Finnish concentration camps in Karelia

That's like preaching for harmony with the rapist - who has never been judged nor accused - and his victim, who the rapist blames for walking alone on the street after 6 pm...

 

Again...these Finnish camps sound much like the camps set up by Brits in South Africa and for same reasons if Kar is correct...I say if because I know little of the Finnish camps..I do know that the world has accused Britain since the Boer war of inventing camps. Which sound much like those of Kar's explanations and reviled us ever since and use it as a weapon against debate in may an a forum when such camps are discussed..neatly bypassint the Spanish American wars.

 

I disagree. They may be less than desireable but in some cases they are probably the best answer which makes it hard to consider them "wrong". The camps for the Japanese in America for instance or some of the current refugee camps come to mind.

Unfortunatly correct but that doesn't mean that all camps are the same. Unless your defintion is that it's a concentration camp if fits the above and it's some other kind of camp if it doesn't.

 

It is impossible to understand the subject by looking into something else. Try to look directly to the facts. They want to misslead you to see these camps as these other humane detention facilities for the Japanese in the USA. Americans did the job in a fashionable way. The basic question is what really happened in these specific Finnish camps. Intentions? Who knows and it doesn't matter at all what they "wanted" when the results are so regretful and no one wants to regret.

 

I disagree. Intentions are important and so is capabilty.

 

I've met Balts and Poles that hated the Soviets, and said that the Germans weren't that bad...

Anectdotal evidence of non-repression isn't worth much in the face of physical evidence of various misdeeds.

 

You seem to want to ignore the facts. The facts are as follows:

- more civilians would have died without the relocation camps In East Karelia and the help of the Finnish army
- soviet army had left the civilians (mostly old and children) without food nor means to survive
- less than half of the non-Finnic population was in the camps at the most, later less than a quarter
- the health and nutritional conditions of the civilians were often bad to start with
- after the first bad year the health of the civilians got better - reaching a level which was BETTER than the soviet peace time level
- the first year was bad because there was not enough food - thanks to the soviets
- the intentions of the Finns are well known: it was to feed the civilians, move them away from the front area, guard the suspected partisan helpers/saboteurs and initially to return the non-Karelian civilians back to their homes in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and so on, where the soviet regime had often forcibly transported them from

We Finns regret, that the soviet regime wanted to conquer our land and started three wars against us - unsuccesfully.


Finnish military personnel and non-Finnic people of East Karelia at a transfer camp in Petrozavodsk during the visit of a Swiss correspondent during the final phases of the war.[1]

 

Déjà vu

You can also see a propaganda photograph of Jewish children in the Theresienstadt ghetto taken during an inspection by the International Red Cross. Prior to this visit, the ghetto was "beautified" in order to deceive the visitors. Czechoslovakia, June 23, 1944.
— Comite International de la Croix Rouge

Just look at the facts, not embellished photos.

 

Except that in your example the Red Cross was only allowed to visit Theresienstadt, the "happy" concentration camp. AFAIK not many, if any, of those childen in the picture survived.

In East Karelia the International correspondents during their visit in January 1944 were allowed to see what they wanted and to go to any camp, which they did. They found nothing to complain about. Naturally in spring 1942 the situation would have been different, as I have already explained. AFAIK (practically?) all of the children in my photo (from Jan 1944) survived, since the child mortality even in the camps was then at the same level as in Finland.

Nice try, Taminov...

BTW - you never answer to any of my questions. Why? I naturally understand, that you can't find any proper counter arguments, but you should at least try, since you keep continuing your propaganda efforts...

 

Ah, in 1944 it was obvious that the Russians are inevitably coming back to ask difficult questions. At that time a total makeover has been done to hide what happened during 1941/1942. But until then too many kids were missing and their mothers were missing too. Facts are undeniable. We know that they were systematically gathered into the camps and left without the food behind the barbed wire.

I would like to thank you dear Karjala for speaking so frankly. Now I know that at the East a large-scale crime was committed over a continuous and uniform area from Murmansk, over the White Russia and Ukraine to the Caspian. I don't see any difference anymore between crimes committed in Poland and crimes committed in Karelia.

I feel sorry for these innocent victims and for those who cannot confess and regret. May God have mercy upon their souls.

