The end of the Lapland War

On 27 April 1945 the last units of the German Twentieth Mountain Army left the north-western tip of Finnish Lapland and withdrew across the border into occupied Norway. That same day a Finnish combat patrol reached the Three-Country Cairn, a concrete boundary marker in the small lake of Koltajärvi, at the point where Finland, Sweden and Norway meet, and planted the Finnish flag on it. It was the symbolic end of the Lapland War, which had begun in September 1944, and at the same time the end of all hostilities on Finnish soil, which had continued intermittently since the outbreak of the Winter War in November 1939.

There was no surrender, no truce and no signed document. The Germans simply left and the Finns occupied the abandoned ground. Finnish studies date the last exchange of fire between reconnaissance patrols of the two sides to 25 April, in the Kilpisjärvi area. In Finland 27 April is regarded as the day the war ended; since 1987 it has been observed as National Veterans’ Day.

The last months of the Lapland War

The Lapland War broke out because the Moscow Armistice of September 1944 obliged Finland to disarm or expel the German troops stationed on its territory. After a brief period of tacit understanding with the Germans at the start of the Lapland War, real fighting broke out from the end of September and from the landing at Tornio on 1 October. The Germans, commanded by Colonel General Lothar Rendulic, withdrew to Norway using scorched-earth tactics. In mid-October Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, went up in flames.

For most of the country the war was in practice over by the beginning of November 1944. In the north-east the Germans left the last Finnish villages at the end of November, withdrawing via Karigasniemi into Norway. Behind them came the troops of the Soviet Karelian Front, which in October had taken Petsamo and the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, and on 5 November met the Finns near Ivalo. Soviet units remained there until September 1945.

Things were different in Finland’s “arm”, the narrow wedge of territory in the north-west squeezed between Sweden and Norway. Through it ran the road to the Norwegian coast along which the last German columns were withdrawing. From 26 November 1944 the German 7th Mountain Division held the fortified Sturmbock position on the Lätäseno river, about a hundred kilometres from the Norwegian border. On 10 January 1945 it abandoned the position without a fight, once a new defensive line on the Lyngenfjord in northern Norway had been manned. This position, which the Germans called the Lyngenstellung, was intended to halt any Soviet offensive into Norway. Its eastern flank reached over to the Finnish side of the border, to the area of the lake and village of Kilpisjärvi.

In January the German command changed as well. Rendulic was transferred to Courland, and the Twentieth Mountain Army was taken over by General der Gebirgstruppe Franz Böhme, who from 8 January 1945 was also commander of all Wehrmacht forces in Norway.

Positional warfare at Kilpisjärvi

On the Finnish side few troops remained in western Lapland. Under the armistice the Finnish army had to be reduced to its peacetime strength by December 1944, and compliance with this condition was overseen by the Allied Control Commission in Helsinki, dominated by the Soviet Union. At the beginning of November there were still four Finnish battalions in north-western Lapland; by February 1945 there were only about six hundred men. On 13 January they were formed into Battle Group Loimu, made up of regular officers and NCOs and a reinforced rifle company of young conscripts.

Throughout the winter and spring both sides watched each other, exchanged patrol fire and shelled each other sporadically, but the Finns made no attempt to storm the German fortifications, and the Germans had no reason to hold them any longer than the situation in Norway required. In the spring of 1945 that situation changed. The Germans had already completed the forced evacuation of the inhabitants of northern Norway – eastern Finnmark and the northern part of Troms – and had burned the abandoned areas, just as they had earlier burned Finnish Lapland. A screen in the Finnish “arm” was no longer needed. At the end of April the last German outposts withdrew across the border, and the Finnish soldiers following them were able to advance unhindered to the point where their country’s territory ended.

A flag on the Three-Country Cairn

The Three-Country Cairn – in Finnish Kolmen valtakunnan rajapyykki, in Swedish Treriksröset – is a boundary marker standing on an artificial stone islet in Lake Koltajärvi, a dozen or so kilometres from Kilpisjärvi. The point where the borders converge was fixed in 1897, and the present concrete cone with its yellow top was built in 1926, because the earlier marker kept being destroyed by the spring ice floes. It is the northernmost point of Sweden and the westernmost point of mainland Finland.

The Finnish patrol that planted a flag there on 27 April 1945 did so as a sign that not a single soldier of an enemy army with which their country was at war remained in Finland. This was not entirely true, since Soviet units were still stationed around Ivalo, but they were the troops of a partner under the armistice, not of an enemy.

