This thesis deals with the Finnish deserters who came to Sweden during World War II to escape the war and military service.
Sweden's efforts to defend the country during the Second World War has been debated and analyzed largely since the end of the war, but usually with a focus on Swedish military effoerts and to some extent supply preparedness. At the end of the war, the influx of refugees to Sweden was still significant, mainly Finns but also Germans, Soviet citizens, and Balts. In the state public inquiry 1945:1 there is a compilation of the refugees who were in Sweden on 1 December 1944 based on their nationality. The table shows that at that time there were approximately 175,000 foreign persons here in Sweden, of which approximately 90,000 were categorized as refugees and approximately 6,000 of these were Finnish citizens.
During the Soviet Union's major offensive against Finland in the spring and summer of 1944, the flight from Finland was at its greatest. According to previous research, most of the men who came to Sweden were then conscript soldiers and two-thirds were Swedish-speaking. As the historian Ville Kivimäki shows in his thesis, many of those who deserted were traumatized by their war experiences, but there were also those who deserted before they had been assigned to war. This suggests that the reasons behind the desertion could be very different. Also the fact that some remained in Finland as so-called forest guards while others fled to Sweden indicates different motives for fleeing and perhaps also different perceptions regarding their decision to desert altogether.
By analyzing interrogation protocols from the local police in a number of districts as well as personnel files from internment camps and from the Foreigner Commission, the Finnish deserters' experiences and feelings connected to war in general and desertion in particular will contribute with knowledge about why the Finnish soldiers chose to escape from their military service to Sweden. It is also relevant in relation to other research to analyze what opinion both the Swedish and Finnish states had about the Finnish deserters who came to Sweden and how the states acted in the matter of the deserters. The thesis will contribute knowledge about the social and cultural history of the Second World War from a Nordic perspective and also to research on refugee policy at both central and local level. The thesis will also increase knowledge about the relations between two Nordic countries and about Sweden's neutrality during the Second World War.