 

1. But not after the harvest in 1942, when the situation already started to dramatically improve. The Germans were still advancing nicely and the soviets were still on the run. The Western Allies had not yet achieved even their first victory in Europe. As you wrote - but did not understand - the facts indeed are undeniable.

2. "Systematically"? Yes, those, who could not otherwise survive, were "systematically" gathered in the camps. That meant less than half of the non-Finnic population at the most, on average much less. Unfortunately there was not enough food - thanks to the soviets.

3. There were originally not even the barbed wires, which were later erected to fight the Typhus epidemy. ALL those civilians would have died without the camps. After the harvest 1942 the mortality normalized.

To be continued...

 

From the arguments of both sides it does look like the actions in late 42 and 43 are critical. If the mortaility rate decreased rapidly in that time frame then it pretty much points to Karjala being correct.

 

This is only a Wiki-link, but the data is correct enough AFAIK, although one really can't say for sure that all of those 4,000 died due to malnourshment only, which admittedly was the main factor.

"During the spring and summer of 1942, 3,500 detainees died of malnutrition. During the last half of 1942, the number of detainees dropped quickly to 15,000 as people were released to their homes or were resettled to the "safe" villages, and only 500 more people died during the last two years of war, as the food shortages were alleviated."

"The first camp was set up on 24 October 1941, in Petrozavodsk. The two largest groups were 6,000 Russian refugees and 3,000 inhabitants from the southern bank of the River Svir who were forcibly evacuated because of the close proximity of the front line. Around 4,000 of these prisoners perished due to malnourishment, 90 percent of them during the spring and summer of 1942.[6]

Population in the Finnish camps:

• 13,400 — December 31, 1941
• 21,984 — July 1, 1942
• 15,241 — January 1, 1943
• 14,917 — January 1, 1944"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Karelian_concentration_camps

 

Continuing...:

4. As I have shown on several occasions, you still only "know" what you have decided to know in the first place. No fact can change your prejudices. On the other had you are partly right - the soviet war criminals did murder and rape "over a continuous and uniform area", as you described. There was not much difference there from on place to the other.

5. I feel sorry for innocent victims too - Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Hungarian, German etc. - even Russian, who all were victims of the soviet and German dictatorships and their crimes.

 

... were children, women and elderly people, segregated purely on the ethnic basis and were left to starve. That is an unmeasurable shame and it is indecent and utterly shameful to defend those who did these uggly crimes.

 

Trying to decipher the numbers I get this.

Approximately 29,500-30,000 people were interned by Finland during the "Continuation War"

22,000 by July 1 1942, 15,000 released shortly after, leaving 8,000 in custody and over the remaining two years another 7,000 taken in keeping the total number of internees at about 15,000.

Mortality rate during the first year: 15.9%
Mortality Rate during the next two years: 3.3%
Average Mortality rate over entire period: 13.3 to 13.5%

I have attempted to get hard data on other internment camps but this seems something of a challenge. The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia did offer some useful numbers

Allied civilian internee mortality rate in Japanese custody equates out to 11.2% overall, but some camps reached 17%.

The worst Allied run internment camp Purama Quila outside Dehli and run by the British was 5%.

It does seem that overall Finnish camps were on average worse than Japanese run camps which is saying something, But Finland did make considerable strides to change their system that brought significant improvement to conditions even though their average mortality rate over the last two years was still higher than the Allied average, though better than Purama Quila in Dehli.

We must acknowledge that Finland was not a rich country and isolated from any outside help except from Germany who would not give it for this purpose.

We also must acknowledge that Finland knew Germany would attack on June 22, 1941 and was mobilizing at least a week prior to this date. The Continuation war was a conflict of choice by Finland, that they intended to liberate lost territories and so should/could expect to have Soviet civilians fall into their control.

Since troops on the frontlines and Finnish civilians did not suffer such mortality due to malnutrition some degree of incompetence or indifference to the plight of Russian civilians existed, possibly to a criminal degree on the part of some.

I do not blame the Finnish people as a whole as there seems to have been a small cabal of Finnish officers/leaders who laid the ground work for cooperation with Germany going back to late May 1941, and who hid this from the government as a whole. So some degree of confusion and lack of preparation must be accepted.

No Internment camp was good, and even the best had at least slightly higher mortality rate than normal living conditions, but the Finnish camps as bad as they were, did not reach the level of Axis POW camps for Allied prisoners and was well short of German Concentration Camps.

