International Day of Fascist Concentration Camps Prisoners Liberation

• International Day of the Liberation of Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps is a commemorative date celebrated annually on 11 April. There were Finnish concentration camps in Karelia during the World War 2. These were concentration camps for Soviet prisoners of war and civilians, established by the Finnish Occupation Military Department of Eastern Karelia on the territory of the Karelian-Finnish SSR. During the occupation of Petrozavodsk from 1941-1944 the Finnish invaders organized 6 concentration camps, where thousands of Soviet citizens, residents of the capital city of the Karelian-Finnish SSR, of Zaonezhye, of Sheltozersky region and others were imprisoned. During the occupation 14 concentration camps and 15 prisons for civilians were organized on the territory of Eastern Karelia. By April 1942 there were about 24,000 prisoners, mostly women, elderly people and children of Russian nationality(96 %) (one third of the whole population of the occupied territory). Throughout the occupation, the total number of civilian prisoners fluctuated between15,000 and 18,000. Petrozavodsk was the largest concentration camp for the civilian population.

Redemption

• The death camps of Nazi Germany are not just a symbol of inhumanity. This is the quintessence of that misanthropic ideology that was the core of the Third Reich with its claims to world domination at any cost.
• April 11 is a memorable and tragic day that reminds us of the suffering and fear of millions of people, the crimes of the Nazis against civilian lives, which we must not forget. International Day for the Liberation of Prisoners of Nazi Concentration Camps was established by the UN in memory of the rebellious prisoners of one of the largest concentration camps in history - Buchenwald. Its prisoners were performed terrible medical experiments, testing new drugs on the people, poisoned in gas chambers, starved and forced to work at the same time to exhaustion. From July 1937 to April 1945, approximately 250,000 people were imprisoned in the camp and approximately 56,000 people were killed.
• In these inhuman conditions, they had practically no hope, however, there were people, the Pole Gvidon Damazin and the Russian Konstantin Leonov, who decided to start acting on their own and raise an uprising. With their own initiative, they requested help from the advancing Americans, but everything dragged on for several long days. During this time, the rebels started a mutiny and captured most of the concentration camp. But to wait for the allies of Stalin's prisoners is not. The rebels divided the camp into sectors - "red", "green", "blue" and "yellow". The most important is the "red" (there were Soviet, municipal and Slovak Committees) sector, where the rebels must storm the area of the barracks and warehouses with weapons. The prisoners occupied several superior guards and took possession. They even succeeded in storming the commandant's office. The Americans on the same day entered the already liberated Buchenwald

• On April 11, dozens of countries around the world celebrated International Day of Fascist Concentration Camps Prisoners Liberation. This date is related to the events at Camp Buchenwald (Germany). On that day, the prisoners of the camp were finally released by American soldiers, and before that, the prisoners resisted, capturing most of the camp. Buchenwald Death Camp has now been turned into a memorial complex. The main commemorative events take place on its grounds. People bring flowers to the fence of the camp and leave notes. There is a memorial fund at the museum, which annually collects prisoners and soldiers who took part in the liberation.

• Buchenwald Death Camp has now been turned into a memorial complex. The main commemorative events take place on its grounds. People bring flowers to the fence of the camp and leave notes. There is a memorial fund at the museum, which annually collects prisoners and soldiers who took part in the liberation. There are fewer and fewer eyewitnesses to those terrible events, and only the young prisoners of the concentration camps have survived to this day.

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• The concentration camps also affected Karelia. There were 17 concentration camps in Karelia during the Great Patriotic War, seven of them in Petrozavodsk. About 30 thousand people went through them during the occupation. Doctor of History Sergey Gennadievich Verigin, who has long been dealing with the topic of concentration camps in Karelia, notes: On the whole territory of Karelia, where then lived only 86 thousand people, the Finns created over a hundred places of compulsory detention of the local population. People were forcibly placed in the camps, where they awaited a half-starved existence, hard labor, mockery, unsanitary conditions and disease. The prisoners died in large numbers.

