Finnish Civil War prison camps

Finnish Civil War prison camps were operated by the White side of the 1918 Finnish Civil War. They were composed of 13 main camps, mostly active from the April–May 1918, and more than 60 smaller POW camps at the final period of the war. Number of captured Red Guard members and associates was approximately 80,000 including 4,700 women and 1,500 children. A total of 12,000–14,000 prisoners died in captivity. Camps and their hopeless conditions effected in the minds of many people much deeper than the bloody war itself, although the camps were totally ignored for decades by the White interpretation of the Civil War history.

The first prison camps were established at the early stages of war in the White controlled Northern part of Finland. These camps also held 5,000 soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army. In the late March, the number of Red prisoners was only 4,000 but after the Battle of Tampere on 5 April 1918, some 11,000 Red Guard soldiers fell into the hands of the Whites and the first large camp was established in the Kalevankangas district of Tampere. Before the Tampere battle, the captured Reds had mostly been shot, but after the collapse of Tampere the number of prisoners was much too large to carry on the executions.

During the late April, thousands of refugees and Red Guard members headed east towards the Russian border. More than 30,000 were captured by the White troops and the German Baltic Sea Division between the towns of Hämeenlinna and Lahti. 22,000 of them were held for a couple of weeks on a concentration camp founded at the Fellman mansion premises in Lahti. Women and children were mainly released, but 10,900 male refugees and Red Guard members were moved to the Hennala prison camp. Finally, as the war ended on 15 May, around 80,000 Reds were held in more than 60 small camps. During next two months all prisoners were transferred to 13 main camps, located mostly in the southern parts of country.

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