Germans in Finnish Lapland
The play The Colonel is partly set in wartime Lapland. During the Continuation War, there were more Germans than Finns in Lapland, and the local inhabitants had to learn to live their everyday lives side by side with the German soldiers.
Finland’s cooperation with Nazi Germany has long been a difficult topic in Finnish military history, although it is clear that without the influence of the Germans, the course of the Continuation War would have been different. The presence of Germans in wartime Lapland affected the lives of all Laplanders, both soldiers and civilians.
Friendly relations
The nickel reserves in Petsamo had aroused Germany’s interest in Finland already before the Second World War, and after the Winter War, Germany included Finland in its attack plan against the Soviet Union. Practical considerations and the desire to take revenge on the Soviet Union made Finland interested in military cooperation with Germany.
As a result, German troops arrived in Finland during the Interim Peace, and during the Continuation War, the Lapland front was mainly in German hands. During the Continuation War, there were about 200,000 soldiers, personnel and forced laborers who belonged to the German troops in Lapland – and only about 150,000 local residents.
Rovaniemi served as a German garrison town during the Continuation War. The city did not already have buildings intended for military use, so school buildings, among other things, were harnessed for the use of the army and barracks were quickly erected on empty plots. About 6,000 German soldiers stayed permanently in the town of Rovaniemi, while the Finnish population was about 8,000.
Finnish troops were transferred from Lapland to Karelia soon after the start of the Continuation War. The Northern Front remained in the hands of the Germans. The Germans tried in many ways to make the soldiers’ conditions comfortable, and they had their own radio station, front magazine and German-language services in Lapland.
The Germans built a sports field, a slalom slope and a community centre dubbed Haus der Kameradschaft (House of Fellowship) in Rovaniemi, where festive events and concerts were organised, among other things. At Christmas, joint celebrations were held between Finns and Germans, and Finns were otherwise welcome to participate in events organised by Germans.
The everyday coexistence of Germans and Laplanders went relatively smoothly during the Continuation War. German soldiers tried to help the Finns. For example, they lent their horses to Finns for ploughing, offered rides to civilians and even organised charity collections for children and disabled war veterans. Finnish and German officers celebrated together, and the wartime ban on dancing did not have to be enforced in German buildings.
Fortresses and prison camps
The Germans built more than just recreational buildings in Lapland. They erected the 60-kilometre-long Sturmbock chain of fortifications through Lapland and established an estimated one hundred prison camps in the northern remote areas.
During the war, nearly 30,000 Russians were imprisoned in the camps, of whom about one in five perished due to unacceptable conditions and hard work. If there was no suitable work at hand, such work was invented: prisoners could, for example, be ordered to chop down trees that were not needed for anything. In Kaamassaari in Lake Inari, you can still see trees cut by Russian prisoners in decaying piles.
About 15,000 Germans were killed in Finland during World War II. 2,700 of them are buried in a granite mausoleum built in Norvajärvi, Rovaniemi. The last dead buried in Norvajärvi were moved to their resting place in 2010, and the remains of all the German soldiers who fell in Lapland have still not been found.
The end of the alliance
The armistice terms of the Continuation War included that the Finns would expel the Germans from Lapland. The Lapland War broke out in the autumn of 1944.
The retreating Germans followed the scorched earth tactic so that the Russian troops who might arrive in Finland would not find anything useful in Lapland. The Germans destroyed about 18,000 buildings and numerous bridges, bridge culverts, and telephone and telegraph lines. In Rovaniemi, nine out of ten buildings were destroyed.
Many Finnish women had entered into an affair with a German soldier during the war. Especially high-ranking German dating partners were held in high esteem by many women’s families, as they made it possible to get coffee, chocolate and other ingredients to the family’s dinner table that were inaccessible to Finns due to rationing. When the Lapland War broke out, love affairs and especially the children born from them turned into great shame.
The Lapland War ended in April 1945, and in the summer of the same year, the evacuated residents were allowed to return to their home regions. The area was still dangerous because of the mines left by German troops, but the desire
reconstruction was great. The reconstruction of Lapland was soon launched with the help of international aid.
Today, only a few memories of German troops remain in Lapland, such as war debris dotting nature here and there and the Järämä fortress area museum established in the Sturmbock fortress area.
Siiri Liitiä
More information about Germans in Finnish Lapland
- An overview of the history of Lapland from the Stone Age to reconstruction
- Presentation of the German Soldiers’ Children Association on the places and buildings used by Germans in wartime Lapland
- An article by the cultural magazine Octopus about the dark cultural heritage left by the Germans in Lapland