Soviet prisoners of war were not buried in Sandarmokh, according to information held by Finland’s National Archive.

Recently it has been asserted in Russia that hundreds of Soviet POWs, executed by the Finns during the Continuation War (1941-1944), were buried at Sandarmokh in eastern Karelia (the Republic of Karelia in the Russian Federation). The Russian Military-Historical Society has been trying to confirm these assertions by carrying out excavations there.

The National Archive of Finland has issued the following statement on Twitter:

Stalinin vainojen aikainen joukkohauta Sandarmohissa puhuttaa jälleen Venäjällä, jossa väitetään, että Suomen armeija olisi käyttänyt Sandarmohia neuvostosotavankien hautapaikkana jatkosodan aikana. 1/2

— Kansallisarkisto (@Kansallisarkist) August 29, 2019

“Finland has opened up its materials concerning [Soviet] POWs. These archival sources indicate that Soviet POWs were not buried at Sandarmokh”.

In 2007, the archive comments, information about more than 19,000 Soviet POWs was added to its database. Access to this information is available at http://kronos.narc.fi/index.html

Sandarmokh was a secret execution site during Stalin’s Great Terror. In total, 9,500 innocent victims of the political purges in 1937-1938 were shot there, at least 800 of them Finns. In an earlier article the Internet news channel Verkkouutiset described the attention paid to the mass killing of Finns.

Kasperi Summanen, verkkouutiset.fi,
Thursday, 29 August 2019