Cold abomination: what did the Finns do in concentration camps during World War II

Mannerheim concentration camps. How Finns destroyed Russians in the captured Karelia…

Finnish "labor" children camp in Petrozavodsk.

June ,1944

There were 14 children's camps in Karelia during the World War 2 (1941-1945).

There young Soviet citizens aged from 5 to 15 were kept. Ones, who turned 15, were sent to logging, where many of them froze to death or fell ill without the slightest chance to recovery.

Finnish concentration camp prisoners in Karelia

During the Great Patriotic War, every fourth inhabitant of Karelia passed through the Finnish concentration camps. Finns created the first concentration camp for Soviet citizens in October 24, 1941 in Petrozavodsk. Prisoners' property was confiscated, and red armlets about five centimeters wide were sewn onto their clothes.

Vladimir Ignatovich, 11103

Sources of information : 1) Photo: https://ria.ru/20210416/kontslager-1728504516.html

2) Information: https://rk.karelia.ru/special-projects/nasha-vojna/karelskij-arhipelag/

3) Information: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/maloizvestnye-finskie-kontslagerya-na-okkupirovannoy-territorii-karelii/viewer

Yuri Kilin, the Doctor of Historical Sciences of Petrozavodsk State University:

"The population was divided into 'national' (Finno-Ugric) and 'non-national'".

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The conclusion: there were many concentration camps on the territory of Karelia, but they are nowadays poorly studied. It is hard to study the bloody War, but only this way we will be able to preserve the memory of the heroes.

Mannerheim concentration camps. How Finns destroyed Russians in the captured Karelia…

On June 27, 1944 Finnish troops left Petrozavodsk. The next day, Soviet soldiers entered the city.

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“The children were so exhausted that they even forgot how to cry and looked at everything with indifferent eyes”.

Vladimir Ignatovich, 11103

Professor, Doctor of Historical Sciences Y.M. Kilin

The documents tell

• Judging by recently published archival documents, there were at least fourteen large concentration camps in Finland, and six in occupied Petrozavodsk alone. Finns have also created over 30 labor camps and more than 40 camps for prisoners of war. In total, during the occupation of Karelia from 1941 to 1944, more than 24 thousand people — prisoners of war and representatives of the civilian population - were behind barbed wire.
• The number of civilian casualties is estimated at 8 thousand people, including over 2 thousand children. More than 7 thousand prisoners of war, as noted in the Investigative Committee, "were buried alive, killed in gas chambers and shot." Even now, more than two thousand former minor prisoners of Finnish concentration camps live in Karelia, direct witnesses of the atrocities committed there.

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Photo: FSB Directorate for the Republic of Karelia

• From the certificate of the People's Commissar of State Security of the Karelo-Finnish SSR Mikhail Baskakov dated July 3, 1943, it follows that at least 24 Finnish military are responsible for organizing mass killings. Among them are the head of the Military Administration of East Karelia (military administration of the occupied territory), Lieutenant Colonel Kotilainen, his assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Ragnar Nordstrom, the chief of Staff of the military administration, Lieutenant Colonel Kuusilu, the district chiefs, Lieutenant Colonels Sihvonen, Viasyanen and Paloheimo. The commandant of the Petrozavodsk concentration camp Valentin Mix, as well as Junior Sergeant Polevoy, assistant to the head of the Svyatozersk concentration camp, were named as the direct perpetrators of the acts of genocide. As far as we know, most of them escaped punishment for their actions.
• The Finnish side is trying to challenge these accusations. The director of the National Archives of Finland, Jussi Nuorteva, called the statement of the Russian IC "unexpected and deplorable", he assures that the Finns did not kill people in gas chambers and did not bury them alive. In addition, he denies the figure of 8 thousand dead civilians. "Our archives contain an exact figure with all the names. There were 4,060 dead," Nuorteva says.

