The Concentration Camps of Finland
The Hennala concentration camp, where 1200 people would die, 500 by execution. 100–200 women assisting the Reds would die here at the hands of Hans Kalm.
Beginning in 1880, Finland was propelled into the modern capitalist world by its position as a Russian colonial possession sat between Tsarist Russia and Europe. The rapid and enormous industrialization and urbanization of Finland was encouraged by Russia, whose economic policies allowed it to behave with relative autonomy so long as its special economic status continued to benefit Russia, with whom about half its trade was conducted. In this way it’s more appropriate to say that Finland’s growth was stimulated and utilized by Russia, but that this growth also empowered Finland by allowing it to have strong independent trade ties with Germany and Sweden.
This was a country of rural peasantry which in the course of a few decades had become a modest manufacturing center and a regional trade hub for raw materials. A largely illiterate population of farmers who had never heard the words “human rights” or imagined they would be allowed to vote was suddenly confronted, like the rest of the world, with the new realities of modern capitalism. Class tensions which had existed before the language of class politics entered Finland were being exacerbated and made more present in daily life by the growing urban population, especially in the south and along the coast.
While Finns were not especially fond of their Russian overlords, they did not seem particularly bothered by the Russian garrisons in the cities despite something like an ethnic hatred which permeated the culture — Finns may not have liked Russians, but they had never been independent, having been ruled by the Swedes in previous centuries. Nearly a thousand years earlier the Swedes had begun “civilizing” missions into Finland under the guise of the church, and would colonize Finland to such an extent that the capital of Helsinki was established by a Swedish invasion.
Finland’s people had always been a prize to be exploited by the local hegemon, and by comparison the paranoid and clumsy Russian administration seemed content to govern lightly from afar — this earned the Russians both respect for this level of autonomy and a certain aloofness from a Finnish elite who were not afraid to make demands of their overlords. Although the country still shared a deep cultural connection with Sweden, it had always been the case under historical Swedish rule that the Finnish peasantry was conscripted into the Swedish army. One condition of Russian lordship which persisted was the attractive policy that Finns were not to be conscripted into the Russian armed forces, despite the voluntary service of many Finnish elites in the Russian officer corps (including Carl Mannerheim himself, the future war leader of the Whites in the Civil War, and future president — a man who spoke Swedish and Russian, but couldn’t converse in Finnish).
There were two important social distinctions that preceded the arrival of modern politics in Finland. The first was a north/south division, one in which tenant farmers in the north of the country were related by blood to the elite class which owned their land. Because there were so few elites in the north and they were in less of a position to exert control, these peasants were allowed more freedom. While they were still restricted to renting their farms from the elites, men were allowed to essentially pass on this “lease” to their sons. In the south, no such relationship existed. Ultimately the bargain for the tenant farmers in the south was that the socialists promised them ownership of the farms they currently rented. This is an example of the complex, pragmatic landscape of any revolutionary war — despite principles, the reality of different social groups meant that at least in this case, the tenant farmers who fought for the Whites denied themselves the right to own private property, and the tenant farmers who fought for the Reds did so with the belief that the communists would give them ownership of private property.
There is actually evidence that this private ownership of farm land was not the initial state of affairs in the country. In an English-language review of Eino Jutikalla’s work on the peasantry, Danish researcher Fridlev Skrubbeltrang remarks of the 14th century:
“The area under cultivation was often so large that several families combined to make use of it and formed burn-beating teams made up not of villages or family relations but simply of neighbours with common interests. The division of the harvest was based on the number of axes contributed by each family to the labour force, though sometimes burn-beating land was divided into plots, also on the basis of the number of axes. If the burn-beaters continued as a team until the harvest was brought in, then the harvest was divided up in sheaves, stooks or stacks, or after being threshed it might be divided up in grain, trusses of straw or baskets of husks.”
Within the next century, private ownership of farmland — which were essentially strips of forest which would be cyclically burned to enrich the soil so that crops would grow — had emerged, perhaps because peasants had begun to be dispossessed of their land after a failure to pay their taxes.
This is an important point because it tells us that private property did not arrive with industrialization, but it was also the result of a process of the consolidation of wealth by the noble classes. As Finland transformed from a rough hinterland into a progressively more populous nation, ripe for taxation by Sweden and then Russia, the ownership of private property shifted from the peasants to their lords. By the turn of the century, this class division was just a fact of life.