The gesture also carried a political message. The cairn stands on the border with neutral Sweden, through which a large proportion of Lapland’s evacuated inhabitants had passed, and with Norway, which was still under German occupation. For Finland the war was over; for the Norwegians it would last another eleven days.

The cost of the war

According to Finnish figures, the Lapland War cost Finland 774 killed, 262 missing – of whom 164 were taken prisoner – and 2,904 wounded. About a third of the dead were killed by anti-personnel mines, which the Germans left behind in enormous quantities. German losses are estimated at nearly a thousand killed and more than two thousand wounded. In accordance with the terms of the armistice, the Finns handed about 1,300 German prisoners over to the Soviet Union; those who survived returned to Germany in the 1950s. Finnish prisoners taken by the Germans were taken to Norway, where most regained their freedom in the spring of 1945.

The material losses were far greater. According to Finnish estimates, about 14,900 buildings were destroyed in Lapland – 40–46 per cent of all the buildings in the region – along with 675 bridges, about 470 kilometres of railway and 9,500 kilometres of roads; outside Lapland, a further 3,100 or so buildings were blown up. Rovaniemi and many villages had to be rebuilt from scratch. About a hundred thousand inhabitants, evacuated in the autumn of 1944 to the south of the country and to Sweden, began to return to the ruins in the summer of 1945. From 1945 the clearing of mines in Lapland was carried out by a special organisation which at its peak employed about 1,500 civilian sappers; it operated until 1952, and unexploded ordnance continued to be found long afterwards.

From a military point of view the German retreat was a success. The Twentieth Mountain Army brought most of its more than 200,000 soldiers out of Lapland together with their equipment and supplies, and the American historian Earl F. Ziemke judged this evacuation across the Arctic in the depths of winter an undertaking without precedent. The army, however, took part in no further major battle. Until the end of the war it stood idle in Norway while the Reich collapsed.

A war without a treaty

The end of the fighting did not mean the formal end of the war. Finland and Germany never declared war on each other and never concluded peace. Only on 3 March 1945 did the government of Juho Kusti Paasikivi record in its minutes that a state of war with Germany had existed since 15 September 1944. The entry did not earn Finland a place among the founding members of the United Nations, as it came two days after the deadline set at Yalta. The Finnish government of Prime Minister Sakari Tuomioja recorded the end of that state of war in its minutes only in 1954, stating that hostilities had ceased and that relations with Germany were developing peacefully.

For the Finns, what mattered most was that the country had fulfilled the hardest condition of the armistice, already contained in the ceasefire of 4 September 1944: it had removed the German troops from the country with its own forces. In doing so it deprived Moscow of a pretext for sending the Red Army into Finland on the grounds of carrying out that task. The president was still Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, who in 1941–1944 had been commander-in-chief of an army fighting alongside the Reich and who in 1944 had taken the country out of the war. Until the autumn of 1944 the troops in Lapland were commanded by Lieutenant General Hjalmar Siilasvuo, commander of III Corps.

Place in the war

The end of the Lapland War closed five and a half years of Finnish wars: the Winter War of 1939–1940, the Continuation War of 1941–1944 and the war against a former ally. Finland emerged from them as one of the few European states that had fought on Germany’s side and yet were neither occupied nor deprived of their democratic system, but it paid for this with the loss of Karelia and Petsamo, the lease of the Porkkala peninsula for a Soviet naval base, heavy reparations to the USSR and the destruction of Lapland. The reconstruction of the north lasted into the 1950s; the plan for the new Rovaniemi was drawn up in 1945 by the architect Alvar Aalto.

For the Germans, Lapland was one of the first fronts from which they had to withdraw because an ally had failed them. The troops brought out of Finland never returned to the Reich: the Twentieth Mountain Army and the other forces in Norway, together numbering several hundred thousand soldiers, surrendered only with the rest of the Wehrmacht on 8 May 1945, without fighting on Norwegian soil. After the war Rendulic stood trial at Nuremberg before an American tribunal in the case of the generals who had served in the Balkans; the court acquitted him on the charge of devastating Finnmark, finding that he could have acted in the belief that it was a military necessity, but sentenced him to 20 years’ imprisonment for crimes in Yugoslavia, a sentence later reduced to 10 years. Böhme committed suicide in Nuremberg prison in 1947, before his trial.