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The policy of genocide

• So where is the truth? Izvestia appealed to the director of the Institute of History, Political and Social Sciences of Petrozavodsk State University, Doctor of Historical Sciences Sergey Gennadyevich Verigin.
• Professor Verigin has been dealing with the topic of Finnish concentration camps in Karelia for a long time, and this is what he said: "For the entire territory of Karelia, in which only 86 thousand people lived at that time, the Finns created over a hundred places of forced detention of the local population. These are concentration camps for civilians, labor camps, concentration camps for prisoners of war, prisons and other places of forced detention. To be honest, I even find it difficult to name any other occupied territory where such a high density of camps for its inhabitants was created during the Second World War.

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The Museum of the Victims of Fascism

• In Karelia young prisoners of fascism in Petrozavodsk have created a museum for Karelian youth on the territory of the assembly point of the republican military commissariat

• The Museum of the Victims of Fascism has collected photographs, archival documents and a chronicle of Nazi concentration camps. In the museum you can meet veterans and prisoners who were in Finnish concentration camps in occupied Karelia.

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• The leadership of the Karelian military registration and enlistment office plans to allocate one more room at the assembly point for the opening of another museum exposition dedicated to the Karelian front. All of this is being funded by donors

• The museum is now visited by schoolchildren. For them, they conduct excursions and conduct history lessons. All this activity is carried out to increase patriotism among young people and increase interest in the history of their country.

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• On July 8, 1941, Mannerheim issued an order stating that the entire Russian population of Karelia was to be imprisoned in concentration camps.
• Fourteen concentration camps were established in the occupied territory.
• The concentration camps were organized in the villages Vidlitsa, Ilyinskoe, Kavgozero, Pogrankondushi, Paalu and Uslanka. The prisoners included also the population, which was evacuated by the Soviet authorities to the area of the Svir River and later taken by the Finnish army to the inside of the conquered territory in September 1941. Two weeks after capture of Petrozavodsk the staff of the 7th Army gave order to organize concentration camps in Jaannislinna (in August 1941Petrozavodsk was renamed Jaannislinna, which means 'Fortress (fortress) on the Onego').
• During the whole occupation Jaanislinna was the camp centre of Eastern Karelia. In the midsummer of 1942 the campers made up approximately 50%, the Finnish troops - 32% and the free local civilian population - just 14% of the town's population.

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• The camp, initially consisting of 4 parts, was placed in the southern outskirts of the town: at Kukovka (Camp 1), on the premises of the Agricultural School (Camp 2), in the blocks, located to the southwest of the skiing factory (Camp 3) and in Golikovka (Camp 4).
• At the end of November, the camp in the north-western part of the town, Krasny (Camp No. 5), and later also part of the area of the western transshipment exchange, on Perevalka (Camp No. 6) were used as camps.
• When organizing the concentration camps, it was thought advisable to aim at concentration of people in as small an area as possible. In 1942, there were more prisoners in Camp 5 alone than there were free civilians in the entire Jaanislinna.

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• The camps were separated from their surroundings by barbed-wire fences with posts about 2 meters high. Leaving them was forbidden at gunpoint. "I became a prisoner of the 2nd Strict Regime Concentration Camp in Petrozavodsk when I was only 1 year and 3 months old. My fear of barbed wire remained in me for the rest of my life. By the end of my camp life I understood that approaching it will cause trouble and getting through it threatens with execution," remembers T. Shlyakhtenkova, Chair of the Union of Former Juvenile Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps in Karelia.
• All those aged 15 and over were ordered to wear a red armband on their sleeves as a badge of honor. Prisoners were forbidden to communicate with the rest of the population.
• In accordance with the regulations, approved by the head of the Military Administration of East Karelia in 1942, the camps contained:
• - the non-national population from the territories where their stay was unacceptable due to the possibility of hostilities
• - politically unreliable people, irrespective of their nationality, on the territory subordinated to the Military Administration of East Karelia: the national population was detained in Kolvasozera, the non-national population - in Vidlitsa, from where they were subsequently transferred to Kindasovo.
• - in exceptional cases, also persons, irrespective of their nationality, whose stay at liberty in the territory subordinated to the Military Administration of East Kareliawas was considered undesirable.