The second most apparent distinction is one of language — Finland was and is bilingual, with coastal populations and the nobility tending to speak Swedish. This makes more sense when it’s understood that Sweden was not simply a country nearby, but that Sweden had continually invaded and assimilated Finnish territory over hundreds of years. In “The Finnish Civil War 1918: History, Memory, Legacy”, Tuomas Tepora and Aapo Roselius make the case that by the turn of the century there was no ethnic or national tendency associated with Finnish and Swedish. Communists and nationalists alike spoke both languages, and despite appearances Finnish national feeling couldn’t be tied to which language someone spoke — what mattered was economic class.
The emergence of communism and the “Reds” in Finland had just as much a nationalist character as that of the future “Whites”. While the Whites ended up being a home for those people who wanted independence from Russia with German or Swedish support, the Reds wanted a similar independence — but with the addition of more economic equality and human rights, while appealing to the Russians for help. The way that this division formed is telling, in that the industrial unions in urban centers were overwhelmingly socialist and communist, while the Whites would draw their support from the landlord class and the tenant farmers in the north who saw their landlords as friends and family.
Tepora and Roselius provide some revealing statistics — about 60 percent of all Finns did not own property, and about 40 percent of the 3 million inhabitants of Finland were essentially homeless labourers who wandered the country looking for work. Although Finland’s economy had grown enormously, enough to transform the country into a place with cities rather than forests, all of that money was being concentrated in private wealth which was not reaching the people at large. In fact they show that even the Finnish nobility was growing poor, and it was the wealthiest of the Finnish middle class which was now buying up all the land, sometimes from nobles who could no longer afford to keep their holdings. The old world was becoming distorted and the country was on the verge of something new.
The catalyst for the Civil War that would erupt on January 27th of 1918 and last until May 15th of the same year were the Russian Revolutions in late 1917. As the Russian government melted away, Finland found itself without a government. During the course of the last few years — World War I — Finland’s special economic position had been destroyed. During the first years of the war the Russian garrisons swelled and production for the Russian war effort kept the economy afloat, but in reality the Finns were now completely dependent on Russian demand for goods. As Russia’s own economy imploded, Finland’s economy was sapped as the money Finland had been paid became worthless.
Not only was Finland thrown into disarray because of the collapse of imperial Russia, but this political collapse caused an economic collapse, and out of this turmoil emerged a Civil War.
In reality, this was less a war than a slaughter, and it was a slaughter which followed the contours of class lines.
38,000 people died during the war, and Tepora and Roselius are quick to point out that only 200,000 people actually participated in the war. Only a third of those killed died fighting — the other two thirds died of execution or disease in concentration camps. As Tepora and Roselius write, this conflict foreshadowed the nature of that century.
“Although the Finnish Civil War took place on the margins of a Europe entangled in a massive world war, the conflict in Finland included many of the ingredients that would make the first half of the 20th century one of the darkest periods in modern history. The catastrophe in the POW camps, with more than 12,000 victims, became a grim prelude to the global era of which the image of the internment or concentration camp is paramount.”
More tellingly, 85 percent of the dead were Reds — socialists, communists, and sympathizers — making up about 27,000 of the 38,000 victims.
In the same volume Marko Tikka describes the savage nature of White forces, and mentions one Major Hans Kalm, who would become infamous for his mass executions of prisoners, especially women, in the camps.
“The commander of the Second Regiment, Hans Kalm, was a prime example of an irredentist warrior of his time. Kalm, himself of Estonian descent and a World War I veteran in the Russian Army, had become a ferocious counterrevolutionary, and during the Finnish Civil War he led a battalion famous for the use of terror and summary executions. After the war, Kalm and his battalion were responsible of the executions of some 600 prisoners when acting as guards in the POW camp in Lahti.”
At the battle of Paju in Estonia (after the Civil War proper) Kalm’s unit had lost a third of its men wounded or dead, and the unit they were operating alongside suffered 50% casualties. Not only was it White policy that Reds were not combatants but bandits, and so could be executed without worry, but it’s not outrageous to surmise that alongside a fervour for killing communists there was a correlation between the battle deaths of comrades and the summary executions of prisoners after battles.
This is the kind of brutal fighting and murder that seems to us more characteristic of the struggle between Germany and Russia in the Second World War than any fighting elsewhere in the First World War, save perhaps the seething enmity on display between Slavs and Italians. It’s telling that when the Whites won a battle at Narva, they executed the Red Finns but not the Russians. Although at least 2,000 Russians died in the Civil War, this was perhaps less a hatred for a communism in general, of which the people knew little, and more a hatred of their own destitute class. Many Whites may truly have seen these Red fighters as bandits, in the same way that the French army of 1871 were told that the citizens of Paris were now bandits and rapists who were to be killed on sight and executed should they surrender.
