MOSCOW, 25 APR — RIA Novosti. Newspaper Ilta-Sanomat published material, which justified the creation of a Finnish occupants of concentration camps in Karelia during the great Patriotic war.
Earlier, Russia’s Investigative Committee opened a criminal case on genocide in connection with the mass killings of the peaceful population of the Republic of Karelia Finnish occupation in world war II. This happened after the publication of RIA Novosti in the framework of the project “Without time limitation” of declassified archival documents about the Finnish concentration camps that teach about the abuse of prisoners and that they were forced to starve.
“Finns want to do the Nazis who fought on the German side, and have evidence, that is, rewrite the story again,” — said in an interview with military historian Antti Laine.
the author of the publication of Pasi LAAKKONEN considers that the actions of the Finnish invaders supposedly “all very different” from the German. “The fact that 83 thousand inhabitants of Eastern Karelia, more than half, i.e. 41 thousand people had Finnish roots,” he writes, claiming that they allegedly were treated better than Russian, who lived on the same property.
according to the author, “the purpose of the internment camps could not be the destruction of the people”. “The camps were created out of fear that the Russian population to start guerrilla activity and sabotage,” he said.
According to him, the decree could not collect the Finnish population in internment camps, was released in July 1941, before the occupation of Karelia. “Although Finns and divided the population of East Karelia on a national basis, it is still not comparable to mass killings of civilians by the Nazis” — says, in turn, Laine.
the Finns controlled the territory of the Karelian SSR from 1941 to 1944, was created several dozen camps for “non-national” civilian population. At the beginning of April 1942, they were about 24 thousand people — about 30% of the population in the zone of occupation. In the camps, according to declassified archives, contained mostly Slavs, more than 90% Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians. According to historians, over the years the camps they had about 50 thousand people, the whole Finnish fascists built from 1941 to 1944 14 camps and six in Petrozavodsk.