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• In winter the prisoners were driven to logging, road construction... The working day lasted from 6am to 8pm. The food consisted of 200-300 grams of bad bread a day, irregularly given frozen potatoes or rotten horse meat.
• The Finnish occupiers widely used corporal punishment. One of the punishments was the deprivation of rations for 2-3 days and confinement in a punishment cell. In the camps the Soviet people were not only tortured, tormented and starved, but also shot for the slightest "offence". In 1943, in a concentration camp in Petrozavodsk, which accommodated children aged 12-15, the Nazis shot a number of boys and girls, then declared that they had been killed "while trying to escape".
• As a result of hard labour regime, living and working conditions, hunger, mass epidemic diseases and shootings more than 14 thousand Soviet citizens, or more than one fifth of the population, stayed on the occupied territory, were killed.
• In all, during the occupation Jaanislinn every twentieth of the free-living inhabitants died, and about every fifth of those in the camps.
• On 28 June Petrozavodsk was liberated from the occupiers. The camp gates were immediately opened, but at first many remained in place - there was nowhere for them to go. Hundreds of houses lay in ruins, some were burnt down, others were blown up.
• The city was being rebuilt. The city, like a living organism that had overcome a terrible disease, was thirsting for life. As the residents recall, there was no need to force anyone, everyone worked. And it was not subbotniks and resurrection work, but daily, hard and persistent work. While men were still at war, the burden of restoring the city lay mainly on the shoulders of women. In the years that followed, the city probably never knew such enthusiasm, such a desire to return to life.

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References

1. Morozov K.A. Karelia during the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). - Petrozavodsk: Karelia, 1983. - 239 p.
2. Kulomaa, J. Finnish occupation of Petrozavodsk, 1941-1944 / Jukka Kulomaa ; Military Historical Society of the Republic of Karelia ; [translated by S. Karhu et al. ; scientific ed. and rev. of Yu. M. Kilin ; artist: N. V. Trukhin]. - Petrozavodsk : A. Remizov, 2006. - 278 p.
3. Memorial lesson "Petrozavodsk during the Great Patriotic War". [Electronic resource] -URL: http://biblioteka.ptz.ru/resursi/bibliotekari_rasskazivayut/vzroslim_i_yunoshestvu/o_velikoi_otechestvennoi_voine/urok_pamyati_petrozavodsk_v_godi_velikoi_otechestvennoi_voini

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A memo for the International Day of the Liberation of Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps (April 11).

• The Finns equipped 14 concentration camps in which at least 8,000 civilians died and over 7,000 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered in the most barbaric ways. There are more than two thousand former juvenile prisoners of Finnish concentration camps, direct witnesses to the atrocities committed there, living in Karelia today

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• Professor Verigin has long been concerned with the subject of Finnish concentration camps in Karelia, and this is what he said: "For the entire territory of Karelia, the Finns created over a hundred places of forced confinement for the local population. I believe that the occupation policy of the Finns was racist.”

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• In 2018, the National Archives of Finland investigated the involvement of volunteers from Finland in the murder of civilians in the Soviet Union. A report based on the diaries of the volunteers was prepared which indicated that the Finns who served in the Viking army knew about the crimes of the German Nazis and took part in them themselves.
•  Historian Jussi Nuorteva cites a diary entry: "Today we received instructions for the conduct of hostilities: among other things, all prisoners are to be shot.

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"I survived Auschwitz": the stories of former prisoners of the concentration camp

• Belgian Jew Paul Sable was a teenager when he was arrested in Brussels in September 1942 with his entire family. They did not hide from anyone, they lived in their own house, and the Germans, who had lists of all the Jews of the city, easily found them. The Sobol family was sent to Auschwitz. Even today it is difficult for Paul to talk about what he endured in the concentration camp. Of all the relatives, only he survived.
• “In April 1945, there was an evacuation, the camp had to be closed, we understood that we needed to run until we were all “liquidated.” But we didn’t have time. We were transported from Auschwitz to Dachau, near Munich. On May 1, the Americans liberated me. I was 19 years old,” says Paul Sobol.