In 1907, the socialists had won nearly half of the parliamentary seats in the country. By 1918 they were being executed where they were found. By 1919 there was still a socialist party, but the Communist Party would be banned by punishment of imprisonment until 1944. Widows of Red fighters were denied pensions. Right up until the day a new law was put in place to mandate arrest rather than death, the White Army conducted cleansing sweeps throughout the country, engaging pockets of Red resistance in gun battles in city centers and conducting executions on the street.
Ironically, even more legal weight was put behind protecting the killers when the White government declared the following statute.
“individuals who have overstepped the line as regards suppressing the rebellion against the nation’s lawful order, stopping the rebellion from spreading, or restoring law and order … should not be accused in court.”
The nature of the exterminations was exceedingly clear and easy to understand. Tikka presents a quote from a police chief who was sick and tired of widows sending evidence of the murder of their husbands and friends, hoping for justice.
“In another case, the Chief Constable in the parish of Pomarkku in southwestern Finland replied irritably to the inquiry requests that: ‘[i]f there should be a profound inquiry on the justification and the cause of death of every Red bastard who died in our district last spring it would be too much to handle for one man.’”
During the war the Whites operated 13 concentration camps. Prisoners were starved to death, and many died of the Spanish Flu thanks to unsanitary and crowded camp conditions. Even after the war ended, those in the camps continued to die. Marko Tikka writes of the Tammisaari camp:
“During the summer, an average of 30 prisoners died every day. In total, almost 3000 prisoners died and were buried in what would be the biggest mass grave in Finland, just outside the prison.”
When a doctor’s report of the dismal conditions of the condemned was leaked by socialists to the Swedish press, the world was shocked. Worried that they would not be granted their independence because of international knowledge of the killings, the Whites were forced to improve the conditions of the camps. By the end of the summer, only 20 people rather than 30 people were dying every day at Tammisaari. However, given the threat of the continued existence of the Bolsheviks in Russia, this token “improvement” was enough for the international community.
Even after the end of the Civil War, the White Finns would continue to fight in Karelia, the sparse backcountry of Eastern Finland which the White Finns admired poetically but whose people they seem to have despised and killed nearly as wantonly as they executed captured Red Finns. As one White Finn soldier in Karelia reported:
“As much as I adore the nature of Karelia, I do not after all want to live here. I cannot agree with the Karelian people, they resemble too much the Russians, that is how it is.”
In Western history we are not encouraged to remember that there was a Finnish Civil War, let alone to ruminate on who it is that won — the rising middle class and their beneficiaries — and how they did it — extermination and suppression. We are encouraged to see Nazi Germany and the clear evil of the Nazi regime as the force which brought concentration camps and extermination into the world, only to have those evils vanish along with the regime. In our history, the Soviet Union attacks Finland unprovoked in the Winter War of 1939, which explains the Finnish attack on the Soviet Union alongside Nazi Germany in 1941.
With the Civil War in mind, the Soviet invasion makes more sense — Finland had shown its willingness to wipe out a worker’s revolution, and to do so with a brutality that Stalin would seek to match. The close cooperation with Nazi Germany also makes more sense, as the Finnish participation in the blockade and starvation of Leningrad was a necessary favour for Nazi Germany, which had directly assisted Finland’s advance into Karelia on the condition that the Finns would help secure the noose around Leningrad. Germany had even ultimately ended the Finnish Civil War by asking Finland to formally request help, and then sending an invasion force to hit the garrison at Hanko, then Helsinki and Lahti and a number of other vital cities.
Today the Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP) is the majority political party in Finland, having ultimately chosen to stay quiet during the Finnish invasion of the Soviet Union with the Nazis in 1941, and subsequently squelching the newer Communist Party of Finland’s (SKP) attempt at establishing an international and Soviet-aligned left party. No doubt the SDP survived because of obedience in a time of NATO domination, and they backed the winning horse in the race — at once a great win for the establishment of a modern Finland with social-democratic values, but on the timetable of the landed elite rather than the workers.
Even more importantly we should look at Finland’s complex identities in the Civil War and realize that this is the truth in all countries. In Finland, like Vietnam, like China, both the communists and the nationalists were patriots fighting for independence. In Finland, like Vietnam, like China, the nationalists received international support and were by any statistical measure more excited to commit murder than those who opposed them.
Originally published at https://reeducation.substack.com.
