are “non-national” populations.

“White Finns [valkoiset – ed] gathered women along with young children, old men, and old women and placed them in houses specially set aside on the outskirts of the city and surrounded by barbed wire. These are houses of death. In all camps there is starvation and typhoid,” recalls a resident of Petrozavodsk.

For helping the Soviet government – the death penalty

People were thrown into camps on the slightest pretext, first of all – on suspicion of sympathising with the Soviet power. Thus, the documents describe the story of the Babushkin family from the village of Ustreka, who were sent behind barbed wire simply because of a rumour that they helped the partisans, although, according to the evidence of the fellow villagers, this was not really the case.

Pelageya Stepanova Barantseva reported during interrogation that she was sent to the camp on November 1942 for the fact that her husband commanded a partisan unit, “which came to our house and we sheltered them”. Those who fought the occupiers were killed, in accordance with a direct directive from Mannerheim from his “Appeal to the Karelian Population”.

“The slightest assistance given to Soviet troops by civilians is considered to be espionage, and their actions with weapons in their hands <… > – robbery attacks. All guilty persons in both cases are punishable by death,” reads an extract from the archival certificate with the annex of the translation of Mannerheim’s “Appeal” itself. The directive was strictly implemented, followed by Lieutenant Colonel Väinö Kotilainen, who, according to historians, and was never brought to justice for his crimes.

There are many examples in declassified papers. Finnish Nazis dealt with Communists and Komsomol members with particular cruelty. Thus, in the Zaonezhsky district the secretary of the Komsomol organisation and deputy of the Kuzarandsky village council Tatiyana Mukhina, who was only 20 years old, was brutally tortured. They tell fellow villagers: “Many times they beat Mukhina during interrogation, after which they threw her into the cold room of the school, which served as a pre-trial detention cell… During an interrogation, Comrade Mukhina broke out of the hands of the White Finns and wanted to run away, but when she was on the street she was fatally shot by Finnish soldiers and again thrown into a cell. Several shots were fired here, and Tanya Mukhina was killed.”

Beat with iron rods

Kolvasozersky camp. Whole families were thrown here, and children were forcibly taken from their mothers. People were arrested under the slightest possible pretext. Thus, Nikolay Ivanovich Alekseyev was captured for talking about the imminent return of the Red Army and the restoration of collective farm life.

Fedor Ivanovich Boglayev tried to escape from the occupiers. “In August 1941, the Finns occupied the village, I went into the forest 15 kilometers away, but was detained by Finnish troops and brought back,” he recalled. When questioned, he was “beaten with iron rods”.

Names of traitors

There were also informers among the prisoners who tried to get the information the Nazis needed from the prisoners. Ekaterina Nikolayevna Vlasova said that such people enjoyed “trust and privileges”. In particular, a certain Stepan Timofeyev “followed the camps and reported to the headquarters or in conversation with the sentries about such cases. After that, the attitude of the organisation of the camp towards the persons reported by Timofeyev changed”. He later voluntarily left for Finland.

According to Ekaterina Nikolayevna’s memoirs, a certain Dora Tarasova snitched on her own: “As a partisan radio operator, she was captured, she gave all secrets known to her, for which she was released and sent to some courses, in my opinion, to courses for spies.” The espionage of Tarasova was reported by several other former prisoners of the camp.

Beaten for bread

Conditions were even tougher in the Svyatnavolok camp. The guards forced the prisoners to carry out ridiculous tasks and beat them. Former prisoner Gerasim Leontievich Pushko said: “The first time commandant Kashras beat me because I didn’t take off my beard. The second time I was beaten by Sergey Pavel Antonovich, a Russian, who was the head of the camp in 1942. He thought I was getting food for the second time. And the third time I was beaten by Saprin, a Finn, for coming to find out if I could get additional food products with ration coupons.”

Aleksandra Ivanovna Ponomareva recalled that in the summer of 1943 in front of her eyes “the Finn Yury Pavlo beat Kashin and Parfenov for the fact that during unloading of the car they concealed food”.

They were, of course, fed poorly: a little bit of bread and a plate of stew made from “different garbage”.

Prisoner Krasilnikov from Petrozavodsk concentration camp No. 5, where about 7,000 people were kept, said that “everyone was given 300 grams of flour with wood admixture and 50 grams of thin sausage for three days”. He counted at least 2,000 dead – he saw them with his own eyes, because he took the bodies to a mass grave in the city cemetery.

Bread, of course, was lacking, and some went to the neighbouring village to get it, for which they were then beaten with sticks in front of the entire camp.

Taisiya Petrovna Petrushin was “beaten with a stick so much that she could not work for two days”.

Ekaterina Nikolayevna Petrova recalled that in the winter of 1942 one of the prisoners went out for bread. As punishment for this “misconduct”, the Finns forced all women to shave their heads.

Their target was Greater Finland

To the question what the former prisoners of the camp know about the atrocities of the Finnish authorities, people answered differently, and the overall picture is formed only when studying the entire array of archival documents. Behind each line is a human life.

“It is all but a manifestation of deliberate genocide against the civilian population. Moreover, it was about the implementation by the Finnish command of a racial policy aimed at the destruction of Russians. The ‘non-national’ population was sent to labour camps, which for many turned out to be death camps, for whole families, including young children. This is eloquently confirmed by the personal data contained in the archival documents,” explains to RIA Novosti the Dean of the Faculty of Archival Affairs of the Historical and Archival Institute of the Russian State University for the Humanities, Candidate of Historical Sciences, and expert of the project “Without a Statute of Limitations” Elena Malysheva.

The Finns strictly monitored ethnic purity, and attempts to violate it were punished. The testimony of Adam Stanislavovich Bobrovich is characteristic: “Beatings happened, especially against girls for cohabitation with Finns. Astapovich, Tyler (German) and another, Zina, I don’t remember the last and patronymic names.”

The Finnish camps for the Russians were part of a large plan to create an ethnically pure state of Greater Finland, as was stated by Marshal Mannerheim. Even before the offensive began, he signed Order No. 132. The fourth paragraph read: “Detain the Russian population and sent them to concentration camps.”

“The names of the zealous perpetrators of this order are not a secret. They are named in the testimony of prisoners of Finnish camps who managed to survive. Human memory can be erased,” said Malysheva, “but archival documents preserved these names, which means that the crimes ‘without a statute of limitations’ were not depersonalised.”

The Finnish occupiers, unlike the German occupiers, did not shoot en masse, and therefore for many years their crimes remained in the shadow of the atrocities of German fascism, historians say. The Finnish Nazis were starved and subjected to unbearable living conditions, hard labour, and constant bullying in the camps. This is also remembered by former young prisoners of Finnish camps who are still alive.

Pursuant to the directive of Marshal Mannerheim, the Russian, Ukrainian, Tatar, and many other “non-national inhabitants” of Kareliya were purposefully and quietly destroyed. The peculiarity of the occupying Finnish regime dictates its approaches to exposing war crimes. The new declassified documents allow this to be done, based on mass and detailed testimonies of eyewitnesses and other documentary evidence that has now been published.

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