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From the recollections of contemporaries of the events...

• During the occupation of Soviet Karelia by the Finns, six concentration camps were established in Petrozavodsk. They were intended for local Russian-speaking inhabitants (Secret Order № 132, signed by Gustav Mannerheim on 8 July 1941, stated literally: «The Russian population is to be detained and sent to concentration camps») One of these camps, № 6, was located in the Perevalka area. It held 7,000 people.
• Many people have seen this photo, but not everyone knows that it shows our countrywoman. The girl who is pictured second from the post on the right is Claudia Nyuppieva. Today Klavdia Aleksandrovna is 85 years old and heads the Karelian Union of Former Juvenile Prisoners of Fascist Concentration Camps, but she still cannot talk about the horrors of her three-year imprisonment with the Finns. Claudia Nyuppieva is the only survivor of the world-famous photograph.

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• Hunger was our biggest killer," says Klavdia Nyuppieva. - There was nothing to eat, they gave us spoiled food. I couldn't eat cheese for a long time because of the smell. It was black, like laundry soap. Or blood sausage - there were worms crawling around in it. Despite the harshness of the Finnish regime, young children in the camp were given milk.
• Corporal punishment was introduced in the camp, with beatings for any act: getting close to the barbed wire - a flogging. «The camp was subjected to corporal punishment for any action: if you went close to the barbed wire, you were beaten with birches and truncheons so that your back was bleeding. People could not get up for days at a time. There were also punishment cells». - Nyuppieva said, adding that sometimes prisoners were beaten to death. According to Klavdija Nyppieva, there were cases in the concentration camp where Finnish guards raped female prisoners.

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• Today, the Finns do not deny that they had a brutal detention regime for prisoners. Scholars are still arguing about the number of civilian casualties in the Finnish camps. According to Nyppieva, an exhumation was carried out and 39 mass graves were found. «More than seven thousand buried in total», - she says. Nyuppieva recalls that corpses were removed from the camps twice a week. Graves measuring two by three metres were dug by prisoners aged 12 and over. «The coffins were stacked in several rows, three or four on top of each other».
• I would also like to refer to the memories of my grandmother, a young prisoner in a Finnish concentration camp Vera Afanasyevna Pereverzeva. My grandmother told me about what her mother had told her. For all the harshness of the camp regime, the Fino girls secretly passed milk to my great-grandmother to feed her baby. To get a minimum of nutrients and survive, great-grandmother rubbed her daughter with a salt solution. It is worth noting that Finland has retained documents from the occupation period, and can send them if requested. This is how my grandmother got her prisoner card.
• It is extremely important to keep the memory of this period alive. Firstly, with each passing year there are fewer and fewer people who can tell us about those events, and secondly, today the truth about the period of the occupation is greatly distorted. It is only from the mouths of those contemporary to the events that we can learn the truth.

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"If God exists, then he will have to beg me for forgiveness"

• "If God exists, then he will have to beg me for forgiveness." — A phrase that, according to legend, was carved on the walls of a concentration camp cell during World War II by a Jewish prisoner. The origin of this inscription is completely unknown, but knowing about the cruel and inhumane conditions in such concentration camps, this line is not in doubt. This thought glowed in the minds of many people who got into this terrible place and did not understand their guilt and the reasons for such cruel tortures.

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Thousands of gold wedding rings taken from dead Jews and hidden in Heilbronn salt mines

• There is no exact data about the concentration camps destroyed by Jews, many documents were burned by the Nazis. According to the most conservative estimates of experts , the figures are as follows: in Auschwitz there are 1 million, Treblinka 900 thousand, Sobibor 250 thousand, Chelmno 300 thousand, Majdanek 310 thousand, Belzec 500 thousand people.
• It is so hard to write about the conditions in which the prisoners were, and about the tortures they endured. Faith in a person disappears, and in the fact that he is capable of kind, selfless deeds. Many films and books have been created about the terrible life of prisoners in concentration camps.

