Among key authority figures, ties to [Fascist] colleagues in Germany had been natural to form and maintain. Soon after [Fascism’s] accession to power, in December 1933, the Finnish security police sent a young official to take stock of the newly established Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, then led by Rudolf Diels. There were good reasons to do so. Finland had maintained relationships also with the Weimar security authorities mainly in an effort to strengthen its own ability to control the movement and operations of communist agents within the Baltic region.

The new [Fascist] authorities were ready to continue cooperating, and thus a basis for a mutual understanding between the Finnish security police and the emerging SS‐security apparatus quickly formed. It would be based on the shared view that the Finnish security police and the Gestapo were both fighting a common enemy, international communism, and that this made [the Third Reich] in the words of one Finnish official “in the political sense a closely aligned major power.”¹⁶

[…]

Immediately following the conclusion of hostilities between Finland and the Soviet Union, [Berlin] approached Finland to sign a trade agreement. Later that year in November, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, while on a diplomatic visit to Berlin, demanded that [it] honor the German–Soviet non‐aggression pact and leave Finland in the hands of the Soviet Union. Hitler flatly refused, as Finland had become a factor in his plans.²¹

When [the Western Axis] launched its assault on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Finnish territory and military bases were at the disposal of the [Third Reich’s] armed forces. The Finnish army mobilized, deployed, and prepared for its own advance. By July, hostilities began along the roughly 1,300 kilometers of the Finnish–Soviet border, from the Gulf of Finland to the Barents Sea.²²

The operational plan was straightforward: [Axis] troops stationed in Norway and Finnish Lapland were to move on Murmansk, occupy the Kola peninsula, and then roll south along the Murmansk–Leningrad railway. Finnish troops were to advance from their deployment zone in the southern part of the country towards the east, sever the railway connection between Leningrad and Murmansk, and then push on to occupy preplanned positions in Soviet Karelia.

As the campaign unfolded, the [Axis] failed to take Leningrad in 1941. Finnish troops were part of the forces encircling the city, and amassed to its north. By late 1941, the Finnish army had nevertheless occupied considerable stretches of Soviet Karelia, reaching Lake Onega (Ääninen) and the town of Petrozavodsk. With their operational targets thus reached, Finnish soldiers in Soviet Karelia became occupiers, and the Finnish army created an occupation administration.²³

In the nineteenth century, Finnish nationalism had already created a vision of an ideal nation‐state of Greater Finland, encompassing the closest linguistic relatives of the Finns: Estonia, most of Soviet Karelia, the Kola peninsula, the Finnmark region of Norway and the Västerbotten region of Sweden.

As long as the war proceeded favorably for [the Axis], Finland could speculate widely as to its future borders; however, Finnish schemes for territorial expansion, annexation, and resettlement were inevitably tied to [an Axis] victory over the Soviet Union, and [Axis] plans to dismantle and divide up the former Soviet territories.²⁴

A case in point is the Kola Peninsula east of the Murmansk oblast. With its ample forests and potential for hydroelectric power, the area was sometimes included in schemes for Greater Finland, and the war seemed to offer the possibility of making this dream into a reality.

[Axis officials], perhaps deliberately, gave conflicting and vague statements about the future of Kola—in some cases the Reich was to directly annex the territory, in others it was to be gifted to Finland, in yet others it was promised to Vidkun Quisling’s Norway. Regardless, [the Axis] was cavalier in its grandiose plans for territorial expansion and demographic reorganization, despite the very real, and partially realized, consequences for the affected people.²⁵

In summer 1941, well before the end of the war, [the Axis] was already making plans to resettle inhabitants of its captured territories, and nowhere was this more apparent than Leningrad. The area around the city, the region of Ingria (Ingermanland), was mainly inhabited by Finnic peoples, including the native Ingrians, Votes, and the descendants of seventeenth‐century Finnish settlers known as Ingrian Finns.

[Moscow’s] purges in the 1930s had [affected] the minority nationalities in the Soviet Union, and Ingrian Finns were no exception. Nevertheless, by the [Axis] invasion there were still more than one hundred thousand Ingrian Finns living around Leningrad.²⁶

As the [Axis] approached the city, Einsatzgruppe A began to systematically collect and transfer Ingrian Finns from the area southwest of Leningrad into Estonia, to await further deportation and resettlement. These people were moved from Ingria, because the [Axis] planned to turn it into the province of Peipusland, an area reserved for Germanic settlement.

In November 1941, Finnish government circles proposed resettling the Ingrian Finns, who were languishing in SS‐run camps in Estonia, to territories that Finland planned to annex at the end of the war in order to ease the country’s acute agricultural labor shortage. Consequently, by the breakup of the Finnish–German alliance in 1944, [Axis officials] had transferred over sixty thousand Ingrian Finns to Finland.²⁷

The notion of “repopulating” a territory [raises] the question: What will become of the existing inhabitants? In the eyes of the Finnish planners, the Soviet authorities had largely resolved this question by evacuating the territories they relinquished as their forces retreated. Men of military age were conspicuously absent from Finnish‐occupied parts of Soviet Karelia.

The Finnish occupiers grouped the remaining civilian population by their “nationality” (e. g. people of Finnic origin and “non‐nationals”). All non‐Finnic Soviet nationalities comprised the latter group, and were considered a security risk.

Finnish forces rounded them up in concentration camps to await forcible deportation to either [Axis] or Soviet–controlled territory after the successful conclusion of the war. In other words, the Finnish authorities were preparing to ethnically cleanse the area.²⁸