Finland's War of Choice: The Troubled German-Finnish Coalition in World War II by Henrik O Lunde (review)

Abstract

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 916 captures the anxieties of a lower-middle-class Catholic at the age of twenty-one as he experienced not only combat and political catastrophe but attraction to fellow men. Over the following several years, Rutha discovered his life mission: leading male adolescents in a militantly nationalist pedagogic crusade to which he could sublimate his sexual insecurities and desires. In the late 1920s came a personal crisis, despair over having found no ‘son and friend for life’ (Rutha’s own words, p. 146) to nurture as his successor. ‘For me,’ Rutha declared in a never sent letter, the Sudeten state idea ‘comes alive and grows only where a young man loves me’ (p. 142). In 1932, it seems, he began to initiate ‘mutual gratification’ (p. 148) with disciples, including one who was only fifteen years old. As the Depression and the Nazi seizure of power in Germany broke open locked doors for Sudeten Germans, Rutha sowed the seeds of his own destruction. Cornwall sees ‘interesting parallels’ (p. 241) between the persecution of homosexuals in the Czechoslovak Republic and in the Third Reich. Yet one and the same discriminatory intent should not obscure the difference made by liberal safeguards in Czechoslovakia such as due process and independence of the judiciary. And to state that Rutha’s ‘sexual and nationalist “deviances” increasingly left him exposed to enemies who wanted to assert “normality”’ (p. 9) seems to miss fundamental distinctions between Rutha’s sexuality and his nationalism; he despised Jews, and at the very least fraternized with fascists. On the whole, however, Cornwall has written a thorough and thoughtprovoking study. In the college classroom, The Devil’s Wall will make a marvellous complement to Martin Pollack’s Dead Man in the Bunker (London, 2008). Department of History, Mount Holyoke College Jeremy King South Hadley, Massachusetts Lunde, Henrik O. Finland’s War of Choice: The Troubled German-Finnish Coalition in World War II. Casemate Publishers, Haverton, PA and Newbury, 2011. 382 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Appendices. Index. $32.95. Henrik Lunde is a scholar of Norwegian origin who served with distinction in the US armed forces. He makes the starting-point of his book explicit in the title: Finland chose to go to war against the Soviet Union in 1941, in that part of the Finnish-Soviet conflict known as the Continuation War (1941–44), because the Finns felt that it was a continuance of the struggle against Russia known as the Winter War (1939–40). In the second phase of conflict with Russia, Finnish propagandists concocted the term ‘cobelligerent’ to explain the relationship their country had with Nazi Germany. But Lunde will have none of that. He finds the Finns to have been in REVIEWS 917 coalition with the Germans and what is more they ought not to have done it. That is because they had an alternative. The alternative was a Nordic Defence Alliance to be formed immediately after the peace that ended the Winter War in March 1940. A day later, however, a leading Norwegian politician, Carl Hambro, made a speech in which he affirmed that the Moscow Peace between the Soviet Union and Finland could never be considered as permanent. It did not take long (about two weeks) for Viacheslav Molotov to follow this up by a condemnation of the whole idea of such an alliance. For the Russians, the alliance that counted was still the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. For the Germans, it was the same and in April 1940 they began to occupy Norway. Could a Nordic Defence Alliance ever have run the risk of taking on both great Powers especially after bearing in mind the exhaustion of Finland from the Winter War? Some breathing-space was allowed to the Finns when the Germans permitted the Norwegian army to station its troops temporarily in Finmark where Norwegian territory bordered on Finnish Lapland. But as Nazi Germany gathered strength after its seizure of the Western European states, the alluring option of turning a Blitzkrieg war on the Soviet Union began to grow in importance. It wasn’t the only option, since while Germany was tempting the Finns with emissaries like Joseph Veltjens, Hitler...