To call them Death Camps is a grave injustice to both the Finns and the real victims of these portals to hell.

 

There were practicly no adult males, which were either in the soviet army or in the soviet labour battalions. Especially since they were mostly children, women and elderly they would have perished ALL without the Finnish aid, which unfortunately was not adequate at first - thanks to the soviets

There were not many Karelians in the camps for several reasons:
- as original inhabitants of the area and as farmers they had their own/ex-own homes, fields and basic skills to keep them fed and sheltered without immediate Finnish help
- they mostly did not live in the front area and therefore were not in the need for evacuation
- they mostly did not try to help the enemy

In comparison many of the Russian(/Ukrainians/Belorussians etc.) were as newcomers/recent refugees and as town people not able to survive on their own without homes (many of which the soviet army had liberately destroyed), fields or skills. Many of them also needed to be evacuated from the front area and also some of them were helping the enemy and thus needed to be guarded. Out of all non-Finnic people (c. 50.000) less than half (c. 24.000) were in the camps at the most, about a quarter (c. 13.000) at the least.


Since you seem to be very enthusiastic about these human interest matters here's some more for you to discuss about...:

The Finns especially and the (East) Karelians to some degree too - among many other non-slavic nationalities - were classified as "enemy nationals" in the USSR. Thousands were outright murdered and tens of thousands perished during the deportations and Stalin's purges in the 30's and 40's.

"Looking at the entire period of Stalin's rule, one can list: Poles (1939–1941 and 1944–1945), Romanians (1941 and 1944–1953), Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians (1941 and 1945–1949), Volga Germans (1941–1945), Ingrian Finns (1929–1931 and 1935–1939), Finnish people in Karelia (1940–1941, 1944), Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks(1944) and Caucasus Greeks (1949-50),[12]Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Karapapaks, Far East Koreans (1937), Chechens and Ingushs (1944). Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union.[2] It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics.[13] By some estimates up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition."

February–May 1935 Ingrian Finns 30,000 from Leningrad Oblast (Russia) to Vologda Oblast, Western Siberia, Kazakh SSR, Tajik SSR
September 1941 Ingrian Finns, Germans 91,000 from Leningrad Oblast (Russian SFSR) to Kazakh SSR, Siberia, Astrakhan Oblast (Russian SFSR), Far East
1942 Ingrian Finns 9,000 from Leningrad Oblast (Russian SFSR) to Eastern Siberia, Far East

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union

"If we relate the 1948 figure presented above to the total numbers, we find that the possibility of being the victim of the terror was higher for the Finns than for any other nationality group in Karelia. In relation to the Russian population in 1937-1938, 1.1 % of that specific nationality group was arrested. For the Karelian group the ratio was 2.5 %, but for the Finns it was as high as 17.0 %. Thus, the possibility of the Finns being terrorized was at least seventeen times higher than that for the Russians. But, on the other hand, the research is still going on. It is very probable that the total number of Finns killed in Soviet Karelia could rise to as much as 8000-11,000, according to the results of Takala and other Karelian researchers. The total number of Finns killed in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist rule might even climb to 25,000-30,000, which is more than the number of Finns killed in the Winter War of 1939-1940 between Finland and the Soviet Union."

(See H. Rautkallio, Suuri viha. Stalinin suomalaiset uhrit 1930--luvulla (Porvoo, 1995). In his study of the exiled Communist Party of Finland 1937--1945, Kimmo Rentola approaches the number of 20,000 destructed Finns in the USSR. See K. Rentola, Kenen joukoissa seisot? Suomalainen kommunismi ja sota 1937-1945 (Porvoo-Helsinki-Juva, 1994), p. 72.)

http://www.genealogia.fi/emi/art/article255e.htm#a19

 

Thanks for the summary. Few observations and comments, numbers and bold texts mine:

1. The demographics in the Finnish camps were not normal. The elderly and the young, among which the mortality was higher even at peace time, were overrepresented. AFAIK, the elderly and even the children were underrepresented in the Japanese camps.

Comparison with the Japanese and the Allied camps is not totally fair, since the health and nutritional condition of the soviets was often poor to start with - unlike among the Western prisoners, who mostly were healthy and well fed.

2. True, but more important was the fact that Finland was not self-sustainable even at peace time, but had to import food. After the Winter War Finland had lost 12 % of the best farming land. Also the harvest in 1941 was bad and all of it could not be harvested because ot the new war, which the soviets had started again.

