DISINFO: More than 7000 POWs were buried alive, killed in gas chambers or shot by Finns in Karelia during WWII

Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation message focusing on Finland and Russia's Karelia during WWII. In October 2019, Russia's Security Service FSB released "secret documents" about the conditions in the Finnish camps. In April 2020, more documents were published, and former prisoners of the Finnish concentration camps asked the head of the Russian Investigating committee Alexander Bastrykin to launch an investigation into crimes of the occupying authorities during the war. While it is true, therefor, that Russia's investigative committee has indeed launched such an investigation, the media outlet in question repeats its questionable claims without challenging them. The researchers have studied the treatment of civilians detained in the Finnish camps established in the Finnish-occupied Soviet Karelia in WWII, and nothing suggests Finns aimed at a genocide of the Russian or Slavic nations. The word genocide is frequently used in pro-Kremlin disinformation, but it seldom corresponds to the actual definition of a genocide. Immediately after the end of the war, a commission led by Russian Major General Gennady Kupryanov held hearings in the occupied territory and provided more than 2,400 pages of evidence. FSB materials have been open since 1996 and this has been known to the Finns. The probative value of the material was weak, as many of the testimonies were based on hearsay. Among other things, allegations about gas chambers and live burials have been raised in the Russian media. However, "nothing like this was revealed in the reports of the Allied Control Commission, not even in Finnish archival sources, memoirs or in many investigations into the occupation of East Karelia," “This is not a new problem either for Finland or for Russia. The issue of responsibility for Finland’s military policy was carefully studied in court after the war. The Allied Control Commission, where the Soviet Union was represented, chaired by Andrei Zhdanov, monitored the trial. As for judicial issues about the war between our countries, they were resolved in the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, " the Finnish Foreign Ministry stated. War reparations amounted to US $ 300 million, and after all, Finland was the only country after World War II to pay all reparations in full to the Soviet Union. A detailed disproof in English can be found here: "The allegations of the use of gas chambers and the burial alive of prisoners of war are absurd. Nothing of this kind came to light in the Allied monitoring commission reports, nor in Finnish archive sources, memoirs or the many studies of the occupation of East Karelia", writes Jussi Nuorteva, director general of the National Archives of Finland and an adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki Read similar cases in our database claiming that Civilians in the Finnish concentration camps in Carelia are victims of genocide, that Finnish concentration camps in Carelia: Finnish guards were paedophiles raping dying kids.