Soviet Partisan activity and raids in Finland – Volunteers sided with the Nazis to fight the Soviet Red Army after the Moscow Armistice

Soviet Red Army soldiers with captured Finnish state flag

Suomussalmi burned down by Soviet-backed communist partisans

Memorial ceremony honoring fallen volunteers in Finland

The partisans in Finland were controlled by organs of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the NKVD. The Soviet partisans often presented highly falsified accounts of the raids inside the Finnish territory. Civilian villages were called military garrisons in the official reports. Their raids on Finnish villages turned more brutal in the months before the ceasefire. Women and children who were taken as prisoners by the partisans were often murdered by being stabbed or beaten. The youngest victim of the July 7 1944 raid on Seitajärvi, was a seven-month-old baby named Ritva. Her head had been hit with a gun-stock. Swedish forensic evidence gathered on site suggested that the females killed in this massacre had possibly been raped before executing. In the Lokka massacre on July 14 1944, the partisan group Stalinets burned the locals alive in a school building. Hilja Kumpula and five of her children perished in the fire, the youngest of whom was a one-month-old baby. Gennady Kupriyanov, who was leading the partisan activity, claimed in his report that the village was a "heavily fortified garrison". In reality, the NKVD had accurate intelligence on the village and the partisans had been monitoring it for days, knowing it had no combatants. The partisan attacks became a sort of forbidden topic after the Moscow Armistice on September 19 1944 and in post-war Finland. In Russia, the Soviet partisans in Finland are held in high regard as heroes of the Great Patriotic War. Middle image: Finnish soldiers at the aftermath of a partisan attack on Suomussalmi in July 1943. Murdered bodies of men, women and children were found in the debris of the village. The Norwegian volunteers in the SS-Schijäger-Bataillon Norwegen had recently fought the fiercest and most violent battle at the Kaprolat and Hasselmann heights any Norwegian military unit has experienced in modern warfare when hostilities between Finland and Soviet ended with a ceasefire. The Scandinavian volunteers had lost their reason for service, and tragically, they even fought isolated skirmishes with the Finnish troops as the German forces marched across Lapland to Norwegian territory. After the Moscow Armistice was signed, numerous veterans of the Continuation War volunteered for the Waffen-SS in order to continue fighting Soviet communism. Many of them enlisted in the multinational 11.SS-Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadier-Division Nordland. The motivations for the Soviet peace agreement with Finland are debated. Several Western historians stated that the original Soviet designs for Finland were no different from their designs for the Baltic countries. American political scientist Dan Reiter and British historian Victor Rothwell both quoted Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov telling his Lithuanian counterpart in 1940, when the USSR effectively annexed Lithuania, that minor states such as Finland, will be included within the honourable family of Soviet peoples. Reiter stated that concern over severe losses pushed Stalin into accepting a limited outcome in the war rather than pursuing annexation, although some Soviet documents called for military occupation of Finland. Credit: Wikipedia i.a. Bottom image: Swedish Military attaché during a remembrance ceremony for the fallen in the war against Soviet Russia. Officers from the Nazi German diplomatic corps, Heer and Kriegsmarine and high-ranking Finns can be seen behind the Swedes. Photo by press photog. Hugo Sundström on Finland's Independence Day before the Armistice. Credit: Julius Jääskeläinen. SA-kuva.