The retreating soviet army had transported the food away from East Karelia or destroyed it.

3. Was not. Finland got to know the exact date of the German attack one day before. Finland immediately declared herself neutral with the troops in defence. Finland naturally got prepared earlier since it was unlikely that she could stay out of a soviet-German war. The start of the actual war was however a soviet choice - not Finnish. Of course Finland wanted Germany to beat the soviets and to be able to get the lost land back.

War was supposed to be short, after which the non-Karelian newcomers were to be returned back to their homes in Russia, Ukraine etc.

4. Food in Finland was not destroyed nor transported away by the soviets like in East Karelia. People in Finland knew how to farm land, pick berries, fish and hunt - unlike many of the non-Karelians in East Karelia. Still there was no food in Finland which could have been exported to East Karelia, since even in Finland the mortality rose in 1942 (and 1945). Even the Finnish army suffered during the spring 1942 and some soldiers had to be treated for malnurishment.

5. (Almost) everybody in Finland was afraid of and expecting a new soviet attack - for very good reasons. All possibilities were considered to get any aid from any source. The ONLY possibility left and available was Germany - naturally with the price tag. There was NOTHING wrong in the Finnish extremely dangerous situation to receive the crucial help from Germany, nor keeping it as secret as possible in that delicate situation. NO Finnish leader - whether civilian or military - is to be blamed for that. Few years back Mannerheim was voted as the greatest Finn of all times (as he always is in these kind of polls). The war time president Ryti became second - despite of or rather because of the fact, that after the war he was sentenced to jail (by soviet demand) as a war responsible.

"Many Finns see the War Responsibility Trials as a kangaroo court set up for the Soviet Union in order to discredit the Finnish wartime leaders,[1] since ex post facto law was against the Finnish Constitution.
Even worse in the public opinion was the fact that the Soviet leadership, which had conducted an aggressive war, the Winter War, just 19 months before Finland started the Continuation War by attacking Soviet Union (actually did not!), were not indicted at all, making the whole process hypocritical victor's justice.[2][3]"

"On May 19, 1949 (president) Paasikivi pardoned Ryti, who was hospitalized (his health collapsed during the imprisonment and he remained an invalid until his death in 1956). He also pardoned Rangell, Tanner, Linkomies, and Kivimäki, who were still on parole. That day, Paasikivi wrote in his diary:"[It was] ... the most noble deed, I have participated in, in the last five years.""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War-responsibility_trials_in_Finland

 

However, of course you know that this is not the truth.

In 1920, just 0.6% of Karelian population were Finns. At that time, percentage of Russians was 55.7%. In 1939 ethnic structure of Karelia was: 63.2% Russians and 42.7% Karelians. The number of Finns in Karelia was negligible because they lived elsewhere: in Leningrad area.

Clearly, majority of Karelians were Russians and a negligible fraction of population were Finns!

Then, in 1941, Finns attempted to annex Karelia as the Finnish Lebensraum at the east with 100% Finns and other ethnicities 0%. Separation of inhabitants strictly by their ethnicity was the first step towards the elimination of all "Aliens" of Karelia. Six feet under or expulsion were the only choice.

Finally, I cannot understand how can you claim that Karelia was Finnish. It is Russian since 1617.

EDIT: Ah, I have forgotten to mention: all non-Russian tribes of Karelia were considered racially adequate for the incorporation into the Finnish nation. All other had to vanish from the face of the Earth. This way or another.

 

Genocide in Soviet Karelia:Stalin´s terror and the Finns of Soviet karelia

http://www.genealogia.fi/emi/art/article255e.htm

Quite interesting.

In terms of numbers out of the total nationality group, it is a fact that the Finnish population in Soviet Karelia was a prime target of the terror campaign. If you were a Finn in Soviet Karelia, you had statistically a seventeen times greater chance of being terrorized than if you were a Russian.

In all, the Finns of the Soviet Union were seen as a small but dangerous group. The total number of victims of the Stalinist era is not exact, but definitely more than only a few thousands. When counted as a whole from all over the USSR, probably 15,000 Finns were exterminated, and some estimates reach as many as 25-30,000. We can at this stage estimate that perhaps half of the Finnish victims originated from the Karelian areas.