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A dead prisoner in a train carriage at Dachau concentration camp

Preparation of the Holocaust in Babi Yar.

Illustration in the book Gerhard Schreiber Kurze Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges, München

But now I will draw your attention to the people who remained human, no matter what.

One of the largest rescue operations of Jews in the history of the Second World War is considered to be the feat of the Swiss diplomat Karl Lutz. He was vice-consul in Budapest. It is not known how Lutz persuaded the German leadership to allow him to issue eight thousand security documents, according to which Jews could emigrate. As a result, he fraudulently managed to write out more than sixty thousand documents instead of eight thousand.

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Karl Lutz

• Oskar Schindler is perhaps the most famous of the righteous. A lot has been written about him, many documentaries and feature films have been shot. Being a businessman, he arranged for over a thousand young men, girls and other prisoners of the Krakow ghetto to work at his factory for the production of metal products and thereby saved them from deportation to Auschwitz. Schindler's former secretary Mimi Reinhard, who also printed the lists of rescued people, recalled that he had to spend almost all nights at his company because he was afraid of the sudden appearance of the Gestapo.

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Oskar Schindler

• In any situation, you need to remain human, not allow yourself to turn a blind eye to the cruelty of others when you can stop it.

"The one who saves one life saves the whole world." - from the movie "Schindler's List".

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Schindler 's Lists

SOBIBOR Prisoners Camp

• To carry out the mass murder of Europe's Jews, the SS established killing centers devoted exclusively or primarily to the destruction of human beings in gas chambers. Sobibor was among these killing centers. It was one of three killing centers linked to Operation Reinhard, the SS plan to murder almost two million Jews living in the German-administered territory of occupied Poland, called the General Government.

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KEY FACTS

1. From April 1942 until mid-October 1943, the German SS and their auxiliaries killed at least 167,000 people at Sobibor.

2. For the killing operations at Sobibor and the other Operation Reinhard camps, the SS drew upon staff and experience gained in the mass murder of patients with disabilities in the "euthanasia" (T4) program in Germany.

3. On October 14, 1943, the Jewish resistance in Sobibor launched an uprising during which some 300 prisoners escaped. Most of the escapees were subsequently hunted down and killed, but some 50 survived the war.

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• The history of concentration camps began in the 19th century. First, the Americans used them for prisoners of war in the Civil War, then the British used them to concentrate civilians in the Boer War. In the 20th century, in almost all major military conflicts, the sides used such camps.

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• In post-Soviet countries, the memory of German death camps is still strong. No country in the world has experienced such damage to the population. During the Second World War, Finnish troops created many concentration camps on Mannerheim's orders.
• The main problem in the history of concentration camps is the punishment of war criminals. Even though the issue of punishing ordinary soldiers who participated in crimes is complicated, punishment does not always overtake their leaders.

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• Most people know only German concentration camps, but in history there are many countries that have used them. They were not always created for the destruction of people, but often prisoners did not experience such imprisonment. Most of the Nazi criminals were punished at the Nuremberg trials. Croatian Ustashi, Italian fascists, Japanese military, and the military of most of the countries that were complices of Germany were also punished.

• However, Finland is not included in this list. Despite their crimes, Finland suffered the least punishment. They transferred some territories to the USSR, paid reparations, and limited their armed forces, but in 1990 Finland unilaterally camceled military restrictions.

• The history of the Finnish occupation regime on the modern Karelian territory during the Great Patriotic War was marked by cruel massacres of concentration camp prisoners. The research in the article "Little Known Finnish Concentration Camps in the Occupied Territory of Karelia" by S. G. Verigin, D. A. Popov and D. A. Eloshin shows the importance of evaluating the brutal manifestations of occupation policy, based on the archival prisoners’ material of concentration camps.

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