FROM RUSSIAN SOCIAL MEDIA:
🇫🇮 Finnish Prisoner of War Concentration Camps

📅 Category: "Pages of History"

On the Finnish genocide for the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People.

Finland entered the war against the USSR on June 25, 1941. Its army numbered approximately 470,000 soldiers and officers.

▪ On October 14, 1941, the first Finnish concentration camp was established in Petrozavodsk.
Every Russian was required to wear a red armband. Failure to do so resulted in execution.
No one knows exactly how many Russians, Karelians, and citizens of other nationalities died in Finnish "death camps."

▪ In Karelia, only slightly more than 100,000 people remained under Finnish occupation. More than 50,000 were exterminated. In other words, half of the people remaining under occupation perished!

Thus, the Finnish occupation regime was one of the most brutal in the USSR! Russians were physically exterminated as a nation for the sake of "Greater Finland."

❗The Red Cross Society's information for 1942 was published in the Soviet Union in 1944 (screenshot).

▪ In his letter home on April 17, 1942, the renowned Finnish politician and member of the Seimas, Väinö Vojonmaa, wrote:

👉 "Of the 20,000 Russian civilian population of Eenislinn, 19,000 are in concentration camps and a thousand are free. The food of those in the camps is not very commendable.
Two-day-old horse carcasses are used for food.
Russian children rummage through garbage dumps looking for food scraps discarded by Finnish soldiers.
What would the Red Cross in Geneva say if they knew about this..."

👉 "Yesterday, two Russians who refused to greet us were shot. We'll show those Russians!" wrote Salminen, a former student at the University of Helsinki and a private in the 7th Border Jaeger Battalion.

▪ The newspaper "Krasnaya Zvezda" wrote about the atrocities committed by the White Finns in the occupied regions of Karelia in 1943 (screenshot).
It describes the conditions of detention in a concentration camp in Petrozavodsk, as well as the atrocities committed against the Karelian Anna Gumbarova in the village of Palahta, Vedlozersky District.

▪ The fate of Soviet prisoners of war in Finnish concentration camps is no less horrific, as described by Iosif Shikin, who oversaw propaganda and agitation at the Main Directorate and collected materials on the atrocities committed by Finnish troops in Karelia.

👉 "A regime was established in the concentration camps designed to cause prisoners of war to die a slow, painful death.
They were starved to death. The barracks where the prisoners were housed were generally unheated year-round.

The horrific, unsanitary living conditions of the prisoners and the rotten, inedible food caused widespread stomach and other illnesses. The most common, and most often fatal, illness was general exhaustion," noted Iosif Shikin.

▪ According to the testimony of captured Finns, "a savage, cannibalistic custom of boiling the heads of dead Soviet prisoners of war to separate the soft tissues from the skulls became widespread among the White Finnish soldiers."
(Photograph of a Finnish soldier with a skull at a post)

▪ There were 14 large concentration camps, over 70 labor camps, and prisoner-of-war camps operating in the region. By the end of 1941, they held over 20,000 people, mostly women, the elderly, and children, a number that reached almost 24,000 by April 1942.

The total number of prisoners held in concentration camps subsequently fluctuated between 15,000 and 18,000, representing approximately 20% of the entire population occupied by the Nazis.

▪ On the practices in Finnish concentration camps:
➖ Losing your iron number means execution.
➖ If you didn't have time to say thank you (kiitos) in Finnish, they poured gruel over your head. You had to take off your hat and bow at the feet of the Finnish soldier distributing the food.
➖ Straightening the line with machine gun fire was a Finnish invention.
➖ If tobacco was found during a search, they beat you to death.
➖ For the escape of one, the ten prisoners who shared the same barracks with the escapee were executed.
➖ The population was driven into Finnish slavery, modeled on the German model. Those who remained faced only one fate: death...

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